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***Official***President Donald Trump (1 Viewer)

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Bruce Dickinson said:
Politics threads may continue, but they need to be about issues and not just people railing on each other.  He made a plea asking we seek to understand each other, and that people with different world views can see the same information radically different.

Dodds said he would stay out of political threads in the future.  Said he was "quasi-fishing" in them.  Did not get specific about that term or his actions beyond that.

I told him I hope he changes his mind and returns to political threads because he's a creative and unconventional thinker and his sincere participation would have a lot to offer. 
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Thanks.  I can see the bolded is going great so far.

 
timschochet said:
Maybe, maybe not. I've already made the point that they can't be effective obstructionists, because they simply don't have the power that the GOP did during most of Obama's presidency.

But also Chuck Schumer has indicated that he's willing to work with Trump on infrastructure. That's more than Mitch McConnell ever offered Obama.
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Schumer & Trump are old friends & Trump is a longtime supporter of Schumer. 

 
TobiasFunke said:
Any chance I can get a summary of weekend developments in the Dodds crackdown?  I assume the existence of this thread means he relented somewhat?
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Honestly please do it in another thread, maybe the moderation thread, just leave it alone here. The snipping here in this new thread has been bad too. If you think about criticizing another poster personally just put down the keyboard. I'm sure it's inevitable that this is forgotten here in a couple months too.

Let's try to act like adults and police ourselves.

 
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Trump nominates Vincent Viola, chairman of high-frequency trading firm Virtu, owner of the Florida Panthers, and multi-billionaire as Secretary of the Army.  

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Honestly please do it in another thread, maybe the moderation thread, just leave it alone here. The snipping here in this new thread has been bad too. If you think about criticizing another poster personally just put down the keyboard. I'm sure it's inevitable that this is forgotten here in a couple months too.

Let's try to act like adults and police ourselves.
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Whatever.  Screw you, buddy.

 
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TobiasFunke said:
Thanks.  I can see the bolded is going great so far.
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You're welcome.  That was an abridged version of the events - I left out, among other things, the part where the Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the Finals after going 73-9 in the regular season - so if people come along and say "but X also happened" they are probably right.  I was trying to boil it down to the relevant stuff for going forward in political threads.

ETA: might want to avoid bringing up Guy Fieri again.  Seems trivial, but people are willing to die on Flavortown Hill.

 
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jon_mx said:
You were talking exclusively about pinning the Iraq War on W.  I have no doubt Gore would have taking a different route.  But that does not dispute the fact the Clinton laid the ground work for the Iraq War including using WMDs as justification and that most Democrat senators support the Iraq resolution when they controlled the Senate.  
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I'm so glad, we can't even hold the President who actually did the action responsible anymore.  The projection on the right these days is just unbelievable.  

 
Sammy3469 said:
I'm so glad, we can't even hold the President who actually did the action responsible anymore.  The projection on the right these days is just unbelievable.  
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You jump in at the end of a discussion and seem to lack any context of the point.  But thanks.  :rolleyes: 

 
jon_mx said:
You were talking exclusively about pinning the Iraq War on W.  I have no doubt Gore would have taking a different route.  But that does not dispute the fact the Clinton laid the ground work for the Iraq War including using WMDs as justification and that most Democrat senators support the Iraq resolution when they controlled the Senate.  
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The original point was who is in the big chair when the #### hits the fan matters. The biggest example in my adult life is W being the guy on 9/11.

If Gore was in there the world would be dramatically different. That was the point.

We now have a thin skinned, guy with no experience, who tweets.

Not to spilt hairs but in the Senate vote you keep referring to those who voted did so allowing the US to use force to protect the US against Iraq. I think many were critical of the way he went about doing that as we built up to and went to war. 

 
I think what Jon Mx is saying has some merit. I have always believed that, had Al Gore won the election in 2000, we would have still ended up invading Iraq after 9/11. 

The management of Iraq afterwards might have been very different however. 

 
https://www.ft.com/content/5d9df7d4-c3c3-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a @Henry Ford

Without realising it, the US electorate appears to have opened the gates to a new cold war in which America’s hand will be far less strong than it was first time round. One of the reasons the US won the original one was its skill at breaking China away from the Soviet block. Detente between Richard Nixon’s US and Mao Zedong’s China in 1972 cemented the Sino-Soviet split and weakened Moscow’s global appeal. Mr Trump plans to do the reverse.

His strong rhetoric against China is mirrored only by his warm overtures to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It remains to be seen what strategic gain Mr Trump will derive from doing deals with Russia — a country that is stoking illiberal democracy in Europe and that played a role in helping Mr Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. But Mr Trump’s antagonism towards China is a gamble without an upside.

Avoiding a US-China conflict will take Nixonian dexterity. Mr Trump is no Nixon. For all his abuse of domestic law, Nixon was a devout student of global affairs who grasped the geopolitical chessboard. Mr Trump is a 70-year-old neophyte with no interest in rectifying the gaps in his knowledge. He spurns the presidential daily intelligence briefings because they are too dull. Nor do any of Mr Trump’s advisers resemble Henry Kissinger, who was chief architect of the One China policy that Mr Trump is threatening to rip up. Mr Trump’s senior appointees reflect both his anti-China and pro-Russia intentions.
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I couldn't agree with that Financial Times piece more, and it is maddening to me that so many conservatives and Trump supporters are so flippant about changing our relationship with China. Do you guys really not understand the possible consequences of this? 

 
timschochet said:
I couldn't agree with that Financial Times piece more, and it is maddening to me that so many conservatives and Trump supporters are so flippant about changing our relationship with China. Do you guys really not understand the possible consequences of this? 
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No, most of them don't.

 
Henry Ford said:
No, most of them don't.
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Then the only thing we can hope for is that China will realize how much it could hurt them, and they'll make some paper concessions on trade to Trump, in order to make Trump look like a hero (which is all he seems to care about).  It will be nauseating to have the Trump fans smirk and say see they told us so but at least the business of the world will be able to continue unabated. 

 
timschochet said:
Maybe, maybe not. I've already made the point that they can't be effective obstructionists, because they simply don't have the power that the GOP did during most of Obama's presidency.

But also Chuck Schumer has indicated that he's willing to work with Trump on infrastructure. That's more than Mitch McConnell ever offered Obama.
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I assume you are referring to filibuster reform here. It's true that Democrats have less leverage but the reforms only changed the rules for cabinet positions and federal court appointments (not the Supreme Court). In general I don't think filibusters should be used for those anyway, and historically they rarely were. 

Democrats will still have plenty of opportunity to block and delay policy as they choose. 

 
timschochet said:
Then the only thing we can hope for is that China will realize how much it could hurt them, and they'll make some paper concessions on trade to Trump, in order to make Trump look like a hero (which is all he seems to care about).  It will be nauseating to have the Trump fans smirk and say see they told us so but at least the business of the world will be able to continue unabated. 
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You can't actually believe that's going to happen while he's treating China the way he is.

 
Arsenal of Doom said:
I assume you are referring to filibuster reform here. It's true that Democrats have less leverage but the reforms only changed the rules for cabinet positions and federal court appointments (not the Supreme Court). In general I don't think filibusters should be used for those anyway, and historically they rarely were. 

Democrats will still have plenty of opportunity to block and delay policy as they choose. 
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It's not just that. 

In 2009 the gerrymandering rules that been set up by Tom Delay were already in place, and that gave the GOP a lot of confidence that in the 2010 they would take back the majority in the House and keep it. That in turn gave both McConnell and Boehner a lot more power even then- including the power to unite the opposition to Obama.

Today the Dems don't have that confidence. They are looking at a situation where in 2018 they might even lose seats, especially if Trump appears to do a good job. The Dems are in disarray and the left (Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison) are attempting to take over the party. 

 
Henry Ford said:
You can't actually believe that's going to happen while he's treating China the way he is.
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No I don't. I hope so,but I doubt it. Face is very important to China- perhaps more important to them than any other country on Earth. Trump is embarrassing them. I don't think this ends well. 

 
Jackstraw said:
A full third of the stimulous was tax cuts which Republicans wanted. Obama care was modeled after plans Republicans developed including Romney care. This isn't even an opinion. These are facts.   
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Nope.  Republicans were critical of the stimulus for numerous reasons and outlined several things they wanted changed including tax cuts targeted at middle class instead of 'tax cuts' targeted at people who did not even pay taxes.  When the GOP presented Obama with their suggestions he laughed them off and told them "I won". 

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/01/23/obama-to-gop-i-won/

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-05/obama-s-self-serving-fictions-exposed

The story the MSM spins is quite different than the truth.

 
beavers said:
Their understanding of anything other than "Lock her up" is minimal.
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I don't think that's entirely true, but I do think there's a general blind spot in understanding how foreign policy works, and "getting" the fact that the world is full of very powerful actors who act in their own states' interests and don't "fear" the United States.  There's this general belief that other powerful countries are just falling all over themselves to make the U.S. happy and don't want to do anything to upset us, and that just isn't how the world works.

 
timschochet said:
I couldn't agree with that Financial Times piece more, and it is maddening to me that so many conservatives and Trump supporters are so flippant about changing our relationship with China. Do you guys really not understand the possible consequences of this? 
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The other thing they fail to realize is Putin will flip on him at a moment's notice once he gets whatever he really wants from him.  These guys (Ross, Tillerson, Trump) seem to think their charm and great ideas were why Putin does what he does to support them.  Putin will flip on them at some point, and everyone on the right will say "no one could have seen that coming".  

 
timschochet said:
It's not just that. 

In 2009 the gerrymandering rules that been set up by Tom Delay were already in place, and that gave the GOP a lot of confidence that in the 2010 they would take back the majority in the House and keep it. That in turn gave both McConnell and Boehner a lot more power even then- including the power to unite the opposition to Obama.

Today the Dems don't have that confidence. They are looking at a situation where in 2018 they might even lose seats, especially if Trump appears to do a good job. The Dems are in disarray and the left (Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison) are attempting to take over the party. 
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This last sentence is something I see repeated a lot, and I think it's way over the top.  From around February 2016 through a month ago people would have said the exact same thing about the GOP except in far more severe terms.  How many magazine cover stories were dedicated to the demise of the party?

The Dems are somewhat rudderless right now, but they have plenty of time to work it out. And they're coming off an election in which they won the popular vote for president by almost 3 million votes and gained seats in both the Senate and the House.  They got victimized by a combination of strategic errors and terrible luck in the presidential election, as is usually the case in upset victories in any arena, but if our country and our basic framework for government remains in place over the next few years (a bigger if then we want to acknowledge, IMO) they'll be just fine.  Especially since, as was the case with the two factions of the GOP over the last six years, they'll be united by a common enemy.

They'll probably lose some Senate seats in 2018 just because of the quirk of the cycle/map, but I bet they make decent gains everywhere else, including important state races. Opposition parties who don't control the White House or Congress always do very well at midterm elections, even with presidents who aren't nearly as widely despised as Trump (see 1994, 2006, 2010).  And the Senate gains will come two years later, probably.

 
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timschochet said:
I couldn't agree with that Financial Times piece more, and it is maddening to me that so many conservatives and Trump supporters are so flippant about changing our relationship with China. Do you guys really not understand the possible consequences of this? 
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They're not conservatives.

 
TobiasFunke said:
This last sentence is something I see repeated a lot, and I think it's way over the top.  From around February 2016 through a month ago people would have said the exact same thing about the GOP except in far more severe terms.  How many magazine cover stories were dedicated to the demise of the party?

The Dems are somewhat rudderless right now, but they have plenty of time to work it out. And they're coming off an election in which they won the popular vote for president by almost 3 million votes and gained seats in both the Senate and the House.  They got victimized by a combination of strategic errors and terrible luck in the presidential election, as is usually the case in upset victories, but if our country and our basic framework for government remains in place over the next few years (a bigger if then we want to acknowledge, IMO) they'll be just fine. 

They'll probably lose some Senate seats in 2018 just because of the quirk of the cycle/map, but I bet they make decent gains everywhere else, including important state races. Opposition parties who don't control the White House or Congress always do very well at midterm elections, even with presidents who aren't nearly as widely despised as Trump (see 1994, 2006, 2010).  And the Senate gains will come two years later, probably.
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Those magazine stories (and me) were wrong, because we didn't pay enough attention to Republicans taking control of the state governorships and legislatures. If the Dems are going to rebound from this they'll have to do the same thing. Hopefully they will.

 
timschochet said:
Those magazine stories (and me) were wrong, because we didn't pay enough attention to Republicans taking control of the state governorships and legislatures. If the Dems are going to rebound from this they'll have to do the same thing. Hopefully they will.
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They will have to change philosophy then.

 
timschochet said:
It's not just that. 

In 2009 the gerrymandering rules that been set up by Tom Delay were already in place, and that gave the GOP a lot of confidence that in the 2010 they would take back the majority in the House and keep it. That in turn gave both McConnell and Boehner a lot more power even then- including the power to unite the opposition to Obama.

Today the Dems don't have that confidence. They are looking at a situation where in 2018 they might even lose seats, especially if Trump appears to do a good job. The Dems are in disarray and the left (Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison) are attempting to take over the party. 
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In 2009 and 2010 the Republicans were under fire from the tea party right, which really spurred the degree of obstructionism we saw. I'm not sure exactly how things are going to play out on the Dem side. There is some good research that suggests Democrat voters don't want their representatives to be obstructionist, where Republican voters do.  I think it will come down to an issue by issue thing, which is the way it really should work as opposed to just shutting down anything coming from the other side. 

As I said in an earlier post, there will obviously be tax cuts and business tax reform. Democrats will (and should) try to help curtail the amount of upper bracket tax reduction but some form will get through. We need business tax reform and the Republican ideas are mostly okay there, Democrats should work with them on that.

Battle lines will be drawn on any kind of entitlement reform and I suspect the Supreme Court nomination will be a long process. 

 
timschochet said:
Those magazine stories (and me) were wrong, because we didn't pay enough attention to Republicans taking control of the state governorships and legislatures. If the Dems are going to rebound from this they'll have to do the same thing. Hopefully they will.
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In this sense it's possible that the awfulness in NC is actually doing the Dems a favor in the future, from a national perspective.  They need to be pushing that story front and center alongside whatever disastrous crap Trump gets into over the next two years.

 
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