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    Trump's Card

    The latest pack of lies from the White House. It's taken their collective brains more than a week to come up with this feeble rubbish.

    "It is interesting how many news outlets reported that this activity [the alleged wiretapping] was taking place during the 2016 election cycle and now are wondering where the proof is. It is many of the same outlets in this room that talked about the activities that were going on back then." (clarification added)
    Really? This was being reported during the 2016 Presidential campaign, was it? Here's one person who seems to have missed all of that:

    "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
    tweeted the President on 4.3.2017. A bunch of 8 year olds could do better than this.

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      Trump's Card

      I mean, in some vague sense it was. Surveillance activity around the Trump campaign was indeed reported during the election. And that's probably what Trump thought he was referring to, by way of Breitbart. But in almost every particular, Trump's tweet did not match the reporting. Obama didn't (couldn't) order it. It wasn't targeted at Trump, and it almost certainly didn't involve an actual wiretap in Trump Tower.

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        Trump's Card

        I think we're saying pretty much the same thing, GY, perhaps the main difference between us being that you're prepared to be more charitable towards him than I am. I'd suggest that it's very difficult to construe the meaning given by Spicer yesterday from Trump's original tweets, more so when their initial response was to insist on a formal investigation rather than seek to clarify what was tweeted. Either Trump writes stuff like this deliberately, or he's so reckless with the truth that he cares nothing for the consequences.

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          Trump's Card

          Oh, I'm not being generous. We're seeing a consistent pattern, of which this is just one manifestation. Trump runs his mouth off at four in the morning based on something on Fox or Breitbart. Because he's an idiot, he's usually got the wrong end of the stick on top of whatever inaccuracies/distortions there are in the source material. The next day his staff have to scramble to make sense of what he says without making him look like the idiot blowhard he is. In the process they usually end up doing something ridiculous like calling for a Congressional investigation of something the president can just demand. And then the press goes crazy for the next cycle.

          Trump absolutely should be held accountable for his words. He's already caused multiple diplomatic incidents by mouthing off ignorantly and is crippling an already logjammed Congress. But when people go "where's the evidence", they're kind of missing the point. The real question is "No. Stop blithering. What do you actually mean by the words that are spilling out of your mouth?" The press has got to stop chasing after every inanity he produces and pin him down to an actual statement he means.

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            Trump's Card

            Basically, this guy has the right idea.

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              Trump's Card

              What's everyone's read on the Trumpcare thing that's on offer? Particularly after yesterday's horrific CBO report.

              Is there any chance that it will pass? My feeling is that there's too much opposition from pretty much everyone.

              But if it fails to pass, is there going to be any negative blowback? Either on the Republicans who pushed it, like Ryan and McConnell and Trump; or on the ones who might lead the resistance - Senators from Medicaid expansion states, or Conservative True Believers who'll be disrupting the Trump/Ryan agenda?

              At the moment it feels like it could be a spectacular disaster for pretty much the entire Republican party, but I'm worried that I'm over optimistic and everyone will forget it by the 2018 mid-terms.

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                Trump's Card

                I'm not optimistic at all that it (or at least something largely like it) will fail to pass. So far Republicans have been all talk and no trousers when it comes to Trump, and this bill actually came from the GOP leadership. Is the Freedom Caucus really going to oppose an Obamacare repeal bill?

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                  Trump's Card

                  I go in waves, thinking that a version will pass, or that it will end up completely screwed.

                  Part of me wonders whether Paul Ryan is actually a bit machiavellian, and has deliberately set it up to fail with opposition from both Republican "centrists" and conservatives, so that everyone who resists it will have some cover, and they can get away without actually destroying the insurance market despite having "tried" to repeal and replace.

                  Whatever happens, it appears to be an astonishingly bad piece of legislation, even by the standards one has come to expect. And the fact that 10% of the pages of it are dedicated to lottery winners tells you how serious they are.

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                    Trump's Card

                    Sorry, is that last sentence a string of typos?

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                      Trump's Card

                      I don't think so. 10% of the pages of the American Heath Care Act are spent on what to do with lottery winners on Medicaid

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                        Trump's Card

                        Part of me wonders whether Paul Ryan is actually a bit machiavellian, and has deliberately set it up to fail with opposition from both Republican "centrists" and conservatives, so that everyone who resists it will have some cover, and they can get away without actually destroying the insurance market despite having "tried" to repeal and replace.
                        But what's the endgame for Ryan here if that's his plan? I mean, he has basically three policy objectives (on top of self aggrandisement) . Cut taxes for the rich, block grant Medicaid and deregulate the insurance market, primarily by allowsng sales across state lines. How does this bill failing advance any of that agenda?

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                          Trump's Card

                          I'm not convinced that Ryan actually cares about the second two items on your list.

                          He can achieve the first better by remaining in the majority for longer, and bringing in tax cuts for the rich that Trump and Senate will agree to. (Corporation tax, estate tax, capital gains, and so on)

                          And he can do that by pushing "repeal and replace" in such a way that doesn't get passed. Because if 24 million people lose their insurance, everyone else ends up with worse coverage through deregulated plans, and old people end up paying 10 times what they used to, then the Republicans aren't going to be staying in power in 2020 - which is the key election for redistricting for the next decade.

                          If they want to stay in power they can't blow up US healthcare. But if they don't want to lose the base they have to at least have tried something after 8 years of telling us they'll "Repeal and Replace".

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                            Trump's Card

                            Breitbart going after Ryan with both barrels within hours of the CBO report being released strikes me as significant







                            I also think it is worth remembering that Trump is not personally invested in tax cuts the way the Kochs and Mercers of the word are, as he hasn't paid taxes for yonks.

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                              Trump's Card

                              I'm not convinced that Ryan actually cares about the second two items on your list.
                              Block granting Medicaid has been in basically every budget proposal and healthcare reform plan Ryan has ever been involved with. It's also basically the only meaningful approach they have to cut the cost of healthcare to the federal government that isn't explicitly providing worse healthcare.

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                                Trump's Card

                                Surely Ryan only cares about block granting medicaid as a means to tax cuts for the rich, rather than as an end in itself?

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                                  Trump's Card

                                  He also cares about as a means to give more power to state legislatures controlled by the right, but even GOP governors are increasingly seeing that as a two-edged sword.

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                                    Trump's Card

                                    Surely Ryan only cares about block granting medicaid as a means to tax cuts for the rich, rather than as an end in itself?
                                    In the sense that everything is in service to that ultimate goal, sure. But it's one of his key policy objectives for reducing the liability side of the balance sheet. He'd trade away lots of other stuff (and indeed has, in the AHCA) to keep block granting, because he knows it will kill Medicaid as a federal programme in the long run.

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                                      Trump's Card

                                      Carrying on with block grants - they're in this proposal, but is there any way they'd qualify under reconciliation? I'd have thought that would be a complete change of the Medicaid regulations, and thus utterly unpermissible.

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                                        Trump's Card

                                        I'm the wrong person to ask, as I don't know the details of the reconciliation rule, though as a Senate rule I imagine the interpretation is basically in the hands of the majority.

                                        Anyway, here's Ryan in his own words, talking to Hugh Hewitt:
                                        This is so much bigger, by orders of magnitude, than welfare reform. We are de-federalising an entitlement, block granting it back to the states, and capping its growth rate. That's never been done before.
                                        Block granting Medicaid is, to a very large degree, the prize for Ryan and his fellow travellers.

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                                          Trump's Card

                                          The more I think about it, the more obvious it is that you're right. Creating block grants that can then be frozen and thus devalue in real terms - and presumably eventually wither away completely - is a way to reduce a massive chunk of non-military US spending. And it could be that Randian fetishists like Ryan actually care about reducing the scope of the US government spending rather than just cutting taxes for the rich.

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                                            Trump's Card

                                            I'm not sure it's that they care about it rather than the taxes (it's probably a bit of a spectrum in practice), so much as Ryan is smart enough to realise that in the long run reducing the scope of government is the surest way* to reduce taxes on the rich.

                                            * I mean, in the conservative worldview, not taking into account cyclical revolts against Gilded Age excess.

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                                              Trump's Card

                                              There's loads of opposition to this though from conservatives, because it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Can sociopathy become culturally normal?

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                                                Trump's Card

                                                You did see Trump get elected president, right?

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                                                  Trump's Card

                                                  There seem to be more opponents just worried about constituents losing coverage than "freedom" types.

                                                  Keep the coverage, cut the taxes, stick it on the nations debt?

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                                                    Trump's Card

                                                    Rachel Maddow says msnbc have the Trump tax returns.

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