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Donald Trump and the Fellowship of the Alternative Facts (Part 14)


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1 hour ago, sawasdee said:

This just emphasises what the US lost when tRump replaced Obama - it's like replacing a Rolls Royce with a child's tricycle.

A rusty trike missing one wheel and with a single barbed spike where the seat should be - the better to fuck America over.

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Also, Paul Ryan's tears sustain my soul.

(I'm assuming he's holed up in his home gym right now, doing bicep curls and crying because his widdle feelings got hurted yesterday.) :pb_lol:

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3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

On Thursday, Obama's office sent out this memo, commemorating the 7th anniversary of the ACA. 

And that's how you troll with class.

How thoughtful. How well written. How... presidential. Boy, do I miss having an intelligent, well written, well spoken President. I don't think our current one could come up with such an elegant message on anything.

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I miss the Obama's.  I wish Michelle would run in the next election.  I'd trample over people to be the first to cast my vote.  Is there a 'wistful' emoticon?

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Can I just vent for second? Sorry, I'll try to keep it brief. 

We went to a local food bank a week or two ago to drop up some stuff, and while there, my husband noticed a Meals On Wheels sticker and next thing I know, he's talking to the sweet little old ladies there if they have an opinion about it possibly being cut.

These are rural-minded people who have lived in our really small farming community (seriously, there is only one traffic light needed for the entire town) all of their lives. What are the chances they are not Trump supporters?

Apparently, none. They all agree it would be tragic, but then one of them pipes up with, "He's going to drain the pond!" and they all agree to that, too!

The pond? What happened to the swamp? They don't even have his rhetoric right, and they're worried about losing the programs they work with to help people they know are hurting and in need, but they're right behind the orange asshole anyway. 

I wanted to ask how that was going so far - how are the elitist billionaire comrades in Trump's circle/cabinet any better than whoever she thought needed to be drained?!? I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from replying to her, because I would have gone off on the lot of them. 

Thank you.

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15 minutes ago, Flossie said:

 Is there a 'wistful' emoticon?

Nope. But I have a wistful doggie for you.

22-wistful_eyes_dog.png

 

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May I take a go at a sample tweet from Agent?

Up front disclaimer:  The following views are of the tangerine toddler and not your humble FJer me: OneKidandDone.

"Barack Hussein Obama tweeted with his usual grace, style, eloquence, and humor. I had an incoherent blithering  toddler rant. SAD."

13 hours ago, JMarie said:

I'm imagining an Instagram selfie to her dad saying: Having a blast here in Aspen. Sucks to be you doesn't it?

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-voter-helen-wife-mexican-husband-roberto-beristain-deported-illegal-immigrant-ice-a7648806.html

Donald Trump voter despairs as Mexican husband set to be deported

Roberto Beristain's family says he has a work permit and a social security card, while his restaurant provides income for 20 families
 

Quote

 

A woman who voted for Donald Trump because of his immigration policies is now facing the prospect of having her husband deported to Mexico. 

Helen Beristain said she cast her ballot for the president believing that only "killers" and cartel members would be deported.

"We don’t want to have cartels here, you don’t want to have drugs in your high schools, you don’t want killers next to you,” she told Indiana Public Media. “You want to feel safe when you leave your house. I truly believe that. And, this is why I voted for Mr. Trump."

But her 43-year-old husband Roberto is now facing deportation after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials ruled he should be forcibly removed from the US.  

 

"I was fine with racist policies as long as I thought they'd only hurt the OTHER Mexicans."

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Semi-political related: I got a FB message last night from a family member who was disgusted that I would donate to "those baby killers" (Planned Parenthood) in his name. I messaged him back- "I thought you were in favor of reducing abortions. More access to health care and birth control does that, you know".

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12 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

That Time  interview didn't do Trump any favors. If Ivanka is smart, she and her fancy sunglasses will be sitting in on all future interviews that Trump does, and not allowing any interviews to take place in her absence. I don't like Ivanka, but I sure don't envy her role in her family as her Father's caretaker.

I still find it so fucking disturbing that this is even something that makes sense. I want to think anyone who says that the president needs his daughter around to help him not behave like a lunatic, is a lunatic herself. Unfortunately, you sound quite reasonable. That scares the shit out of me! 

Then there's this:

Spoiler

 

What kind of leader hopes that their country's health care EXPLODES? Oh, a selfish, delusional, toddler in a 70 year old's orange body. 

I fucked up my post, but under the spoiler is another smile :)

 

 

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9 minutes ago, iweartanktops said:

I still find it so fucking disturbing that this is even something that makes sense. I want to think anyone who says that the president needs his daughter around to help him not behave like a lunatic, is a lunatic herself. Unfortunately, you sound quite reasonable. That scares the shit out of me! 

Then there's this:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

What kind of leader hopes that their country's health care EXPLODES? Oh, a selfish, delusional, toddler in a 70 year old's orange body. 

I fucked up my post, but under the spoiler is another smile :)

 

 

Sounds like Donnie needs my elected official butthurt report form....

butthurt2.jpg

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21 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Sounds like Donnie needs my elected official butthurt report form....

butthurt2.jpg

This is AWESOME! 

and so is this tweet 

 

OMG, DYING 

 

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I think that Ivanka is a hell of a lot scarier than her father.  She has the ability to rein him in, while still staying on his good side, a valuable trait for the child of a narcissistic megalomaniac.  She's built a life somewhat outside of Chump's influence, but has still managed to merge her married life with his.  Her husband is in a power position in the White House, and I doubt he'd be there if it weren't for Ivanka.  She's right there a lot of the time, managing her father, but then will suddenly be gone, leaving the Orange Toddler to his own devices.  

I don't think that her decision to go on a vacation right when the healthcare fiasco was dying was a mistake.  She did the minimum amount required to appear to support her father while distancing herself from the immediate fallout.

I think Ivanka is using her father for her own ends.  She understands PR in a way Tiny Hands is incapable of.  She's got people looking to her to be a moderating influence on Cheeto, but I think she's actually building her own brand and will not hesitate to throw him under the bus when the time comes.  She's smarter than her father, she has better social skills, she can play out the long con, and she knows when to cut her losses.  She's seen as yet another power behind the throne.

I shudder to think of what her time in the White House will mean in the future.  She's using this time to build relationships and influence.  I don't know if she's planning on running for office herself, or if she's planning on pushing her husband into it.  I only know that she scares the crap out of me.

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@Flossie

That's terrifying, and probably true. That would make her like the mother in The Manchurian Candidate. Creepy!

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Loving all the memes of Obama and Hilary laughing their socks off at the defeat/dropping of AHCA.

But do you think they are really laughing? Are they just relieved that 24 million people won't lose their coverage? Or are they in despair at the reality of this incompetent moron and his carpetbagging Cabinet?

I think these are two people who went into public service because they truly believed they had something to offer. And because they loved their country, and believed all in it deserved an equal chance, equal rights and equal care.

To see all to which they have devoted their working lives manoevred by foreign outside interests, distorted into profitmaking, manipulated to enrich the richest, finessed to disadvantage the least in society, the Presidency reduced to a source of income for the incumbent and his family - this total demeaning of public service must hurt like hell.*

And I bet they are very, very angry.

ETA  *And most of this applies to the GOP House as well.

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Do ex Presidents go on the campaign trail for off year House and Senate elections? Cause Obama could do killer damage to the GOP in some States.....

Even if there is no precedent - this presidency is making all precedent obsolete - so go,Obama, go!

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18 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

 

Do ex Presidents go on the campaign trail for off year House and Senate elections? Cause Obama could do killer damage to the GOP in some States.....

Even if there is no precedent - this presidency is making all precedent obsolete - so go,Obama, go!

Don't forget Michelle!
That woman could shake up the world with her phenomenal speeches.

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I keep thinking about the sort of pictures a savvy public relations person would have gotten out of Trump's meeting with the truckers. It sure makes our job easier that he's too stupid to hire and follow the advice of such a person. :pb_smile:

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If this is true, could it be that Flynn sold Trump out to save himself? I don't want to get my hopes up. 

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18 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

If this is true, could it be that Flynn sold Trump out to save himself? I don't want to get my hopes up. 

Yonatan Zunger has a mega-thread explaining much of what's going on right now, with more info. This is the first post in the thread.

Wow. If Flynn, and it seems Manafort too, are flipping, this thing could really blow up sooner rather than later... 

Oh,  remember my post yesterday on Flynn's secret meeting with the Turks on how to kidnap Gulen out of the country? Guess who was there too? NUNES! 

 

 

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10 hours ago, VelociRapture said:

A rusty trike missing one wheel and with a single barbed spike where the seat should be - the better to fuck America over.

----------

Also, Paul Ryan's tears sustain my soul.

(I'm assuming he's holed up in his home gym right now, doing bicep curls and crying because his widdle feelings got hurted yesterday.) :pb_lol:

I was thinking a rusty trike with two flat tires a loose handlebars. I also had an inordinate amount of glee over how crappy Ryan must be feeling, assuming, of course, that he actually has feelings. Of course, he wouldn't be able to understand that so many of us would have felt worse if his deathcare plan had won the day.

 

Sigh, Lurch speaks: "Pence says Trump will keep promise of overhauling Affordable Care Act"

Quote

Vice President Pence said that President Trump intends to keep his promise to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, pledging that the legislation's collapse Friday was a setback that “won’t last very long.” 

“President Trump is never going to stop fighting to keep his promises to the American people,” Pence said during an appearance in Scott Depot, W.Va., where he blamed Democrats and “a handful of Republicans” for standing in the president's way.

...

Though the bill’s defeat has widely been seen as a major setback for Trump, who’s repeatedly touted his own negotiating skills, Pence praised the president's lobbying efforts.

“You saw his resolve, to work with whoever he needed to work with, to call whoever he needed to call, to get our plan across the finish line this week on Capitol Hill,” Pence said. “I’ve got to tell you, I was inspired by President Trump’s determination and commitment to keep his promise to the American people.”

...

In a lighter moment, Pence acknowledged the presence of Linda McMahon, the chief of the Small Business Administration and a former president of the WWE wrestling network.

“Maybe we could have used a few of your WWE superstars on Capitol Hill yesterday,” Pence said playfully.

WTDH? He's joking about intimidating members of Congress. What a douchemonkey.

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"‘The closer’? The inside story of how Trump tried — and failed — to make a deal on health care"

Quote

Shortly after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled the Republican health-care plan on March 6, President Trump sat in the Oval Office and queried his advisers: “Is this really a good bill?”

And over the next 18 days, until the bill collapsed in the House on Friday afternoon in a humiliating defeat — the sharpest rebuke yet of Trump’s young presidency and his negotiating skills — the question continued to nag at the president.

Even as he thrust himself and the trappings of his office into selling the health-care bill, Trump peppered his aides again and again with the same concern, usually after watching cable news reports chronicling the setbacks, according to two of his advisers: “Is this really a good bill?”

In the end, the answer was no — in part because the president himself seemed to doubt it.

...

For Trump, it was never supposed to be this hard. As a real estate mogul on the rise, he wrote “The Art of the Deal,” and as a political candidate, he boasted that nobody could make deals as beautifully as he could. Replacing Obamacare, a Republican bogeyman since the day it was enacted seven years ago, was Trump’s first chance to prove that he had the magic touch that he claimed eluded Washington.

...

There were other problems, too. Trump never made a real effort to reach out to Democrats, and he was unable to pressure enough of his fellow Republicans. He did not speak fluently about the bill’s details and focused his pitch in purely transactional terms. And he failed to appreciate the importance of replacing Obamacare to the Republican base; for the president, it was an obstacle to move past to get to taxes, trade and the rest of his agenda.

Trump’s advisers thought he could nudge the bill over the finish line by sheer force of personality. “He is the closer,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer boasted on Wednesday.

But by Friday, it was clear that the closer could not close.

Trump tried to orchestrate his own win.

He cajoled and charmed uncertain members, offering flattery and attention to some and admonishment and the vague threat of political retribution to others. He invited members to the White House for bowling sessions, gave others rides on Air Force One (complete with ­lasagna) and grinned for pictures in the Oval Office, where he reminded lawmakers of his margins of victory in their districts.

But legislating, it turned out, was different from cutting deals to splash his name across skyscrapers. And less than 100 days into his administration, the president found himself a red-faced Don Quixote, railing against the intractable forces on Capitol Hill, where Republicans are wearied by years of infighting.

This account of Trump’s work on the health-care bill — based on interviews with roughly three dozen White House aides and advisers, members of Congress, and other key figures in the debate — revealed a president in a constant state of negotiation. He remarked to friends and aides that it did not feel much different from his real estate transactions.

...

Yet the man accustomed to acting unilaterally as a Manhattan developer faced a series of new and uncomfortable challenges. As president, he was selling the rare product on which he refused to emblazon his name — devoting himself to an issue for which he has little real passion or knowledge and operating as a dealmaker in an unfamiliar town full of conflicting loyalties.

Reflecting Friday on the failure, Trump said he thought he had cultivated a good relationship with the House Freedom Caucus — the band of hard-line conservatives who proudly oppose Ryan and other House leaders.

...

The self-described dealmaker

The White House had striven to ensure that its first real legislative push would be an organized, disciplined one. But as the bill began to falter, the chaos and turbulence that has become a hallmark of Trump’s presidency emerged yet again.

On Thursday, Trump appeared embarrassingly out of the loop; as the congressional whip efforts faltered, Trump was busy at the White House, greeting commercial truckers and climbing into the cab of a 18-wheeler to honk the horn.

“It’s going to be a very close vote,” the president said, referring to what everyone else seemed to know had been delayed.

...

As the talks stalled later that night, Trump’s exasperation with the hemming and hawing of members escalated and he delivered an ultimatum: Go ahead with the vote no matter what on Friday, he said, all but daring fellow Republicans to vote against his first significant bill.

The president was finished negotiating, and his thinking was straight from “The Art of the Deal”: If the White House continued to postpone the vote, the holdouts would gain leverage and learn the dangerous lesson that they could challenge Trump and win. Lawmakers wanting to oppose the president would have to do so publicly, in a vote, and face the consequences.

...

Meadows said his mantra in negotiating with Trump had been, “If this was about personalities, we’d already be at ‘yes.’ He’s charming, and anyone who spends time with him knows that. But this is about policy, and we’re not going to make it about anything else.”

...

While Trump turned on his charisma, Pence quietly worked behind the scenes. The vice president has been devoting at least one night a week — usually Wednesday — for get-to-know-you sessions with both lawmakers and their staffs at his residence.

...

Trump used one of his favorite trophies, the Oval Office, as a bargaining tool. He had so many lawmakers in and out in the days leading up to the vote that the stately room felt like a train station.

...

 

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54 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sigh, Lurch speaks: "Pence says Trump will keep promise of overhauling Affordable Care Act"

WTDH? He's joking about intimidating members of Congress. What a douchemonkey.

I'm going to be seeing Lurch in my head from now on. :pb_lol:

 

11 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

  Trump thought that once he was the President, that everybody in Washington could either be charmed or buffaloed into doing what he wanted. Bless his heart, after 70 years, he's finally learning that his tactics don't work on everybody. 

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An article by the very erudite Maureen Dowd: "Donald, This I Will Tell You"

Quote

WASHINGTON — Dear Donald,

We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.

You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?

Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.

After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.

I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning.

And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.

Your whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D.C. elite, jawing about how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”

And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.

You mused that a good role model would be Ronald Reagan. As you saw it, Reagan was a big, good-looking guy with a famous pompadour; he had also been a Democrat and an entertainer. But Reagan had one key quality that you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know.

You both resembled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, floating above the nitty-gritty and focusing on a few big thoughts. But President Reagan was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly maneuvering the strings.

You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.

You promised to get the best people around you in the White House, the best of the best. In fact, “best” is one of your favorite words.

Instead, you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you have a Manichaean anarchist in Steve Bannon.

You knew the Republicans were full of hot air. They haven’t had to pass anything in a long time, and they have no aptitude for governing. To paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is like asking Frank to judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

You knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake news. Republicans have been running on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years and they never even bothered to come up with a valid alternative.

And neither did you, despite all your promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” because you wanted everyone to be covered.

Instead, you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. You were so concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.

As The Times’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse put it, the G.O.P. falls into clover with a lock on the White House and both houses of Congress, and what’s the first thing it does? Slip on a banana peel. Incompetence Inc.

...

And you can jump on the phone with The Times’s Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa — ignoring that you’ve labeled them the “fake media” — and act like you’re in control. You can say that people should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would have been — and that Obamacare is going to explode and that the Democrats are going to get the blame. But it doesn’t work that way. You own it now.

You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.

You were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich people — and drew you away from your own.

You sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make Washington work again. Instead, you got worked over by the Republican leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their bidding.

That’s why they’re putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies.

They’re counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post reported, peppering aides with the query, “Is this really a good bill?”

You got played.

It took W. years to smash everything. You’re way ahead of schedule.

And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?

...

 

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