SLATE article: "Trump is Weaker Than He Looks"

[Jacob Boehme]

Found a well written piece on SLATE.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/donald_trump_is_unpopular_and_so_is_the_gop_agenda.html

Excerpt: Intoxicated and emboldened by their near-miraculous victory, Republicans are rushing into the new year with a divisive and unpopular agenda, led by a divisive and unpopular president. Indeed, with no apparent plans for increasing manufacturing jobs or improving veterans’ health care, Trump shows few signs of delivering on his substantive promises. In all likelihood, he’ll offer rhetoric and scapegoats and stunts, while delivering little in the way of tangible gains. And all of this will exist against a backdrop of corruption and influence-peddling, as Trump refuses to disentangle himself or his children from their opaque and sprawling web of business interests.

[malthaussen]

1. I find that improbable.

But fractions of zero are indistinguishable from zero.

-- Mal

[cilla4progress]

2. I'm seeing this as an opportunity

To demonstrate the far superiority of not only the Obamas, but Democrats. To show a clear contrast between the failing dead views of the white predominant past, to the new multicultural future. To show how important strong unions are, taxes on the wealthy so they can pay back this country that sustained them, universal health care, strong supported schools, peace abroad including standing up to dicatators around the world. How popular these ideas are and how cherished as American values. What we are REALLY made of, despite our flaws.

This is OUR chance to take our country back. To think deeply about what it means, what we care about, how hard we will fight for it.

Silk purse from a sow's ear. It's all we can do!

[MountainFool]

11. you're forgetting two things ....

1) the media is not news, but entertainment. they don't care about the truth,
2) the voters are profoundly ignorant.

The GOP will simply assert that any failures will be the Dem's fault and the press won't bother to correct them.

E.g. how many times has Obama been blamed for Congress not getting things done? When the GOP voted to block anything he endorsed?

[lastlib]

15. One correction:

the media is not news, but entertainment.

It's not entertainment, it's propaganda DISGUISED as entertainment! Mental Morphine. Designed to weaken our critical thinking capacity, making us easier to manipulate.

[MountainFool]

18. true enough ...

Notice too that conflicts of interest often require two to dance. I.e. NBC is also choosing to not divest themselves of the Trump while in theory objectively covering his administration. Forget about the corrupt Trump for a minute ... who in NBC thought this was acceptable?

[Nitram]

19. The Democratic Party is the loser and the underdog. The media loves a comeback story.

[not fooled]

23. Re: 'puke voters

Yes, they are profoundly ignorant: they've been getting shafted since Ronnie Raygun started busting unions in earnest and inflicting trickle down, and yet they keep voting for these predators.

The 'pukes have it dialed in by this point: rob their idiot voters blind while deflecting the blame elsewhere, onto libruls, unions, environmentalists, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. The wrecked media aids and abets by keeping the ignorance and propaganda going.

Their moronic followers not only haven't figured it out yet but are running even faster toward the cliff's edge.

[tblue37]

29. Example: More LA Repubs blame Obama than Bush for botched federal Katrina response.

And 44% don't know whom to blame. They either blame Dems for GOP screwups, or they just throw up their hands and say they have no idea who is at fault.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/obama-hurricane-katrina_n_3790612.html

A third of Louisiana Republicans Blame Obama for Hurricane Katrina Response Under Bush

A large number of Louisiana Republicans think President Barack Obama is to blame for the federal government’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a new Public Policy Polling survey released Wednesday — despite the fact that the storm occurred three years before he took office.

The Democratic-leaning polling firm, which provided its results to Talking Points Memo, found that 29 percent of Louisiana Republicans said Obama was responsible for the Katrina response. Twenty-eight percent put the blame on President George W. Bush, whose administration did in fact oversee the federal response to Katrina. Nearly half (44 percent) of the Louisiana Republicans polled didn’t know who to blame.

SNIP

[MountainFool]

35. wow

I hadn't heard that one. I wonder if there's a collection of such things ... top-10 list of stupid things voters believe.

[calimary]

36. Welcome to DU, MountainFool!

Man, I was just having that argument with my best friend. "So disappointed in Obama," she says. It's all his fault. He was woefully unprepared for the job. Blah-blah-blah... and I, too, remind her that if it weren't for the fucking GOP CONgress doing its damnedest to foil everything he tried, obstruct everything he proposed, insulted him, attacked him, criticized everything about him except his emails (although I'm sure they would have tried that eventually, too), he'd have done even better than it's widely-acknowledged he's already done. And she won't hear of it. "Oh, no, calimary, it's his fault for this and his fault for that. It's been hard on my family." She won't hear of the problems with the ACA being of such greater magnitude and mess in red states, where CON governors refuse to take any of the federal funding and stand in the way and posture and strut about how their side is so much more moral and "American."

We're back to the era of the massive manifestation of GOP entitlement. They feel they're entitled to rule. And that's that. That's this personality complex that side of the aisle seems to have. I've sensed it from almost everybody I can think of who has an "R" by their name. They're better. They're entitled to govern. It's their right, their purview, their territory, their exclusive jurisdiction. (No wonder that whole "build the wall" thing was so popular on that side of the aisle!) It's THEIR way or bust. Because. Because it's their entitlement. I often refer to it as the World's Biggest Entitlement Program. Not Social Security. Not Medicare. Not food stamps. It's the GOP's purported "divine" right to rule.

[J_William_Ryan]

3. Not that it matters

"Republicans are rushing into the new year with a divisive and unpopular agenda, led by a divisive and unpopular president.

And Republicans are going to force that divisive and unpopular agenda on the American against their will, in spite of the fact that their agenda is failed and wrongheaded.

[Cha]

4. Yep, that pretty well sums it up how I see it.

Thank you for this, JB

SLATE article: "Trump is Weaker Than He Looks"

Found a well written piece on SLATE.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/donald_trump_is_unpopular_and_so_is_the_gop_agenda.html

Excerpt: Intoxicated and emboldened by their near-miraculous victory, Republicans are rushing into the new year with a divisive and unpopular agenda, led by a divisive and unpopular president. Indeed, with no apparent plans for increasing manufacturing jobs or improving veterans’ health care, Trump shows few signs of delivering on his substantive promises. In all likelihood, he’ll offer rhetoric and scapegoats and stunts, while delivering little in the way of tangible gains. And all of this will exist against a backdrop of corruption and influence-peddling, as Trump refuses to disentangle himself or his children from their opaque and sprawling web of business interests.

[Wellstone ruled]

5. We as Democrats have

the opportunity to put a stake in the heart of the GOP once and for all. Fear we are about to miss it. Where the heck is our leadership? Talk about needing change. Our Nation is in a Dynamic Change,with all new job creation in market areas of more than 100k population and in even more jobs created in larger population areas. We are now a Urban Society,and we will have to provide assistance to those left behind in the Rural areas. Face it,it is a fact of life and progress of humanity. And the Rural areas who still cling to the false premise that the good old days are just around the corner,will wake up once this in coming group of thieves finish their handy work.

Trump just simply does not have the Moxie to handle what he stepped into. So much damage will be inflicted on our Institutions of Government that it will take decades to repair. What is really of importance is,where will the Republicans strike first with our Military. You know it is in the works. Might is Right and Screw you if you object,which has always been the GOP model.

[msongs]

22. hillary is still hiding away while we deal with the wreckage. not any leadership from her nt

[world wide wally]

6. One trick you bet on that Republicans will use:

They will cut taxes for the wealthy and pass infrastructure bills to create jobs. Then as the $16 trillion deficit, that they are soooo concerned about , balloons, they will point to the jobs created and say that deficits don't matter

[wryter2000]

7. Until a Democrat is in the White House again

And then deficits will be the biggest issue facing the country.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. I rather doubt they will pass infrastructure bills to create jobs.

These are people who assume that everyone can get a good job that pays well and has benefits and are completely ignorant of the realities of the workplace. They haven't a clue what the world of retail work is like, just to name one part of the economy. They do not understand the cyclical nature of the business cycle, other than sometimes they have lower profits than others, and sometimes they lay off a lot of workers to protect their high income.

They will simply point to the unemployed and say, "See? I told you they were lazy!"

[world wide wally]

10. They also like nice airports, safer roads for their sport cars, and being able to ship their goods

to their big box stores around the country.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

26. If they actually like those things,

why have they consistently voted down money for infrastructure projects?

They don't give a flying fuck about these things. As for airports, they're flying around the country on their cute little corporate jets, so the terminal buildings can fall down completely and they won't care. I do suspect that things like airport runways are somewhat better maintained on average than the public roads, but I simply don't know.

[world wide wally]

28. They opposed them to not allow Obama to succeed. It would have created jobs and

Spurred the economy and we can't have a Democrat doing that. Can we?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

32. You are right about their motivation back in 2009,

but now the economy is much better, and I believe they really don't care at all about the infrastructure. Let alone job creation. It's not as though when they had a poor economy they did job-creation things. They really believe anyone who doesn't have a job only has himself or herself to blame.

So do not look to them to do a single thing that would provide one new job, other perhaps than working in the prison systems.

My take anyway.

[world wide wally]

33. Think about who the infrastructure really serves.

It is a convenience for average people, but a necessity for business. What they will most certainly do is make all highways toll roads to discourage average citizens from using them as much as possible. Of course, trucks will get a major break on the cost to soothe the pain for corporations.
Not so sure about airplane terminals, but the runways will be great. Bridges along trucking routes will be safe, but not so much on back roads.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

37. On one hand you are absolutely right.

On the other, they've reduced funding for everything, including the infrastructure. I'm not sure they fully understand that they need safe bridges -- actually bridges are a huge problem. The collapse of I25 in Minneapolis was nearly 10 years ago now, and I don't believe bridges have been noticeably strengthened since then. Bridges are catastrophes waiting to happen. It's my impression that they think they are somehow magically protected from the deliberate neglect of the infrastructure.

After all, things like the bridge collapse in Minneapolis don't happen every day. Heck, it's been almost a decade so how bad can things be? But things can be very bad. I'm sure citizens of the Roman Empire didn't fully appreciate how bad things were until it was too late. Which took hundreds of years.

Similarly, this country is past its peak. My personal take is that the peak was around 1965, but historians a couple of centuries from now will be better placed to figure the date. Clearly (at least it's clear to me) by the time Ronald Reagan became President we'd crested the hill and had started the very long, slow, but inevitable downward slide. Most people can't begin to recognize this, because our country still has the money and the wherewithal to maintain bases around the world, to finance new jets, send soldiers off to innumerable endless wars. But make no mistake. We are in the sunset of the American Empire.

One of the ways you can tell is the crumbling infrastructure. Not just roads or airports, but hospitals, schools, the general social contract.

Shall we discuss schools? For a couple of decades now the prevailing meme is that public schools are terrible, they are failing, teachers are incompetent. While I'm not about to go into those things in detail, consider this: If our schools are so awful, why are so many of our colleges and universities so hard to get into? It's not because most places are taken by foreign students. Nope. There are more extremely well-qualified American students competing with each other. Yes, there are bad schools. There are ones who graduate students who can barely read or write. But that's connected to race, class, and the money invested in those public schools.

Anyway, if you're right (meaning I'm wrong) about the infrastructure thing, I'll be glad. Because investing in the infrastructure might actually lead to investing in other things, like public schools. But I'm not holding my breath.

[NewJeffCT]

20. the infrastructure bill will be HUGE tax cuts

to corporations to privatize infrastructure:

Interstate Highway 95, sponsored by ExxonMobil and Wal-Mart, now with every rest stop featuring an ExxonMobil gas station and a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market; The Boeing Newark Airport, now featuring only planes made by Boeing;

[Wellstone ruled]

27. Sorry to say,there are not going to be any new jobs.

This whole Infrastructure bill from the GOP is just a Wealth Transfer from the US Treasury to Mega Corporations with existing Government Contracts. And it will be done via a Tax Code Changes and outright hand outs.

And yes,the National Debt will take a major hit. Looks like 1.1 to 2 Trillion in Bonds will be coming to market via Goldman-Saches to cover this baby. And the bonds will be snapped up by 1%ers after their major Tax Breaks kick in. Voodoo Economics.

[wryter2000]

8. Remember when Bush spent his "capital" touring the country about privatizing Social Security?

After he was "re-elected" in 2014. It didn't go over so well.

[Cryptoad]

12. but that was back when the Media

kept the Prez feet to the Grind stone!

[not fooled]

24. And when the 'pukes hadn't consolidated their power

with control of both houses of congress and soon the judiciary for a generation.

This is gonna be worse.

[wryter2000]

34. They never did with him

They let him get away with whatever idiotic thing entered his head. Remember even the NYT issued a mea culpa for missing the story that the build up to the Iraq war was bogus.

The media have been doing their "both sides do it" since Raygun or before.

[0rganism]

13. until we get our next 9/11 incident

which blue state or city will be the target?
how many will die?
which civil liberties will we be required to sacrifice on the altar of His Greatness this time around?
what will be the punishment for dissent?

stay tuned for the next exciting episode of "We Didn't Win The Popular Vote But You'll End Up Supporting Us Anyway"

[MineralMan]

14. Beware of weak men who are attended by people

with power. Such men are more dangerous than you can imagine. I assure you that Trump does not care about increasing jobs or any of those other things. They won't even enter his tiny brain. He has other things he wants to do, and he has followers and allies who will help him do them.

The goal is to disrupt and tear down our very system of government and install something that allows the government to have almost unlimited power. That is the goal of the dominionist religious right, who will be represented in the administration by Pence, and in the Congress by a large bloc of fundamentalists.

The goal is to replace our democratic system of government with something far less democratic. That has been the goal of the Christian Right for a long, long time, and in Trump, they may have someone who will sign bills that set those wheels in motion.

Beware of what is going on while Trump plays the fool.

[HeartachesNhangovers]

16. I think Donald Trump expects to spend his

term tweeting and having photo ops. He's going to leave the work to the staffers, take credit for whatever he thinks looks good and blame others for whatever he thinks goes wrong. The Republicans can get their way as long as they can convince Donald Trump that it makes him look good - I don't think he really cares about the details as long as he stays in the spotlight.

[NewJeffCT]

21. he's also going to negotiate the "big" deals

like spending $8 million to save 800 Carrier jobs, or claiming that every corporation that hires people is because of Trump.

[Buns_of_Fire]

17. It all sounds reasonable. BUT...

But we shouldn’t exaggerate the state of play. Neither Trump nor congressional Republicans are as strong as they appear. Both enter the field with severe disadvantages, and both risk overplaying the hands that they have. Democrats are on the defensive, but the conditions are there for pushback and resurgence. (emphasis mine)

The conditions may be there, but sending A Strongly-Worded Letter doesn't really count as "pushback". Not when the Party of Satan has developed a real taste for blood.

[treestar]

25. Yes make sure the Democrats

especially in the Senate, know we have their backs. No more of this constantly ragging on them.

[MFM008]

30. and distraction

every time something needed distracting under smirky chimp they pulled a red/orange alert.

[USALiberal]

31. Stupidity elected him. No one uses critical thinking any more.