Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[Florestan]

Am talking about where the line of adding countries to NATO should end - it has to end somewhere.

I'd like you talking about where Russia's adding countries or regions of countries should end  --- it has to end somewhere.

Let me tell you something in all earnest: Russia's complaining about NATO's expanding to include the Baltic States, Poland or Romania is exactly and precisely like an inveterate rapist's complaining that his victims have been put under 24/7 police protection.

[bwv 1080]

I'd like you talking about where Russia's adding countries or regions of countries should end  --- it has to end somewhere.

Let me tell you something in all earnest: Russia's complaining about NATO's expanding to include the Baltic States, Poland or Romania is exactly and precisely like an inveterate rapist's complaining that his victims have been put under 24/7 police protection.

But its not in our interest to police beyond a certain line, just like we are not going to war with China, for Tibetan independence the US should draw a sphere around the former SSRs.  Its not our battle to fight, the rapist analogy is not correct - we are not the world's policeman

[drogulus]

So do you think Georgia and Ukraine should be admitted to NATO, giving them a more or less unconditional guarantee that the US will go to war on their behalf?  What is our national interest in these former Soviet Socialist Republics?  If you ask me, the line for NATO should be drawn where it currently stands - the pre Molotov-Robbentrop USSR boundaries (ie the former USSR less the Baltic states).  Putin, while a bad actor, not sitting around planning on how he is going to set up a chain of dominoes that results in Russian tanks rolling through Germany (anyway Russia is a poor country - on par with Mexico and no long term existential threat to Western Europe)

    NATO can decide who is in it and we will help decide. Poland is in. Should we kick them out? The choice is that or defend them, correct?

    Putin does war on the cheap. Yes, he's good at it, but the fact is Russia is weak militarily. We could raise the price of their adventures. I think we will at some point.

[bwv 1080]

    NATO can decide who is in it and we will help decide. Poland is in. Should we kick them out? The choice is that or defend them, correct?

    Putin does war on the cheap. Yes, he's good at it, but the fact is Russia is weak militarily. We could raise the price of their adventures. I think we will at some point.

The US is NATO and we decide whose security it is in our national interest to guarantee

[drogulus]

     It doesn't occur to me that I can not want to be the policeman and then, as if by magic, I'm not. It never will occur to me. A world wide alliance system just grew on me while I was asleep? I'm its founder and most powerful member, and the chief target of its enemies but that's OK, Belgium, it's your turn.

The US is NATO and we decide whose security it is in our national interest to guarantee

     It's not a free choice, though. We can't just decide to be wrong because the choice is ours. We are responsible to our allies and that restricts our choices. Defining national security down is not something we should be doing. Could we shrink the defensive perimeter to where nothing Putin does would cross it? No, we could not be that free and be in NATO.

[drogulus]

     

     Hey everybody, lighten up! Here's my "Nunes taking a dump" impression.

[bwv 1080]

     It doesn't occur to me that I can not want to be the policeman and then, as if by magic, I'm not. It never will occur to me. A world wide alliance system just grew on me while I was asleep? I'm its founder and most powerful member, and the chief target of its enemies but that's OK, Belgium, it's your turn.

     It's not a free choice, though. We can't just decide to be wrong because the choice is ours. We are responsible to our allies and that restricts our choices. Defining national security down is not something we should be doing. Could we shrink the defensive perimeter to where nothing Putin does would cross it? No, we could not be that free and be in NATO.

Alliances change all the time as situations change.  The US gov is ultimately responsible to its citizens, not its allies.  We needed to defend and rebuild Western Europe after WW2, we successfully did this and they no longer need our support.  Countries make allies because of a shared national interest, not sone perceived moral obligation

[BasilValentine]

Trump has begun inciting violence, using his usual method: Claiming the "other side" (in the guise of Antifa, no less) is planning to commit the offense he himself is perpetrating by the very fact of bringing the subject up in front of delusional fanatics. Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. What Trump said was that if the Democrats take back Congress, there will be violence. This man really should be in jail.

[drogulus]

Alliances change all the time as situations change.  The US gov is ultimately responsible to its citizens, not its allies.  We needed to defend and rebuild Western Europe after WW2, we successfully did this and they no longer need our support.  Countries make allies because of a shared national interest, not sone perceived moral obligation

     The U.S. government is responsible to its citizens through its alliances. Europe needs our help, our national interests are still shared and we still need their support, too.

[drogulus]

Trump has begun inciting violence, using his usual method: Claiming the "other side" (in the guise of Antifa, no less) is planning to commit the offense he himself is perpetrating by the very fact of bringing the subject up in front of delusional fanatics. Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. What Trump said was that if the Democrats take back Congress, there will be violence. This man really should be in jail.

     Dictators are famous for creating a permanent state of emergency to consolidate their power. Trump has come up with a new twist by starting a new mini-crisis before the last one has faded, so they overlap. He'll keep it up because he has to.

     A long pause might cause people to think. Which Hate Week is this? Is it the last one or the next one?

[Karl Henning]

     Dictators are famous for creating a permanent state of emergency to consolidate their power.

Those who selectively ignore history are full willing to repeat it, if they are the beneficiaries.

[drogulus]

     As the labor share of income shrinks demand is suppressed and output falls. Output can be pushed up by high demand or decay to a lower level. By tracking estimates of potential and how they split off over time you can get a view of what was lost. Here's a slice from a few years ago:

     

     Recovery strength is a matter of when you stop the process and how hard you brake. It's something you intend to do, not something you forget to do. No one forgot what economists said about the original recovery package and what would be needed after. The estimates were that the ARA was about half the size of what the package needed to be. Some economists worried that when the emergency was over the shrinksters in Congress would retaliate against Obama for his role in the recovery and prevent it from becoming the kind of success it could have achieved with their help. Mitch had a different idea, and his prevailed. He didn't even try to disguise his intention to punish the country to get the Kenyan Socialist.

     United States Lost Output Clock

     This is a useful clock. It tells you the amount of damage that can't be undone. We won't get the lost output back. What we will do, if we decide to, is reverse the downward slope of potential. We can bend it up, not just down. The shrinksters who say no want you to think we can't raise output because of something about how government doesn't work, but then hope you don't notice that they are relying on the efficacy of government to implement their own lossy program. It works for them, but not for you.

[Karl Henning]

Sturdy uptick in broken dream production, it looks.

[Karl Henning]

A LOT, I am guessing.

Republicans rejected McCain and embraced Trump. What does that say about them?

[Karl Henning]

A LOT, I am guessing.

Republicans rejected McCain and embraced Trump. What does that say about them?

I was one of those naive souls who imagined that Donald Trump's presidential campaign was finished on July 18, 2015, when he called Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) a "loser," denied that he was a war hero and said, "I like people who weren't captured." Mocking a man who had spent more than five years in a hellish POW camp, I figured, was the third rail of American politics, particular when the mocker spent his own Vietnam War years partying at nightclubs.

How wrong I was. How little I understood what were then my fellow Republicans. It turns out that, far from being repulsed by Trump's attack on their previous standard-bearer, many Republicans rejoiced in it. They are even happier, these fanatical partisans, now that the president could not bring himself to hide his antipathy toward one of America's greatest heroes even on his deathbed.

Trump expressed the right sentiments but about the wrong people. "Such respect for a brave man!" he tweeted.

He was talking not about McCain but about the felon Paul Manafort, who displayed his bravery not by resisting torture but by resisting the urge to "rat" on Trump.

[Karl Henning]

[...] many Republicans, far from being appalled at Trump's inexcusable mistreatment of [McCain], cheer him on. One reader posted this comment on Facebook in response to my tribute to McCain: "McSTAIN was a thorn in the side of conservatism for over 30 years, a true SWAMP CREATURE, if ever there was one! GOOD RIDDANCE!!!"

[drogulus]

     China Is Treating Islam Like a Mental Illness

     Just imagine what it would mean if the President of the U.S. took a stand against the persecution of religious minorities. Trump can't go after Russia because TrumPutin is in the way, he can't go after China about the Uighers because his MuslimHate campaign is in the way.

[bwv 1080]

     China Is Treating Islam Like a Mental Illness
Just imagine what it would mean if the President of the U.S. took a stand against the persecution of religious minorities. Trump can't go after Russia because TrumPutin is in the way, he can't go after China about the Uighers because his MuslimHate campaign is in the way.

Its not a mental illness?  What exactly would it 'mean' if the president 'took a stand' on this?  We 'took a stand' on the slaughter of Muslims by Buddhists in Burma, did anything change?  Is there a single example you can point to where a US president 'taking a stand' had a meaningful impact on religious persecution?

[drogulus]

Its not a mental illness?  What exactly would it 'mean' if the president 'took a stand' on this?  We 'took a stand' on the slaughter of Muslims by Buddhists in Burma, did anything change?  Is there a single example you can point to where a US president 'taking a stand' had a meaningful impact on religious persecution?

     I don't know what it would mean. I would like to find out. The Soviet Union was vulnerable to pressure on dissidents and Jews. I have a hunch Putin is vulnerable to NATO pressure or it wouldn't be so important to him that the pressure be turned off. Or, give him NATO dismemberment because we can't think of a war it prevented. I can't think of one.

[Karl Henning]

     Just imagine what it would mean if the President of the U.S. took a stand against the persecution of religious minorities.

You mean, rather than "taking a stand" on the "persecution" of the institutionalized religious majority?  Hard to imagine, with this POTUS.