Trump 33: Making Norman Bates Look Like a Choir Boy

[JMarie]

9 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Don't miss this hard-hitting interview where Daddy Huckabee will help advance the lies of this administration! 

 

The president AND a magician?  Get outta here!

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Bill Maher's jabs at Dumpy, Ingraham, Palin, Jones, and Cernovich:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a sobering perspective: "Counting the days till Trumpism ends? You’ll run out of fingers."

Spoiler

Three years after Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator to present himself as the great hope of a new American populism, his detractors are increasingly betting that Trumpism will end in a dramatic confrontation between the president and the investigators examining how he won office. Some, like the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, say Robert Mueller’s team will lift the fog from Americans’ eyes and lead us back toward a sober embrace of the very institutions that voters rebelled against when they chose a populist disruptor. Some, such as the Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, say reports about the president’s sordid behavior (alleged affairs with porn actresses, among other things) will break the populist fever. Others hope that a snowballing of policy outrages — thousands of traumatized children held in tent camps, for example — will smother Trumpism.

But the history of populist movements tells a different story. When citizens rise up against a system they believe is broken, when voters conclude that they’ve been conned or taken for granted, they are generally not dissuaded by their leaders’ personal peccadilloes, nor are they impressed by investigations that reveal misdeeds by their populist flag-bearers.

President Trump remains as polarizing a figure as ever — a paragon of possibility for his supporters and the leader of an anti-democratic demolition crew to his detractors. But any blue wave approaching the shores of power this fall is likely to be modest in size, and the populist fever that swept Trump to office is still quite a ways from breaking.

In the United States and other Western democracies, populist uprisings, even when they seem to come from nowhere, usually turn out to have been a long time brewing. Trumpism, in many ways, is the ultimate expression of a frustration that had been growing among Americans, from Barry Goldwater and Eugene McCarthy in the 1960s to Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in the 1980s and ’90s and on to the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008.

And just as they emerge over a long stretch of time, populist movements also dissipate slowly. They die not simply because of corruption investigations, dogged news coverage or bad behavior by the movements’ leaders. Rather, there seems to be a natural process, a pattern of political change that transcends personalities and places. Even when leaders of such movements prove to be less effective or attractive than they seemed at first blush, the political and economic forces that brought them to power tend to protect the movements longer than their opponents might expect. Abroad and at home, populist movements end when the ideas that fueled them are absorbed into mainstream institutions or when the conditions that sparked their outburst are elementally altered.

For years, outsiders argued that Italian populist leader Silvio Berlusconi could not survive atop his country’s notoriously volatile government for long. After all, although Berlusconi was a master of media messaging who was allergic to ideology and had a knack for mirroring the passions of the people — sound familiar? — he was also a bully who favored his own business interests and was constantly fighting off investigations of corruption and sexual impropriety.

But Berlusconi lasted 17 years as Italy’s dominant political figure before he was forced to resign as prime minister in 2011. The public grew weary of his show — the scandals, the media circus, the sordid indignities of his personal life. Yet even after the man was out of office, his message continued to resonate in Italian politics. His skepticism of globalization and his anti-immigration rhetoric, for example, remain at the core of the country’s populist movement.

Similarly, in Austria, Joerg Haider rose from the political fringe to become the country’s most important postwar right-wing populist figure, even as he fought off a steady stream of investigations into money laundering, embezzlement and other corruption allegations. Haider died in 2008 having effectively broken his country’s major parties, reshaping Austria’s political landscape and establishing an anti-immigrant nationalism as an enduring, animating force in politics.

In the United States, the history of populist uprisings is a story that, over and over, ends with absorption and co-option. The socialist movement of the early 20th century never captured the White House, but the ideas that Norman Thomas and other socialist leaders pushed in a time of stark economic inequality became essential parts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal: Social Security, unemployment benefits, jobs programs.

Half a century later, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, Ronald Reagan similarly adopted positions first staked out by the harshly conservative and deeply unpopular Goldwater. Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign made a classic populist appeal aimed at what he called a “hidden majority” of frustrated Americans, promising to slash regulations and taxes, reduce government’s role, and leave civil rights questions to the states. Goldwater suffered a historically lopsided loss, but 16 years later, Reagan rode many of those ideas to a big victory.

And that, argues three-time populist presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, is how populist movements both end and succeed. When someone comes along to “capture those ideas and ride them to power,” the populist movement fizzles because it’s no longer necessary — the people have, in a sense, been heard, said Buchanan, who sought the White House from 1992 to 2000. “The populists are the canary in the mine. They do not survive,” he said. “But their ideas do. FDR and Reagan knew how to seize on those ideas and make them palatable to a majority. Today’s establishment doesn’t seem to know how to do that.”

Of course, Roosevelt and Reagan didn’t adopt populist ideas or methods whole-hog. They adapted the issues and tapped into the emotions that drove the movements, all in a way that they expertly fit into the institutions that bind American society.

Kathy Cramer, author of “The Politics of Resentment,” has spent countless hours with Trump supporters in Wisconsin, exploring the edges of their political decisions. “We shouldn’t expect people who voted for Trump to say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I made a mistake,’ ” she said. “So often, they preface their support of him with, ‘Well, I wish he didn’t behave like that.’ They don’t love him. But I don’t see signs of embarrassment. They see the investigation and the news media as conspiring against Trump. They still want respect, to be heard, to not be looked down on.”

The endgame Cramer imagines is the emergence of a Republican “who gives people a way to shift from Trump in a way that allows them to save face. They do eventually want something to turn toward, and I don’t see what that is. I sure don’t see what the Democratic Party is offering as an alternative.”

In theory, the next phase of U.S. politics might feature a new FDR or Reagan emerging to extract powerful ideas from Trumpism and build onto that structure a message that brings Americans together. But such a unifying push is not inevitable, and proponents of a new American nationalism, such as Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, contend that the chapter after Trumpism will be avowedly anti-immigration, pulling the country back from the multicultural future envisioned by the three previous presidents. Nativism does not lend itself to adaptation into some less polarizing political movement.

Still, a follow-on to Trumpism could take any number of forms. Either a Democrat or a Republican could cobble together an appeal that incorporates Trump’s skepticism of the excesses of political correctness and identity politics while rallying Americans toward a more welcoming approach to immigration, picking a fight with tech companies over the future of work, and returning to an embrace of science and internationalism.

Trump was elected to disrupt and dismantle — the classic aims of many populist leaders. He has already dashed Democratic hopes that the Obama presidency had ushered in a new multicultural majority; he has also redefined the Republican Party as something far from its half-century of conservatism and given Americans their first view of what a cult of personality looks like in the White House.

But the leader of a populist movement is often so far outside the political norm that he turns out to be a one-shot. There is, after all, no obvious next Trump in either party. Yet the passions that made the populist personality attractive in the first place often survive the leader’s fall.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting crusade of the 1950s remained popular long after the press and members of Congress turned against him. Decades later, some historians would suggest that had news coverage of McCarthy been more aggressive, much earlier, his effort might have waned sooner. But as Edwin Bayley showed in his 1981 book, “Joe McCarthy and the Press,” there was no lack of truthful, clear reporting: “Almost every aspect of McCarthy’s record was investigated and his derelictions exposed, over and over. No one cared,” Bayley concluded. “. . . It was not McCarthy’s character, morals, or deportment that concerned people; the only issue that mattered was the Communist issue.”

McCarthy, like Trump, preached skepticism and disbelief, railed against the news media and investigators, and sowed doubt about the very nature of expertise and fact. A cavalcade of criticism and investigation led McCarthy’s supporters to stick by their man, just as we see today.

Any pivot from that doubling down to an endgame is likely to involve the passage of enough time to get past the powerful obstacle of pride. The more that Democrats press Trump voters — and Republicans in Congress — to admit that their leader is problematic, the less likely they are to do so.

Is there anything a Mueller report could say that would turn Trump’s hard-core supporters against him now? It’s unlikely that the forces that got him elected will dissipate until traditional institutions, those his supporters feel abandoned by, begin to deal with the structural problems beneath the populist impulse. There are still a lot of deeply frustrated voters out there.

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is a sobering perspective: "Counting the days till Trumpism ends? You’ll run out of fingers."

  Hide contents

Three years after Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator to present himself as the great hope of a new American populism, his detractors are increasingly betting that Trumpism will end in a dramatic confrontation between the president and the investigators examining how he won office. Some, like the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, say Robert Mueller’s team will lift the fog from Americans’ eyes and lead us back toward a sober embrace of the very institutions that voters rebelled against when they chose a populist disruptor. Some, such as the Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, say reports about the president’s sordid behavior (alleged affairs with porn actresses, among other things) will break the populist fever. Others hope that a snowballing of policy outrages — thousands of traumatized children held in tent camps, for example — will smother Trumpism.

But the history of populist movements tells a different story. When citizens rise up against a system they believe is broken, when voters conclude that they’ve been conned or taken for granted, they are generally not dissuaded by their leaders’ personal peccadilloes, nor are they impressed by investigations that reveal misdeeds by their populist flag-bearers.

President Trump remains as polarizing a figure as ever — a paragon of possibility for his supporters and the leader of an anti-democratic demolition crew to his detractors. But any blue wave approaching the shores of power this fall is likely to be modest in size, and the populist fever that swept Trump to office is still quite a ways from breaking.

In the United States and other Western democracies, populist uprisings, even when they seem to come from nowhere, usually turn out to have been a long time brewing. Trumpism, in many ways, is the ultimate expression of a frustration that had been growing among Americans, from Barry Goldwater and Eugene McCarthy in the 1960s to Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot in the 1980s and ’90s and on to the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008.

And just as they emerge over a long stretch of time, populist movements also dissipate slowly. They die not simply because of corruption investigations, dogged news coverage or bad behavior by the movements’ leaders. Rather, there seems to be a natural process, a pattern of political change that transcends personalities and places. Even when leaders of such movements prove to be less effective or attractive than they seemed at first blush, the political and economic forces that brought them to power tend to protect the movements longer than their opponents might expect. Abroad and at home, populist movements end when the ideas that fueled them are absorbed into mainstream institutions or when the conditions that sparked their outburst are elementally altered.

For years, outsiders argued that Italian populist leader Silvio Berlusconi could not survive atop his country’s notoriously volatile government for long. After all, although Berlusconi was a master of media messaging who was allergic to ideology and had a knack for mirroring the passions of the people — sound familiar? — he was also a bully who favored his own business interests and was constantly fighting off investigations of corruption and sexual impropriety.

But Berlusconi lasted 17 years as Italy’s dominant political figure before he was forced to resign as prime minister in 2011. The public grew weary of his show — the scandals, the media circus, the sordid indignities of his personal life. Yet even after the man was out of office, his message continued to resonate in Italian politics. His skepticism of globalization and his anti-immigration rhetoric, for example, remain at the core of the country’s populist movement.

Similarly, in Austria, Joerg Haider rose from the political fringe to become the country’s most important postwar right-wing populist figure, even as he fought off a steady stream of investigations into money laundering, embezzlement and other corruption allegations. Haider died in 2008 having effectively broken his country’s major parties, reshaping Austria’s political landscape and establishing an anti-immigrant nationalism as an enduring, animating force in politics.

In the United States, the history of populist uprisings is a story that, over and over, ends with absorption and co-option. The socialist movement of the early 20th century never captured the White House, but the ideas that Norman Thomas and other socialist leaders pushed in a time of stark economic inequality became essential parts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal: Social Security, unemployment benefits, jobs programs.

Half a century later, on the other side of the ideological spectrum, Ronald Reagan similarly adopted positions first staked out by the harshly conservative and deeply unpopular Goldwater. Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign made a classic populist appeal aimed at what he called a “hidden majority” of frustrated Americans, promising to slash regulations and taxes, reduce government’s role, and leave civil rights questions to the states. Goldwater suffered a historically lopsided loss, but 16 years later, Reagan rode many of those ideas to a big victory.

And that, argues three-time populist presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, is how populist movements both end and succeed. When someone comes along to “capture those ideas and ride them to power,” the populist movement fizzles because it’s no longer necessary — the people have, in a sense, been heard, said Buchanan, who sought the White House from 1992 to 2000. “The populists are the canary in the mine. They do not survive,” he said. “But their ideas do. FDR and Reagan knew how to seize on those ideas and make them palatable to a majority. Today’s establishment doesn’t seem to know how to do that.”

Of course, Roosevelt and Reagan didn’t adopt populist ideas or methods whole-hog. They adapted the issues and tapped into the emotions that drove the movements, all in a way that they expertly fit into the institutions that bind American society.

Kathy Cramer, author of “The Politics of Resentment,” has spent countless hours with Trump supporters in Wisconsin, exploring the edges of their political decisions. “We shouldn’t expect people who voted for Trump to say, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I made a mistake,’ ” she said. “So often, they preface their support of him with, ‘Well, I wish he didn’t behave like that.’ They don’t love him. But I don’t see signs of embarrassment. They see the investigation and the news media as conspiring against Trump. They still want respect, to be heard, to not be looked down on.”

The endgame Cramer imagines is the emergence of a Republican “who gives people a way to shift from Trump in a way that allows them to save face. They do eventually want something to turn toward, and I don’t see what that is. I sure don’t see what the Democratic Party is offering as an alternative.”

In theory, the next phase of U.S. politics might feature a new FDR or Reagan emerging to extract powerful ideas from Trumpism and build onto that structure a message that brings Americans together. But such a unifying push is not inevitable, and proponents of a new American nationalism, such as Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, contend that the chapter after Trumpism will be avowedly anti-immigration, pulling the country back from the multicultural future envisioned by the three previous presidents. Nativism does not lend itself to adaptation into some less polarizing political movement.

Still, a follow-on to Trumpism could take any number of forms. Either a Democrat or a Republican could cobble together an appeal that incorporates Trump’s skepticism of the excesses of political correctness and identity politics while rallying Americans toward a more welcoming approach to immigration, picking a fight with tech companies over the future of work, and returning to an embrace of science and internationalism.

Trump was elected to disrupt and dismantle — the classic aims of many populist leaders. He has already dashed Democratic hopes that the Obama presidency had ushered in a new multicultural majority; he has also redefined the Republican Party as something far from its half-century of conservatism and given Americans their first view of what a cult of personality looks like in the White House.

But the leader of a populist movement is often so far outside the political norm that he turns out to be a one-shot. There is, after all, no obvious next Trump in either party. Yet the passions that made the populist personality attractive in the first place often survive the leader’s fall.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting crusade of the 1950s remained popular long after the press and members of Congress turned against him. Decades later, some historians would suggest that had news coverage of McCarthy been more aggressive, much earlier, his effort might have waned sooner. But as Edwin Bayley showed in his 1981 book, “Joe McCarthy and the Press,” there was no lack of truthful, clear reporting: “Almost every aspect of McCarthy’s record was investigated and his derelictions exposed, over and over. No one cared,” Bayley concluded. “. . . It was not McCarthy’s character, morals, or deportment that concerned people; the only issue that mattered was the Communist issue.”

McCarthy, like Trump, preached skepticism and disbelief, railed against the news media and investigators, and sowed doubt about the very nature of expertise and fact. A cavalcade of criticism and investigation led McCarthy’s supporters to stick by their man, just as we see today.

Any pivot from that doubling down to an endgame is likely to involve the passage of enough time to get past the powerful obstacle of pride. The more that Democrats press Trump voters — and Republicans in Congress — to admit that their leader is problematic, the less likely they are to do so.

Is there anything a Mueller report could say that would turn Trump’s hard-core supporters against him now? It’s unlikely that the forces that got him elected will dissipate until traditional institutions, those his supporters feel abandoned by, begin to deal with the structural problems beneath the populist impulse. There are still a lot of deeply frustrated voters out there.

 

That’s an interesting article, and as you say, @GreyhoundFan, quite sobering. There’s just one thing that the article doesn’t mention. The populists that got the presidunce in office do not represent the majority in the US. They won the election because the elections were rigged. The Russians meddled in the voting systems of almost every state. They won because of your undemocratic system of electoral votes, because the populists did not win the popular vote. And they did not win the popular vote despite the Russian meddling.

The populists are a loud, voiciferous and in your face hateful part of American society. But they are not the majority. 

When the real American majority stands up, and more importantly, makes itself heard, it will be a devastating counter to the populist movement. Coupled with a leader who manages to also address the valid issues populists have, the age of the presidunce will be cut short in its tracks.

The only thing the majority lacks right now is that leader. But I’ve already seen quite a few good candidates for that role, so I’m optimistic and confident one will rise up in the next couple of months. 

The majority will prevail.

[AmazonGrace]

Rick Wilson is an optimist 

idk i think by this time most Trumpers are holed up in the bunker and nothing will shake them. This week broke those people who hated Trump already

[AmazonGrace]

Exhibit A in the file "Trump supporters are beyond reach"  

 

[fraurosena]

This is MAGA...

America's poor becoming more destitute under Trump, UN report says

Quote

Americans born into poverty are more likely than ever before to stay that way, according to a United Nations report on poverty and inequality in the US.

"The United States, one of the world's richest nations and the "land of opportunity," is fast becoming a champion of inequality," the report concluded.

The Trump administration has slammed the UN report, arguing the organization should instead focus on poverty in the third world. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said, "It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America." The report, presented Thursday in Geneva, comes two days after Haley announced the US would withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council.

Haley's comment was in response to a letter from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and 18 other politicians calling on the US to "take action to reduce shameful levels of poverty across the country."

They agreed with the report's conclusion that the Trump administration's $1.5 trillion in tax cuts "overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality."

Philip Alston, a New York University law and human rights professor, led a UN study traveling across US. The group went to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. Alabama, California, Georgia, West Virginia were among the states they visited.

"Most Americans don't care about it. They have bought the line peddled by conservative groups that poor people deserve what they are getting," Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told CNN.

The report notes that the US has highest child mortality rate of 20 rich countries (OPEC comparison). It also has among the highest child poverty rates in the developed world, at 21%. It also considered obesity rates, income inequality and incarceration rates.

Haley said the UN special rapporteur had "categorically misstated" the progress America had made reducing poverty, but she gave no examples.

Who are America's working poor?

More than 40 million Americans live in poverty, according to the US census.

Maudine Fall has spent her life working minimum wage jobs. At 56 years old, she became homeless. Although she continues cleaning and catering, she rarely gets more than 30 hours of work a week. Occasionally, she stays in shelters, some nights she sleeps on the street. The worst part she says; you can never let your guard down.

"I worry about the danger, you put yourself in a vulnerable position when you're out here," she says. Fall says it's impossible to save money for a rental deposit. "You're never able to save, you're never able to really just build up and have a big deposit to put down. You're struggling, day by day. Even working," she says.

If you are among the working poor living pay check to pay check, one illness or natural disaster can put you on the street. John Bobbit is one such man. He used to own a maintenance business employing four people. That all changed after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans in 2005. He lost everything and ended up homeless for almost a decade.

"Pride was my biggest sin because I wouldn't ask people to help me," John Bobbit said. "Pride was my biggest sin because I wouldn't ask people to help me. I always thought, 'I'm on my own, I've got to do this on my own.' I turned to drugs and alcohol just out of self-pity, and I ended up digging myself into a deeper hole," Bobbit said. He was at rock bottom when he decided to walk some 500 miles (more than 700kms) from New Orleans to Atlanta to start anew. It took him 32 days.

Safehouse Outreach in downtown Atlanta helped him find work in a major hotel. "I was in a job program and they started me off at $8.50. It's the most humble I've ever been in my life and I'm 50 years old. I'm used to making $25-30 an hour when I ran my own business." He was quickly promoted to a manager position but was out of work 18 months later when illness struck. Respiratory failure, cellulitis and gout meant five weeks in hospital and many more weeks recovering. The hotel could not hold his position. Bobbit returned to Safehouse Outreach first as a volunteer and then he was hired as the kitchen manager. Today he's making grilled cheese sandwiches and soup for the hundreds of people who struggle to survive on minimum wage. "We do a free, hot healthy meal to anybody who walks in the door. That's lunch and dinner. In a given year, we'll see about 4,000 people," said Safehouse Outreach CEO Josh Bray.

The underemployed

The official unemployment rate might be at record lows, but Safehouse Outreach says it's seeing an increase in the number of underemployed. Nolan English runs the outreach program.

"At least 40% of the people we serve are working, they're holding down two to three jobs, have children, they may be trying to land on someone's couch, some live in abandoned buildings, in their cars, then they come here and they go on shift, they work," he said.

Demetrius Philips and his wife, Shamika Harper, both are minimum wage workers who are homeless. At 38 years, Philips earns just $8 hour. "You might work today, might not tomorrow, which puts you in a bind because you're only making $40-50 maybe $60 a day. So pay for a hotel room and buy something to eat, you don't have any more money."

Across the US, people working for tips can often earn as little as $2.13 an hour and have to make up the rest in tips to meet the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. "They're not livable wages, they're little tokens they're throwing, they're crumbs from your table," English said.

The Obama administration pushed to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour in 2014, but Republicans blocked the bill despite overwhelming support for the measure.

What is absolute poverty?

More than 5 million Americans live in third world conditions also known as "absolute poverty," according to the report.

In Lowndes County, Alabama, the report found residents lacked basic sewage systems. Unable to afford a septic tank some people constructed their own homemade sewerage lines using PVC piping.

The UN study also found 19 out of 55 people tested in Alabama had hookworm. It's a disease typically found in developing countries, one that was thought to have been eradicated in the US in the 1980s.

While the issue is not new, the problem is becoming more dire under the Trump administration according to the UN. It found Trump's policies seem "deliberately designed to remove the basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship."

"Contempt for the poor in US drives cruel policies," Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told CNN.

"The Trump administration has brought in massive tax breaks for corporations and the very wealthy, while orchestrating a systematic assault on the welfare system," he said. "The strategy seems to be tailor-made to maximize inequality and to plunge millions of working Americans, and those unable to work, into penury.

Forty-six million Americans depend on food banks, which is 30% above 2007 levels, according to Feeding America.

"Even people who are working full time can't afford a decent living. They do need food stamps. They do need the sort of assistance that government can provide, but instead what we see is a constant cut back in all of those benefits by this administration," Alston said.

 

[apple1]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

That’s an interesting article, and as you say, @GreyhoundFan, quite sobering. There’s just one thing that the article doesn’t mention. The populists that got the presidunce in office do not represent the majority in the US. They won the election because the elections were rigged. The Russians meddled in the voting systems of almost every state. They won because of your undemocratic system of electoral votes, because the populists did not win the popular vote. And they did not win the popular vote despite the Russian meddling.

The populists are a loud, voiciferous and in your face hateful part of American society. But they are not the majority. 

When the real American majority stands up, and more importantly, makes itself heard, it will be a devastating counter to the populist movement. Coupled with a leader who manages to also address the valid issues populists have, the age of the presidunce will be cut short in its tracks.

The only thing the majority lacks right now is that leader. But I’ve already seen quite a few good candidates for that role, so I’m optimistic and confident one will rise up in the next couple of months. 

The majority will prevail.

@fraurosena Great post. My only  issue (for lack of a better word) is your statement about Americans standing up - and I know you have posted similar things before. I guess my point is that many are standing up, in the (limited) ways that we can. I am somewhat puzzled at this point as to what else we can do, other than express our opinions and VOTE (and continue to insist on integrity in the voting process itself - which is even challenged with gerrymandering and with manipulation of public opinion, more than actual vote-meddling). But the vote option only comes around periodically.

So worrisome.

4 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Exhibit A in the file "Trump supporters are beyond reach"  

 

I watched this little video when CNN first posted it. Completely... discouraging. Distressing. Something else. Reminds me that Hillary's faux pas that continues to be used against her, in some cases, is truth.

I don't like feeling this way about my fellow citizens.

[AmazonGrace]

This is the only way that can break  Trump supporters: Trump hits them at the wallet.

 

[fraurosena]

55 minutes ago, apple1 said:

Great post. My only  issue (for lack of a better word) is your statement about Americans standing up - and I know you have posted similar things before. I guess my point is that many are standing up, in the (limited) ways that we can. I am somewhat puzzled at this point as to what else we can do, other than express our opinions and VOTE (and continue to insist on integrity in the voting process itself - which is even challenged with gerrymandering and with manipulation of public opinion, more than actual vote-meddling). But the vote option only comes around periodically.

So worrisome.

I think I need to clarify where I'm coming from with my posts. In saying what I do, I do recognize that I'm preaching to the choir here. I'm quite sure all of us are on the same page. So when I say that people should get out and do something, get out and vote, you shouldn't take that personally. Rather, I'm just voicing my opinion in a general sense, not a personal one.

I really don't think any of you need to be convinced to get out and vote, or march, or volunteer, or anything really. You are all smart and intelligent and decent, and we're all like-minded on this. I'm sure every single one of you is doing whatever they are able to. Even if it's just talking to people and voicing your opinions. It's my sincere hope that our collective opinions and arguments will spread out into society at large, and thereby nudge others still sitting on the fence into action. That majority I was talking about in my post? It is going to stand up. I'm sure of it. And in doing so, it will overcome all the obstacles in it's way, from foreign interference to domestic gerrymandering and voter-suppression. The majority is simply too big to conquer. It will prevail.

I've said it before: I'm an eternal optimist. I believe in the power of good. I believe in the power of peaceful action. And I believe America will recover from this disaster of a presiduncy, right itself and get itself together again. 

[AmazonGrace]

This is a real thing that the White House did

[fraurosena]

Ok, against better judgment, I'm going to attempt to disseminate this tweet.

1. Invade? You mean they're coming with an army? Or they're coming in great swarms? Sorry, but the numbers contradict that. There are no swarms of people overrunning the borders, no matter how much you repeat that. I know you don't read, but this article shows that the numbers of people crossing the borders are actually in decline: Border Crossings Have Been Declining for Years, Despite Claims of a ‘Crisis of Illegal Immigration’
2. '...with no Judges or Court Cases...' In other words, without due process, without the rule of law? Your mask is slipping, presidunce dear, and your authoritarian, dictator-wannabe predilection is showing.
3. '... a mockery to [...] Law and Order...' Eh, that Schrödinger's cat in your brain is at work here, isn't it? This is a complete contradiction to the previous sentence. Law and Order means Judges and Court Cases. You can't have one without the other, no matter what that cat is mewling to you.
4. 'Most children come without parents...' Even if this is true (and it's not) what are you saying here? That because kids come without parents it's totally acceptable to put them in detention camps? Or it's totally acceptable to 'bring them back from where they came' (a sentence by the way, that does not make grammatical sense) without due process?

[fraurosena]

Because of course they are.

Russians Flock to Trump Properties to Give Birth to U.S. Citizens

Quote

Anatoliy Kuzmin held out his daughter’s blue U.S. passport over a red Russian one and snapped a photo from a Florida beach.

“Woohoo! Got dual citizenship for my daughter!” he wrote on Instagram.

American citizenship for the newborn girl was the goal of Kuzmin and his Instagram-celebrity wife, who sought the help of birth-tourism services in Florida for the arrival of their first child. They are among the estimated hundreds of Russian parents who flock to the U.S. annually for warm weather, excellent medical care, and, more importantly, birthright American citizenship.

And many, like Kuzmin and his wife, stay at President Donald Trump’s properties in Florida.

While Trump rails against U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, his Florida properties have become a playground for birth tourists from Russia’s upper crust. The Daily Beast has discovered several companies are advertising rentals in Trump properties to expectant Russian parents. While the Trump Organization does not directly profit from subleases of privately owned condos, it does benefit from Russian patronage of the nearby Trump International Beach Resort. (The Trump Organization did not return requests comment.)

Many of the companies that cater to Russian birth tourists advertise their services openly and warn no one will get in trouble as long as they don’t lie on immigration paperwork.

Baby Boom

A thriving Russian émigré community has grown around the Miami suburbs, making it a home away from home for those looking for a few months away from Russia’s bitter winters. The area’s most popular Russian deli, a mainstay for many moms on birthing forums, as well as other shops serving a taste of Eastern Europe, sit directly across the street from the Trump International Beach Resort, Trump Palace, and Trump Royale.

Some Russian parents-to-be come on the cheap, eschewing fancy packages in favor of a do-it-yourself approach from a modest Miami apartment. A no-frills, three-month stay in the Miami suburbs, complete with out-of-pocket medical bills, can cost $20,000, moms told The Daily Beast.

The Florida Trump properties are convenient options for wealthy Russians who can afford it. They are notorious for being investment properties for Russia’s hyper-wealthy, a safe place to store savings in U.S. dollars. And birth-tourism companies offer Trump apartments as part of packages costing upwards of $75,000.

SVM-MED, a Miami birth-tourism company that also boasts outposts in Moscow and Kiev, offers three tiers of packages to its clients, with the top two advertising lodging in Trump Towers. The most expensive package costs $84,700 for a Trump Tower II apartment with a gold-tiled bathtub and chauffeured Cadillac Escalade or Mercedes Benz.

Miami-Boom advertises an apartment at Trump Royale with two bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. The website doesn’t list a price, but the same apartment is listed on other real-estate websites for $5,000 a month.

A third company, albeit aimed largely at Ukrainian customers, promises that Miami’s Sunny Isles suburb has excellent condominium options, “some of which, like Trump Towers, were created by American multi-billionaire Donald Trump himself!”

Another offering, from Status-Med, a company with offices in Moscow and Miami, advertises a Trump Royale penthouse apartment on its website for $7,000 a month.

Status-Med is affiliated with the Sunny Medical Center, a clinic just down the street from the Trump properties in Sunny Isles. It organizes beachside yoga, get-togethers, and medical care for expectant mothers. Owner Vera Muzyka said Trump properties are in high demand among her clients.

“And also, the name Melania has become very popular,” she added.

One Russian mom of a newborn U.S. citizen told The Daily Beast that she runs a support group for women making birthing plans without the help of a company. At any given time, 50 members of her online group are in Miami to give birth, she said. Muzyka estimated in 2014 that 40 to 60 women from former Soviet countries give birth in Miami each month.

“Our clients pay for their own medicine and other services, and spend a lot of money during their time in the county,” she said, claiming that the average client spends $40,000 to $50,000 for three months in the U.S.

Tagged shots on Instagram are often underscored with a hashtag, in Russian, of “births in Miami.” They show moms floating in swimming pools, or bulging pregnant bellies doing yoga on the beach, or, weeks later, their new infants, decked out in red, white, and blue.

Sunny Medical Center openly advertises citizenship as one of the primary benefits their clients receive. Muzyka told The Daily Beast that all the women using Sunny Medical Center’s services openly tell U.S. officials that they are coming for birth tourism.

They also warn parents to avoid applying for Medicaid, as some expectant birth tourists apparently do. Doing so, or lying on their visa paperwork, might permanently blacklist them from U.S. visa eligibility even after their child can apply for family reunification, they warn.

An employee at one Miami birth-tourism company geared toward the former USSR is awaiting trial in Florida on charges that he falsified documents. The FBI says he claimed to witness both parents signing necessary documents when he could not have done so. He has pleaded not guilty.

‘I Was Looking Particularly for Trump Towers’

Valeriya Storozheva’s first experience giving birth in Miami seven years ago was so good she came back for her next child, due this fall. Storozheva told The Daily Beast she liked the weather, the relaxed feel, and the feeling of being on vacation.

“This time, of course, we want to stay a little longer because we don’t want to go back to the [Russian] winter,” she joked.

Her U.S.-born son, now 6 years old, attends an American school in the area, while her husband and older son are flying in for vacations.

The first time, Storozheva booked her stay through a popular birth-tourism company, which gave her a driver, helped find an apartment, and arranged for a doctor. Storozheva said the people who ran the birth-tourism company had since sold it and switched to real estate, so she asked them for help finding an apartment.

“I was looking particularly for Trump Towers. My friend lived here before,” she said, referring to a fellow mom she’d met during her first pregnancy.

Seven years ago, Storozheva stayed at a similarly ritzy condo just up the street, but but she’d found it lacking.

“[Now] in the evenings, I have a great view because you have the bay, and the buildings aglow,” Storozheva said. “The building is great. No regrets.”

She posts photos of herself grabbing breakfast on the go, or videos doggie-paddling in the condo’s pool.

In the meantime, she’s found a community. Some moms message her on Instagram, where they use hashtags like “births in Miami” to publicize their posts. She meets others while getting her eyebrows done.

And, Storozheva says, she met two more moms just on her flight to Florida.

But even those who don’t pay for a full-time stay at one of the Trump-built apartments often visit the Trump International Beach Resort Miami.

One mom documented her explorations of beachfront properties including the Trump resort on Instagram. In one photo from her stay there, she shows her newborn son sleeping on his stomach. “Our little bear,” she crows.

The very next photo shows her family’s four passports: Three red, one blue.

One mom recommended Trump Palace on a popular forum, DeliveryinUSA.com, after visiting a friend.

“A building which has more Russian officials than all of Moscow,” a third post chimed in about the Trump Palace, punctuating the joke with a smiley emoji.

Laughter at Idea of Crackdown

Birth tourism is a booming industry thanks to the growing middle- and upper-class in Russia and China. These families have no plans to work in the U.S. or pay U.S. taxes as their child grows. Rather, U.S. citizenship is an extra security blanket that the wealthy give themselves after months-long vacations on Miami’s beaches. It also gives their kids a shot at financial aid at U.S. schools and easier access to jobs in the U.S.

After the child turns 21, he or she can also apply for family reunification, to get her parents and non-citizen siblings green cards to come to the U.S.

It seems like the sort of thing Trump spoke out against.

On the campaign trail, he argued that children born to undocumented parents don’t have a legal right to citizenship.

“I don’t think they have American citizenship and if you speak to some very, very good lawyers—and I know some will disagree, but many of them agree with me—and you’re going to find they do not have American citizenship,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly. “We have to start a process where we take back our country. Our country is going to hell.”

He railed against people he said came over from Mexico for a short time period, to give birth.

“Many lawyers are saying that’s not the way it is in terms of this,” Trump said. “They are saying it is not going to hold up in court. It will have to be tested but they say it will not hold up in court.”

In fact, children born to undocumented parents don’t help keep the parents in the country. That myth is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the recent case of an Oakland nurse, Maria Sanchez, who was deported last month despite having a career and three children who are U.S. citizens. Sanchez and her husband chose to take the youngest of their U.S.-born children with them to Mexico when they were deported.

Initially, potential birth tourists and agencies worried that Trump’s election would stymie their options. After the election and into the spring, articles popped up on birth-tourism forums, fearing that they would be ensnared in the “anchor baby” crackdown.

Less than two weeks after the election, leading Russian news site Lenta was among those to raise the question, but said there was no chance Trump could pass a constitutional amendment to change the policy. Russian news agency Tass noted earlier this year that combating birth tourism “will be much more difficult than simply closing entry points for illegal migrants.”

“Only the situation where the woman hides the true purpose of her visit is illegal, such as indicates that she is not coming to ‘receive medical care’ but just for ‘tourism,’” it said.

Indeed, such schemes have already ensnared birth-tourism companies across the country. Los Angeles, where birth-tourism agencies cater to a largely Chinese clientele, even created a task force to tackle the issue in 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Muzyka, the Sunny Medical Center owner, said she wasn’t worried about a change in policy.

“Donald Trump doesn’t share his plans with us,” Muzyka chuckled in Russian.

Nearly nine months into Trump’s presidency, birth-tourism agencies continue to advertise services for expecting parents. Trump stopped pushing the idea of challenging birthright citizenship, even as he doubled down on plans to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Nothing, however, stands in the way of birth tourists who fly business class.

“When Trump was elected, he said he wanted to eliminate citizenship based on place of birth,” birth tourist Tanya Yanygina told The Daily Beast. “But he said that in reference to people from the Middle East and Mexico.”

Another link to Russian money...

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Some of the coverage is pretty pathetic

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good op-ed: "Don’t forget Trump’s cruelty is routine"

Spoiler

President Trump has a special animus toward immigrants, but the children of those crossing our borders are not the only vulnerable people in his sights. His administration is waging a less visible war on our nation’s poorest citizens, with the complicity of its Republican allies in Congress.

We can welcome the fact that the president’s family-separation policy aroused the indignation of a broad empathetic majority. This instinct for compassion and justice should also be mobilized to stop efforts that will, quite literally, take food off the tables of Americans who already have great difficulty making ends meet.

And can we please stop using the word “populist” to describe a crowd that would slash programs for the neediest to help finance a deficit-inflating tax giveaway that disproportionately benefits the very wealthiest people in our country? There is nothing populist about transferring money and power to those who already have a great deal of both.

The latest attacks on programs that have long commanded bipartisan support came last week when the House voted 213 to 211 for a farm bill that would impose new work requirements on recipients of food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

But SNAP already includes work requirements. Most recipients who don’t receive disability payments and are in their prime work years hold jobs of some kind or are between jobs. Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), estimates that the new rules and cuts “would eliminate or reduce food assistance for more than 1 million low-income households with more than 2 million people.”

Supporters of the bill tout its $1 billion a year for new job-placement and training initiatives. This looks like a big number, but it’s a fraction of what a serious national employment strategy would cost. The CBPP estimates that the funding amounts to under $30 per person per month for those who would need an employment program to keep receiving SNAP benefits. The work requirements are also poorly conceived; they would, for example, hurt those whose employers reduce their work hours.

No, this is not about “poverty-fighting,” as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan claimed. It’s about increasing poverty by throwing people off food stamps, one reason every House Democrat — they were joined by 20 Republicans — voted against the farm bill.

The Senate takes up its own farm bill this week with bipartisan food-stamp provisions that protect benefits and improve administration. What’s essential is resisting amendments that would try to match the House’s meanness.

The House vote came on the same day the administration released a massive government reorganization plan. Among other things, it would merge the Labor and Education departments (renamed the “Department of Education and the Workforce”) and push a variety of programs into the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS would get a new name, too, the “Department of Health and Public Welfare.”

Food stamps would shift from the Agriculture Department, which could deprive them of the political support they now enjoy from farm-state politicians. And the plan would create a “Council on Public Assistance” with the power to impose the administration’s beloved work requirements across programs, including food stamps and Medicaid.

In principle, reorganizing the federal government and finding ways to make it more efficient are actually reasonable objectives. There are good arguments for rethinking a structure built by accretion over decades. But as is its way, the Trump administration poisoned this effort from the start. It failed to engage in serious conversation with stakeholders (or the opposition party), and it put its ideological goals first.

It’s hard to escape the sense that this is about decimating help for the least fortunate. Given the demonization (and racialization) of the word “welfare,” the HHS rebranding exercise appears to be an attempt to delegitimize all social spending. (It’s unlikely this crowd wants to restore the dictionary definition of “welfare” as “well-being.”) The Council on Public Assistance looks like a power grab that deserves to be called the Council to Slash Public Assistance.

Oh, yes, and Republicans in Congress have opted in the past (in renaming the Committee on Education and Labor, for example) to displace the hallowed word “labor” with “workforce,” which reduces employees to a factor of production.

The family-separation policy dramatized in an especially egregious way the routine cruelty of this administration. It highlighted an approach that targets those who have the fewest resources to defend their interests and their rights. The fight against callousness must be extended across a much broader front.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

I hope Maxine Waters has security because this falls just a little short of asking some racist wacko to hurt her

 

[JMarie]

11 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I hope Maxine Waters has security because this falls just a little short of asking some racist wacko to hurt her

 

No other president would ever call a coworker "an extraordinarily low IQ person."  And yes, because of the balance of power, Waters and Trump are coworkers.

[CTRLZero]

42 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I hope Maxine Waters has security because this falls just a little short of asking some racist wacko to hurt her

This is really scary.  "She has just called for harm to supporters..."  This is practically condoning violence between the MAGA and non-Trump supporters.  When will sanity be restored.  Not before some horrible things happen, I bet.

[AmazonGrace]

He's so easy to charm with flattery.

 

[Howl]

On 6/24/2018 at 1:40 PM, fraurosena said:

Because of course they are.

Russians Flock to Trump Properties to Give Birth to U.S. Citizens

Another link to Russian money...

This has been going on in California for quite some time; wealthy Chinese women come over to give birth.  There was a raid in January on so called "maternity hotels". 

FEDS RAID 'MATERNITY HOTELS' WHERE TOURISTS PAID UP TO $80K TO GIVE BIRTH IN U.S.

Being in the US on a tourist visa is not a crime and giving birth in the US is not a crime.  However, lying about why you are coming to the US when you apply for a visa IS a crime.  

Quote

Birth tourism has been somewhat popular in the United States, with court papers cited in the NBC article estimating that 40,000 children every year were born to women who are in the U.S. on a travel visa. 

I got side tracked.  I came over to note that it's been hours/days since  Rudy G has shared a nonsensical tweet with the American public.  What's he up to?

[Cartmann99]

5 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

This is really scary.  "She has just called for harm to supporters..."  This is practically condoning violence between the MAGA and non-Trump supporters.  When will sanity be restored.  Not before some horrible things happen, I bet.

The United States Capitol Police are the ones who have the responsibility of keeping members of Congress safe. I'm sure they are thrilled that Trump is making their jobs harder by stirring up his nutters again.