Trump 36: We Shall Overcome

[MarblesMom]

8 hours ago, BernRul said:

I DO think that Trump believes he can or should be able to override the constitution,

Me thinks Trump has been The Boss™ for so many years - calling the shots, making things happen/not happen - that he actually believes corporate business protocol works in Federal government.  

Changing a corporate policy on a whim is one thing, changing the Constitution is quite another.

I wish he had someone on his staff with a spine to set him straight.

[Audrey2]

15 minutes ago, MarblesMom said:

I wish he had someone on his staff with a spine to set him straight.

A spine? That is what must be handed over when one gets their White House or Capitol identification badge, if you're a Republican.

[fraurosena]

Even if there was someone with a spine there who was willing to set him straight, what makes you think that narcissistic megalomaniac would ever listen?

[AmazonGrace]

I think everyone with spine gets fired eventually. 

(Disclaimer: getting fired is not proof of spine)

[Drala]

I think there are any number of people who try to set the orange toddler straight on issues like the 14th amendment.  Paul Ryan is on record to that effect--and just mentioning the obvious in public got a swift slap-down from the Dumpster.  There's method to his madness.  He knows he can't eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order, and he's purposely being outrageous and provocative.  This conveniently puts the focus of conversation on immigration and takes attention away from pipe bombs, synagogue massacres, and racially-motivated murder.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘When I can, I tell the truth’: Trump pushes back against his peddling of falsehoods"

Spoiler

President Trump defended his proclivity to spread misleading statements and falsehoods, saying in a television interview Wednesday that he tells the truth when he can.

“Well, I try. I do try . . . and I always want to tell the truth,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News. “When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported last month that Trump had made more than 5,000 false or misleading claims in the first 601 days of his presidency — an average of 8.3 claims a day — and that the pace is picking up.

Since then, as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric in advance of the midterm elections, he has continued to mislead voters and invent facts.

He, for instance, said a middle-class tax cut would be passed by Nov. 1, even though Congress wasn’t in session and had no plans to reconvene before the elections.

He has repeatedly asserted that Republicans are more committed than Democrats to protecting people with preexisting health conditions, despite numerous past actions contrary to that claim.

And he has asserted that the United States is the only country to grant automatic citizenship to children born on its territory, despite the fact that more than 30 other nations have a similar “birthright citizenship” policies.

In the interview with ABC’s chief White House correspondent, Jonathan Karl, Trump also took issue with the media’s estimates of the sizes of caravans of Central American migrants slowly making their way toward the United States.

“You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it’s reported, actually,” Trump said. “I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size. And I’ll tell you, they look a lot bigger than people would think.”

Trump has often overstated the size of crowds he draws, starting with the first day of his presidency. At Trump’s direction, his then-press secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed that the crowd at his 2017 inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

I swear, he has more of a size fixation than any guy I've ever met.

[Drala]

I read somewhere that Trump supporters will admit he's an habitual liar, but that this character fault doesn't bother them because they like his ideas and policies.  If he uses falsehoods and misleading facts to sell and support a narrative they like, they just ignore the lies--even when they recognize the lies for what they are.      

[Audrey2]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump defended his proclivity to spread misleading statements and falsehoods, saying in a television interview Wednesday that he tells the truth when he can.

“Well, I try. I do try . . . and I always want to tell the truth,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News. “When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful.”

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported last month that Trump had made more than 5,000 false or misleading claims in the first 601 days of his presidency — an average of 8.3 claims a day — and that the pace is picking up.

Since then, as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric in advance of the midterm elections, he has continued to mislead voters and invent facts.

He, for instance, said a middle-class tax cut would be passed by Nov. 1, even though Congress wasn’t in session and had no plans to reconvene before the elections.

He has repeatedly asserted that Republicans are more committed than Democrats to protecting people with preexisting health conditions, despite numerous past actions contrary to that claim.

And he has asserted that the United States is the only country to grant automatic citizenship to children born on its territory, despite the fact that more than 30 other nations have a similar “birthright citizenship” policies.

In the interview with ABC’s chief White House correspondent, Jonathan Karl, Trump also took issue with the media’s estimates of the sizes of caravans of Central American migrants slowly making their way toward the United States.

“You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it’s reported, actually,” Trump said. “I’m pretty good at estimating crowd size. And I’ll tell you, they look a lot bigger than people would think.”

Trump has often overstated the size of crowds he draws, starting with the first day of his presidency. At Trump’s direction, his then-press secretary Sean Spicer falsely claimed that the crowd at his 2017 inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

I swear, he has more of a size fixation than any guy I've ever met.

One word- overcompensation. Based on "Little Mr. Mushroom" (thank you, Stormy), he must make up for a lot of shortcomings.

[GreyhoundFan]

From Dana Milbank: "Guess what? Trump can totally rewrite the Constitution."

Spoiler

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t. . . . Now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

— President Trump, explaining this week that he could unilaterally end the Constitution’s protection of birthright citizenship

Jan. 1, 2019 (BREITBART) — President Trump, under his newly discovered authority to rewrite the citizenship requirements of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, today issued an order restricting U.S. citizenship to the following individuals and groups:

“My family”

“Kellyanne Conway (but not George!)”

“Sarah Sanders (dad okay, too)”

“Kanye West”

“Russians living at Trump properties”

“Residents of Trump Tower”

“Lou Dobbs”

“Sean Hannity”

“Tucker Carlson”

“Steve Doocy”

“Steve King”

“Stephen Miller”

After signing the order, the president told reporters: “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment to restrict citizenship to friends and family. Guess what? You don’t. Now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”

Jan. 8, 2019 (BREITBART) — A federal district court judge struck down President Trump’s orders today awarding citizenship only to friends and family, saying, “You can’t run the country like it’s a Manhattan co-op.”

Trump, saying the ruling was invalid because one of the judge’s ancestors came from Mexico, responded by issuing a new executive order eliminating Article III of the Constitution and replacing the federal judiciary with Judge Jeanine Pirro.

“Guess what?” Trump told reporters after the signing. “I can do it just with an executive order.”

Jan. 15, 2019 (BREITBART) — President Trump, using his expanding authority to revise the Constitution by executive action, ordered the summary deportation of all 11 million illegal immigrants by next week — just in time to keep his promise to have them out of the country within two years of taking office.

After the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit to stop without-cause searches of every American home, business and vehicle, Trump issued a second order requiring the imprisonment without charges of all ACLU lawyers, as well as Robert S. Mueller III, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, Omarosa Manigault Newman and “NFL players who present a risk of kneeling.”

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment to do unreasonable searches and seizures and to eliminate due process,” Trump told reporters as he boarded Marine One for a campaign event. “Guess what? You don’t.”

Jan. 22, 2019 (BREITBART) — President Trump issued a new executive memorandum today ordering the Justice Department to immediately end all civil and criminal prosecutions, “particularly any that mention ‘collusion,’ ‘taxes’ and ‘emoluments.’ ” The order redirects 100 percent of Justice Department resources toward investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Top department officials resigned, saying the order violated the constitutional requirement that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But acting attorney general Lindsey O. Graham said Trump’s order overrode Article II, Section III of the Constitution.

“Guess what?” Graham said. “He can do it.”

Jan. 29, 2019 (BREITBART) — President Trump, responding to media criticism of his recent executive orders, issued a memorandum revising the First Amendment to abolish all media, allowing only: Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Alex Jones, Gab and QAnon.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Failing New York Times, responded by saying, “[CENSORED].”

Feb. 5, 2019 (BREITBART) — President Trump, responding to a call by Democrats for his impeachment, issued an executive order rescinding the Constitution’s Article II impeachment provisions , ending the terms of all current members of Congress and replacing them with the Mar-a-Lago board of directors.

“Guess what?” said departing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who had served one month on the job. “I agree with the president.”

Feb. 12, 2019 (BREITBART) — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have not been seen in public since criticizing President Trump’s expanding use of executive orders to revise the Constitution.

The disappearances are possibly related to the president’s latest executive order decreeing that anybody who criticizes his executive orders is no longer covered by the Eighth Amendment’s protections against “cruel and unusual” punishment.

Tom Cotton, who identified himself as “acting defense secretary,” said Mattis and the chiefs were on “an extended visit” to Guantanamo Bay.

Feb. 19, 2019 (BREITBART) — Lady Liberty herself, in a rare Oval Office appearance, made an emotional appeal to President Trump to stop “rewriting the Constitution by fiat.”

Lady Liberty, known widely from French romantic paintings and a statue in New York Harbor, made little progress. Trump, according to two people familiar with the meeting, told her: “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

“Guess what?” Trump told Fox News shortly after a tearful Lady Liberty departed the West Wing. “When you’re a star, they let you do that.”

I know it's sarcastic, but, sadly, I can see some of it coming true.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Our stuntman in chief"

Spoiler

With everything on the line for his party next Tuesday, President Trump has turned into our stuntman in chief.

He has rolled out one phantasmagoric idea after another in recent days, some of them as offensive as they are preposterous.

There is the tax cut of 10 percent for the middle class that he promised will be “put in” this week by a Congress that is not in session. It was a proposal that no one on Capitol Hill or even his own White House staff had heard about before he blurted it out.

There is his declaration that he will rewrite the Constitution by executive order, revoking birthright citizenship, which no one with any serious understanding of the law believes is within his power.

He has also done something he can do: ordering 5,200 troops to the border, to deal with the supposed national emergency posed by a caravan of destitute migrants. (By Wednesday afternoon, he had upped the ante to a possible 15,000 troops.) Those asylum seekers are hundreds of miles away and will not arrive for weeks, if they get there at all, given that their numbers are reported to have shrunken by half.

On Wednesday morning, the president trumpeted that plan again:

It is not the first time Trump has tried a version of this particular stunt.

When Trump sent National Guard troops to the border last spring, something both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had done under similar circumstances, members of the finest military in the world ended up doing things like feeding the Border Patrol’s horses, shoveling manure from their stalls and fixing flat tires.

This time, he is taking the unprecedented step of deploying active-duty personnel, in roughly the same numbers as we have serving in Iraq, along with military helicopters and giant spools of razor wire. Trump claims they will be “waiting for” the migrants at the border, implying that U.S. military will be apprehending them as they arrive. But the troops will actually be there in a support role for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, given that the 19th-century Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits the U.S. military from direct participation in law enforcement. In other words, they will be limited to doing what the Guard was already doing.

The bottom line is this: Trump is using American troops as props, a gesture both wasteful and disrespectful.

We’ve heard often that Trump’s supporters take him seriously, not literally. But as he spews these ridiculous ideas to stir up his base just before an election, it seems reasonable to wonder: How exactly does he regard them? As gullible, or just indifferent to the truth?

 

[onekidanddone]

As seen at Jammin Java Vienna, Virginia 

 

[Ozlsn]

On 11/1/2018 at 1:14 PM, Rachel333 said:

That doesn't make sense though since Trump was a citizen so his kids would have been citizens no matter where they were born. Trump's father, on the other hand, was born in the US to two recent immigrant parents.

So I guess it comes back to how far back do you go? If you were born to a naturalized citizen you're probably good, but if you were born to someone with only birthright citizenship are you a citizen? I'm sure Trump is planning on granfathering (heh) himself in, but if you take it to the illogical extreme he's looking very shaky.

[CTRLZero]

On 10/31/2018 at 9:14 PM, Rachel333 said:

That doesn't make sense though since Trump was a citizen so his kids would have been citizens no matter where they were born. Trump's father, on the other hand, was born in the US to two recent immigrant parents.

I think that we (the collective we) would like to urgently remind Trump that his family are/were fairly recent immigrants, used the system (legally or not), and he should be more compassionate.  But Trump and compassion in the same sentence?  Not going to happen. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

On 11/1/2018 at 6:52 AM, Drala said:

He knows he can't eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order, and he's purposely being outrageous and provocative.  This conveniently puts the focus of conversation on immigration and takes attention away from pipe bombs, synagogue massacres, and racially-motivated murder.  

Bingo!  It's what he's done, over and over, since Day 1.  Why are we ever surprised?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump floats a new absurdity to support his latest hate narrative"

Spoiler

Donald Trump has now served up a grand total of 6,420 lies and misleading statements as president, according to the newly updated tally from The Post’s indefatigable fact-checking team. The dishonesty has escalated dramatically in the run-up to the midterms, and virtually all of the lies and distortions are ones Trump has repeated before, in some cases dozens of times.

But every now and then, Trump debuts a new species of absurdity, one that isn’t quite a “lie,” one that can’t be fact-checked in the form in which Trump offered it — yet at the same time, it’s so deeply absurd and so heinously destructive to common understandings that it seems to deserve a category all its own.

That’s what happened at a rally in Missouri on Thursday night. Trump once again called for an end to birthright citizenship (which is granted to all people born in the United States) for the children of undocumented immigrants. He said this:

The Democrats want to continue giving automatic birthright citizenship to every child born to an illegal alien. Even if they’ve been on our soil for a mere matter of seconds. Hundreds of thousands of children born to illegal immigrants are made automatic citizens of the United States every year, because of this crazy lunatic policy that we can end.

And they’re all made instantly eligible for every privilege and benefit of American citizenship. All of you, you get nothing more than they do. They’re full citizens. And it’s costing us many, many billions of dollars a year.

The part of this quote that generated attention was his description of “this crazy lunatic policy,” because he was actually talking about a constitutional right. But there’s something just as pernicious embedded in this riff: the idea that all these children of undocumented immigrants are “costing us many, many billions of dollars a year.”

What’s particularly awful about this claim is that he’s talking about U.S. citizens. And he’s asking his supporters to see those U.S. citizens as being in direct competition with them for the country’s spoils and resources.

Trump, of course, regularly makes variations on this claim about undocumented immigrants. He inflates them into a uniformly menacing and destructive presence with lies about how they bring outsize crime and pose an economic threat to Americans. But in this case, he’s applying the claim to their U.S. citizen children — they cost us, and so they should not be granted the privileges of American citizenship that you are granted, because this deprives you of what is yours.

When Trump bellowed out that “we can end” this “policy,” the rally crowd roared with approval.

This whole framing casts the children of undocumented immigrants as undeserving of American citizenship purely on the basis of the background of their parents. That, of course, is the whole point of the push to end birthright citizenship — and precisely why it runs so flagrantly counter to the spirit and values at the core of this provision of our constitution.

As Garrett Epps puts it, at the heart of birthright citizenship is a fundamental conception of civic equality that ideally extends it to all Americans born here, regardless of race or the heritage of their parents. Ending it, Epps notes, “would create a shadow population of American-born people who have no state, no legal protection, and no real rights that the government is bound to respect.” Given who their parents are, for Trump, this is a feature, not a bug. Trump is casting this entire class of people as undeserving of citizenship, as only deserving of this shadow status.

Underlying this push to end birthright citizenship is a form of virulent xenophobic ethno-nationalism that seeks to roll back the country’s evolving racial and ethnic mix, something Trump confirmed with his private “s—hole countries” comment. But Trump can’t say this out loud. Thus he is now applying to these U.S. citizens the same argument he has long applied to undocumented immigrants: They, too, are a menace to your economic well-being. They will take what’s yours.

Daniel Dale, who tracks Trump’s lies assiduously, tells me he first heard this “billions” claim this week, as Trump “has begun talking about birthright citizenship in a sustained manner for the first time as president.” The complication here is: How do you even check such a claim? Do you tally up all the taxpayer-funded services these U.S. citizens avail themselves of? Do you factor in the contributions of their undocumented parents? What about these children’s contributions when they become adults?

Can you even fact-check this claim in the first place without inevitably validating Trump’s ugly underlying premise — that this whole class of U.S. citizens is somehow less entitled to the benefits of being American because of who their parents are?

As Dale put it to me, it’s a “constant challenge for fact checkers” to figure out how to handle “extremely vague claims for which he has not provided any evidence.” The uncheckability of Trumpisms such as these are arguably the whole point of them, since, at bottom, Trump is telling a story, one that he knows will thrill his supporters, one that is supposed to remain beyond the reach of rational scrutiny.

We don’t have the right language for the Trump era

In all kinds of ways, Trump is testing our ability to find the right language to describe our current moment. We struggle to capture the relentless lying about even the most trivial, easily verifiable matters; the nonstop racism and xenophobia and misogyny; the all-around deep rot of bad faith that’s eating away at just about everything Trump says and at so much of what his administration does.

Our language perpetually comes up short. On this final round of campaign demagoguery, with Trump hyping destitute migrants hundreds of miles away into a national emergency, and even sending in troops as props to sustain this monstrous fiction, we keep hearing that Trump is “fearmongering” or “stoking division” or “exploiting racial and cultural tensions.” This blog has used these terms regularly. But they feel, in some sense, deeply inadequate.

So I propose the term “hate narratives.” If you have a better one, I’m all ears.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Cue the tantrum: "Judge denies Trump’s request for stay in emoluments case"

Spoiler

A federal judge on Friday denied President Trump’s request to stay a lawsuit alleging he is in violation of the Constitution by doing business with foreign governments, a decision that paves the way for plaintiffs to seek information from his business as it relates to his D.C. hotel.

U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., denied the Justice Department’s request that he pause the case in order to allow a higher court to intervene. And he sharply questioned the president’s position that his business does not improperly accept gifts or payments — called emoluments — as defined by the Constitution.

By Trump’s analysis, Messitte wrote, the term emoluments is the subject of such “substantial grounds of disagreement” that payments his business received from foreign governments could not qualify. The judge did not agree: “The Court finds this a dubious proposition.”

Messitte ordered the plaintiffs, the attorneys general for D.C. and Maryland, to submit a schedule for discovery — the process of producing evidence for the case — within 20 days.That decision is subject to appeal.

The judge previously limited discovery to information related to the president’s D.C. hotel.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.

This is the second civil case in which Trump’s business is now subject to discovery, after Trump agreed Tuesday to produce portions of his calendar from 2007 and 2008 in a defamation lawsuit brought by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos.

Trump still owns his company, although he says he has stepped back from day-to-day control.

The Trump Organization has held several large events paid for by foreign governments at Trump’s D.C. hotel and reported about $150,000 in what it called “foreign profits” last year.

The Constitution bars federal officials from taking emoluments from any “King, Prince, or Foreign State.” The Founding Fathers’ intent had been to stop U.S. ambassadors overseas — emissaries from a new, poor, fragile country — from being bought off by jewels or payments from wealthy European states.

 

[Howl]

It just occurred to me today that Trump's spirit animal is a dick pic. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s border deployments could cost $200 million by year-end"

Spoiler

The total price of President Trump’s military deployment to the border, including the cost of National Guard forces that have been there since April, could climb well above $200 million by the end of 2018 and grow significantly if the deployments continue into next year, according to analyst estimates and Pentagon figures.

The deployment of as many as 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border — potentially equal in size to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — occurs as the budgetary largesse the military has enjoyed since Trump took office looks set to come to an end. 

Although the costs of the border deployments will be a tiny slice of a $716 billion annual defense budget, they arrive as the Trump administration is calling on the Pentagon to cut unnecessary expenditures. The White House recently ordered the Pentagon to slash next year’s budget for the military by about $33 billion in response to the largest increase in the federal deficit in six years.

Veterans and Democratic lawmakers have complained that Trump is wasting military dollars in a politically motivated stunt ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, at a time when the Pentagon budget is under pressure.

“Instead of working in a bipartisan manner to make comprehensive, common-sense, and humane reforms to our immigration system, the President continues to turn to politically-motivated fear mongering and uses [Department of Defense] resources and personnel as a means to drive his troubling anti-immigration agenda,” more than 100 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Nov. 1.

Retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the deployment as “wasteful” in a message on Twitter and said Marines and soldiers were already overstretched. 

Administration officials have defended the deployment. Mattis said this week that the military doesn’t do stunts. The commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, argued that the deployment is necessary to “effectively and safely” handle the possible arrival of as many as 7,000 migrants walking toward the border in caravans from Central America.

But military planning documents, dated Oct. 27 and published by Newsweek, predicted that only 20 percent of the migrants, or about 1,400 at the higher end of estimates, were likely to complete the journey to the border, raising questions about the size of the deployment.  

“The military has a lot of things that it needs to be doing these days,” said Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon official and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Looking at estimates of the size of the caravan, you could ask the question as to whether this is the most appropriate use of U.S. active-duty forces.” 

It isn’t clear how many U.S. troops will end up on the U.S.-Mexico border.

About 2,000 forces from the National Guard are already there, operating under an order Trump issued in April. Northern Command has said more than 7,000 additional active-duty troops will join them in Arizona, Texas and California. Trump said this week that he will be deploying between 10,000 and 15,000 troops but didn’t make clear whether those figures included the National Guard. 

The cost of the National Guard deployment from April 10 through Sept. 30 amounted to $103 million, according to Pentagon figures. The Defense Department expects the Guard deployment to cost an additional $308 million through the end of next September, including the last quarter of 2018, as long as the operations continue apace. 

Active-duty forces, which Trump deployed under his recent order, generally are less expensive because they don’t require additional pay or benefits. 

Travis Sharp, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments, estimated that the cost of deploying 8,000 active-duty troops through mid-December in addition to the Guard would amount to $40 million to $50 million. Should the administration deploy 15,000 active-duty troops, as Trump suggested, the estimated cost would rise to as much as $110 million, Sharp said. 

The forces could end up staying past mid-December, depending on the status of the caravans, which by most accounts are still weeks away from the border. An extension of the deployment could result in costs in excess of those estimates. 

As of Saturday morning, about 3,500 active-duty service members have been deployed as a part of the mission, dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot, said Maj. Mark Lazane, a Northern Command spokesman. They include about 2,250 in Texas, 1,100 in California and 170 in Arizona, he said.

Photographs taken Friday at the port of entry in Hidalgo, Tex., show U.S. soldiers stringing concertina wire while working with CBP. The soldiers are wearing standard camouflage uniforms along with body armor and helmets, and appear unarmed.

Lazane said soldiers who do not typically use firearms in their day-to-day jobs while stateside will continue to work without them, though Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, the chief of Northern Command, has the authority to change that if desired.

Democrats have complained that in addition to paying for the border deployments, the Defense Department internally allocated $7.5 million to advanced planning for a 37-mile barrier along the side of a military bombing range in Arizona that abuts the border. Democratic lawmakers said the barrier alone could cost as much as $450 million. 

Mattis offered a safety justification for the barrier in testimony to Congress earlier this year, suggesting that any migrants crossing the border through the range could end up hurt. Critics have said the project amounts to a move by the president to build part of the border wall he promised on the campaign trail by tapping military resources. 

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan said last week that the White House had instructed the Pentagon to prepare a $700 billion budget for 2020 — about 4.5 percent less than the $733 billion the department had planned.

Thomas Spoehr, a retired Army lieutenant general and director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, said many of the units deploying to the border are fulfilling duties approximate to their wartime missions and could end up with good training from the field. He said the expenditure would be marginal in terms of the overall American defense budget. 

“The military needs every dollar it can get. Having said that, this is not in the scheme of things a huge thing,” Spoehr said. “It probably will pass almost unnoticed in terms of the budget.”

 

[Cartmann99]

I got nothing.

Edited to add: Okay, I do have something. I went over to read this story at CBN, and the ad after the story is about a "top surgeon" and "flushing out your bowels". Rufus does have a sense of humor! 

[thoughtful]

How obnoxious, and how weak. "We can't go back?" The slogan may as well be "You voted for this shit in 2016, now you're stuck with it" (or possibly, "Without Republicans, your daughter will never play Carnegie Hall").

 

[Cartmann99]

*sighs*

 

[smittykins]

I've actually seen a Facebook meme saying "On November 4, we turn the clocks back.  On November 6th, we take our country back."

Take it back?  You already have it! 

[Cartmann99]

I guess Tomi Lahren and Alex Jones were busy.

 

[AmazonGrace]