If Bernie had won in 2016, he would naturally be expected to run in 2020 — so he’s not too old. If he does win (sounds do-o-able) and he turns daft by the end we can always tell him he’s in his second term and can’t run again and he wont know the difference.
Suppose the US had no unions at all in private business — instead of today’s 6%. At that point would it occur to someone (progressive) that something had to be done to remedy that — you know; remedy one business (ownership) using market power to squelch a competing
business (labor) a felony on a state by as-many-progressive-states-as-we-can-get-going basis …
… especially since the labor business is the sole economic bargaining power of the mass of people and also their only political organization.
An important sales point is that while management has a First Amendment right to “educate” workers against unions — no law can forbid that — union organizers do not have equal freedom to proselytize because employers forbid that (by firing joiners). The law has to mandate employers not forbid that.
For 94% of us we are down to 0% unions. It’s virtually the same thing — but 0% seems like a good sales point; that imagery might actually MAKE THE POINT (somewhere in progressive brains).
The institution of the executive office of the President has been dealt a serious blow in terms general expectations of what constitutes leadership and nature public communications from that office.
My own history in observing the President in their public demeanor and communcations only goes back to Ike (and his opponent Adlai Stevenson) in seeing his speeches on TV and in newsreels. But I became more aware during the Nixon / Kennedy debates, the Johnson, Nixon Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations.
And irrespective of which side of the isle I favored (always liberals) there was never any doubt or concern in my mind that the President was on solid ground in their duty or ability to lead the nation on some form of rational foundations — except that I did become quite concerned with Bush II’s capacity to lead and make rational decisions.
But I’ve never expected that the public could possibly elect an outright blatant and habitual liar, locker-room adolescent mentality type who was as blatantly racist as Trump.
I never expected the public to support a person who, during both the Republican primary campaign and the general election campaign who clearly demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of the nature of U.S. constitutional government, it’s political system (check/balances) or the nature of the role of U.S. in the global scheme of things.
I never expected the public to elect or support a person who demonstrated a repeated lack rational debate capacity on the public stage in formal debates or in their other informal communications in speeches and statements to the press.
I hoped that if actually elected as President that the demeanor and leadership style and communications logic and rational basis would change to become more like what the public had come to expect in their President, even if totally against all my political preferences.
My hopes were shattered, splat like dog-shit on a rainy day on the sidewalk (or more like ….) on day one of his inauguration when he claimed that the attendance was greater than any other Presidential Inauguration, and repeated this claim more than once when it was quite obvious that it was paltry by comparison even to Obama’s.
So he made no change from his prior behavior or blatant lies even after he was inaugurated. In the weeks since he has continued in the same manner and fashion of behavior as during his campaigns. He lies blatantly, boasts repeatedly about stuff that has no basis for a boast what-so-ever… as if he’s making up some reality nobody else on the globe can see or recognize.
He has demonstrated a serious lack of comprehension or ability to comprehend, and an apparent inability in reading comprehension of anything more than a paragraph in bold type at the top of a page. It’s as if translating what’s on the written page into comprehension of what it says taxes his brain so much that it’s overwhelming to him.
OK, so he’s not the brightest candle n the room… more like the dimmest one in fact, so dim that he make Bush II look like an Einstein. But that shouldn’t impede his ability to reason or use rational foundations for his statements and justifications, especially with a close family staff on hand to front for him, help him through his comprehension problem. Furthermore he has a reasonably competent cabinet — even if they’re the extreme of the right wing conservatism, they appear for the most part to be able to understand political issues and deal with them (whether successfully or to their satisfaction or not is another issue) — so they should be able to help him formulate rational responses to reasonable questions posed by the press.
I watched his behavior sitting with Chancellor Merkel and was appalled by his actions and responses to her… the head of state of a major ally… even the most important of our allies perhaps — the most prosperous European nation, the most economically powerful in Europe by far, the nation with the most clout in the EU, a major foreign trade nation for the U.S.
Was that behavior typical of a U.S. President? Was it expected of any U.S. President? Was it appropriate for a U.S. President? Was it even remotely respectable for any U.S. politician much less the President?
I think the clear answer to all those questions is absolutely not. Does Trump even comprehend the nature and consequence of his own pubic behavior or does he just not care about any consequence of appearances and behavior?
But what is it about the U.S. voting public (nearly half of that public) that gives them the ability to have voted for a blatant in consummate serial liar? … recognizable and clear lies and not even little white lies.
Does this demean the office of the President? I think it does. Does it provide a new precedent for the nature of the office of the President? I don’t know yet, but I’m concerned that it does or will. And if it does then what does that mean for the nature of the U.S. form of government? What does it do to a democracy or the type of democracy we have had?
If the head of state can lie so blatantly and frequently about major things, both domestic and foreign, doesn’t that erode the public’s trust in it’s leadership; in government in general? And if that is the case then what provides the public with the foundation and basis to follow its leaders and laws if leaders are not trustworthy?
Look, I don’t have to like the President or his picks for his cabinet or Judicial appointments, and I can even vehemently oppose them (which in this case i do of course), but I still have to have trust that what leaders tell me is true or at lease a reasonable facsimile of truth. If I can’t believe a leader of our nation or can’t believe what his cabinet members are telling me, then how do I trust whether what I’m told is actually the way things are or might be expected to become.
I do admit that I’m already concerned about this because Bush II’s administration led the nation to war over lies, while the entire fucking congress on both sides of the isle accepted the lie. So I have rational reason to wonder if I can trust what our gov’t is telling me, and with Trump being a blatant known and persistent public liar of the first order than my concerns are even more founded.
Did Bush II’s lying about the Iraq WMD’s actually make it possible for Trump to lie and that this is now ok for Presidents and Cabinet members to do? I recall the VN war rational… I lived it at the time and the lie then was the “domino effect” but we didn’t really have a way of knowing this was a lie at the time…we conjectured about it and there were two sides on the question, but it wasn’t until more became known about the back-ground of the war and other factors that we learned the domino effect was for public propaganda purposes.
So it’s not like I and most members of the public don’t know already that our gov’t lies to us about some things … Iran Contra comes to mind under Reagan, for example, and there are many more such behind the scenes lies that only come to light after the fact.
But what I’m referring to now is Trump’s continual lies about almost everything. and his apparent incomprehension of a political system of government and how it was designed to work. And this makes me concerned that the office of the executive in charge has been irreparably damaged and depreciated.to little more than the level of a barker on the carnival strip or the lowest common denominator of members of our House of representatives.
And those concerns lead me to be concerned about whether our gov’t can remain viable as a legitimate trust institution at all. And if that goes then we have a dictatorship or a state of virtual chaos;… take your pick.
Apparently the Republicans only believe in States’ Rights when the states want something the right wants.
Today they voted to deny Oregon the right to establish its own retirement system that would have given all workers access to a retirement plan similar to that for public employees.
This year’s Social Security Trustees Report seems to be late as usual.
But this is the LAST year that a gradual increase in the payroll tax can begin and still solve some of the less understood problems of the projected shortfall in SS funding: This is mostly that a gradual increase starting now preserves the Trust Fund at it’s current level… meaning the Congress doesn’t have to find the money to pay back it’s debt TO Social Security. The interest from that Trust Fund will keep the needed tax increase about 1% smaller than it otherwise will need to be. And the needed increase of one tenth of one percent per year will eliminate the projected “actuarial” shortfall entirely.. and that should eliminate the “sky is falling” argument of those who want to destroy Social Security.
Trouble is that neither the Left nor the Right are interested in actually solving the SS shortfall. The Right wants to kill Social Security by calling it welfare. The Left wants to kill Social Security by turning it into welfare.
After this year, SS can still be “saved” by the one tenth percent per year increase in the payroll tax, but will not have the advantages alluded to here. Because the Trust Fund is being drawn down, the needed tax rate to prevent an actual shortfall in about 2030 will rise fairly rapidly. If nothing is done, the tax rate would need to rise about 2% all at once in about 2030 or so. This would not be a real burden to people even at that, but they will see it as such… be told to see it as such… and the bad guys will seize the opportunity to cut benefits, raise the retirement age, and even “tax the rich” as the first step to turning it into welfare as we knew it and guaranteeing that event he honest rich — who currently are NOT burdened by SS – wiil be burdened by it and join the campaign against it.
Even raising the tax rate about 1 and a half percent now would solve the projected shortfall for the rest of the century. This solution is objected to by those who want to confuse you because it would leave a need for another “significant” tax raise in 2093. That raise would be about one half of one percent.. at a time when wages will be more than 100% higher than they are today. I think we can leave that problem to those who will face it. It’s not my favorite solution, but those who tell you we must “solve the SS problem once and for all” are hoping you are stupid enough to think they are saying something sensible.
I hadn’t been watching, but apparently the Supreme Court has been steadily reducing the Fifth Amendment to a mere game of words. You no longer have any protection whatsoever against being compelled to testify against yourself.
And that means whatever you say, or are claimed to have said, to the police WILL be used against you. And if you refuse to talk to them, that WILL be used against you in court as proof that you are guilty. After all, why would you refuse to talk unless you had something to hide.
Unfortunately, neither the Supreme Court…. or even the Obama administration… can even conceive a time might come when the government makes something illegal that an honest and decent person would think he was morally compelled to do.
For more on this “You Have the Right to Remain Innocent” by James Duane.
“Today [the Republicans] voted to deny Oregon the right to establish its own retirement system that would have given all workers access to a retirement plan similar to that for public employees.”
I cannot find the bill you’re talking about. Can you post the bill number?
heard it on the news. Oregon was not specifically mentioned, but Oregon is one of the states proposing a state-wide retirement system. I don’t have time to look it up. or the google skills.
If Bernie had won in 2016, he would naturally be expected to run in 2020 — so he’s not too old. If he does win (sounds do-o-able) and he turns daft by the end we can always tell him he’s in his second term and can’t run again and he wont know the difference.
Suppose the US had no unions at all in private business — instead of today’s 6%. At that point would it occur to someone (progressive) that something had to be done to remedy that — you know; remedy one business (ownership) using market power to squelch a competing
business (labor) a felony on a state by as-many-progressive-states-as-we-can-get-going basis …
… especially since the labor business is the sole economic bargaining power of the mass of people and also their only political organization.
An important sales point is that while management has a First Amendment right to “educate” workers against unions — no law can forbid that — union organizers do not have equal freedom to proselytize because employers forbid that (by firing joiners). The law has to mandate employers not forbid that.
For 94% of us we are down to 0% unions. It’s virtually the same thing — but 0% seems like a good sales point; that imagery might actually MAKE THE POINT (somewhere in progressive brains).
The institution of the executive office of the President has been dealt a serious blow in terms general expectations of what constitutes leadership and nature public communications from that office.
My own history in observing the President in their public demeanor and communcations only goes back to Ike (and his opponent Adlai Stevenson) in seeing his speeches on TV and in newsreels. But I became more aware during the Nixon / Kennedy debates, the Johnson, Nixon Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations.
And irrespective of which side of the isle I favored (always liberals) there was never any doubt or concern in my mind that the President was on solid ground in their duty or ability to lead the nation on some form of rational foundations — except that I did become quite concerned with Bush II’s capacity to lead and make rational decisions.
But I’ve never expected that the public could possibly elect an outright blatant and habitual liar, locker-room adolescent mentality type who was as blatantly racist as Trump.
I never expected the public to support a person who, during both the Republican primary campaign and the general election campaign who clearly demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of the nature of U.S. constitutional government, it’s political system (check/balances) or the nature of the role of U.S. in the global scheme of things.
I never expected the public to elect or support a person who demonstrated a repeated lack rational debate capacity on the public stage in formal debates or in their other informal communications in speeches and statements to the press.
I hoped that if actually elected as President that the demeanor and leadership style and communications logic and rational basis would change to become more like what the public had come to expect in their President, even if totally against all my political preferences.
My hopes were shattered, splat like dog-shit on a rainy day on the sidewalk (or more like ….) on day one of his inauguration when he claimed that the attendance was greater than any other Presidential Inauguration, and repeated this claim more than once when it was quite obvious that it was paltry by comparison even to Obama’s.
So he made no change from his prior behavior or blatant lies even after he was inaugurated. In the weeks since he has continued in the same manner and fashion of behavior as during his campaigns. He lies blatantly, boasts repeatedly about stuff that has no basis for a boast what-so-ever… as if he’s making up some reality nobody else on the globe can see or recognize.
He has demonstrated a serious lack of comprehension or ability to comprehend, and an apparent inability in reading comprehension of anything more than a paragraph in bold type at the top of a page. It’s as if translating what’s on the written page into comprehension of what it says taxes his brain so much that it’s overwhelming to him.
OK, so he’s not the brightest candle n the room… more like the dimmest one in fact, so dim that he make Bush II look like an Einstein. But that shouldn’t impede his ability to reason or use rational foundations for his statements and justifications, especially with a close family staff on hand to front for him, help him through his comprehension problem. Furthermore he has a reasonably competent cabinet — even if they’re the extreme of the right wing conservatism, they appear for the most part to be able to understand political issues and deal with them (whether successfully or to their satisfaction or not is another issue) — so they should be able to help him formulate rational responses to reasonable questions posed by the press.
I watched his behavior sitting with Chancellor Merkel and was appalled by his actions and responses to her… the head of state of a major ally… even the most important of our allies perhaps — the most prosperous European nation, the most economically powerful in Europe by far, the nation with the most clout in the EU, a major foreign trade nation for the U.S.
Was that behavior typical of a U.S. President? Was it expected of any U.S. President? Was it appropriate for a U.S. President? Was it even remotely respectable for any U.S. politician much less the President?
I think the clear answer to all those questions is absolutely not. Does Trump even comprehend the nature and consequence of his own pubic behavior or does he just not care about any consequence of appearances and behavior?
But what is it about the U.S. voting public (nearly half of that public) that gives them the ability to have voted for a blatant in consummate serial liar? … recognizable and clear lies and not even little white lies.
Does this demean the office of the President? I think it does. Does it provide a new precedent for the nature of the office of the President? I don’t know yet, but I’m concerned that it does or will. And if it does then what does that mean for the nature of the U.S. form of government? What does it do to a democracy or the type of democracy we have had?
If the head of state can lie so blatantly and frequently about major things, both domestic and foreign, doesn’t that erode the public’s trust in it’s leadership; in government in general? And if that is the case then what provides the public with the foundation and basis to follow its leaders and laws if leaders are not trustworthy?
Look, I don’t have to like the President or his picks for his cabinet or Judicial appointments, and I can even vehemently oppose them (which in this case i do of course), but I still have to have trust that what leaders tell me is true or at lease a reasonable facsimile of truth. If I can’t believe a leader of our nation or can’t believe what his cabinet members are telling me, then how do I trust whether what I’m told is actually the way things are or might be expected to become.
I do admit that I’m already concerned about this because Bush II’s administration led the nation to war over lies, while the entire fucking congress on both sides of the isle accepted the lie. So I have rational reason to wonder if I can trust what our gov’t is telling me, and with Trump being a blatant known and persistent public liar of the first order than my concerns are even more founded.
Did Bush II’s lying about the Iraq WMD’s actually make it possible for Trump to lie and that this is now ok for Presidents and Cabinet members to do? I recall the VN war rational… I lived it at the time and the lie then was the “domino effect” but we didn’t really have a way of knowing this was a lie at the time…we conjectured about it and there were two sides on the question, but it wasn’t until more became known about the back-ground of the war and other factors that we learned the domino effect was for public propaganda purposes.
So it’s not like I and most members of the public don’t know already that our gov’t lies to us about some things … Iran Contra comes to mind under Reagan, for example, and there are many more such behind the scenes lies that only come to light after the fact.
But what I’m referring to now is Trump’s continual lies about almost everything. and his apparent incomprehension of a political system of government and how it was designed to work. And this makes me concerned that the office of the executive in charge has been irreparably damaged and depreciated.to little more than the level of a barker on the carnival strip or the lowest common denominator of members of our House of representatives.
And those concerns lead me to be concerned about whether our gov’t can remain viable as a legitimate trust institution at all. And if that goes then we have a dictatorship or a state of virtual chaos;… take your pick.
Apparently the Republicans only believe in States’ Rights when the states want something the right wants.
Today they voted to deny Oregon the right to establish its own retirement system that would have given all workers access to a retirement plan similar to that for public employees.
This year’s Social Security Trustees Report seems to be late as usual.
But this is the LAST year that a gradual increase in the payroll tax can begin and still solve some of the less understood problems of the projected shortfall in SS funding: This is mostly that a gradual increase starting now preserves the Trust Fund at it’s current level… meaning the Congress doesn’t have to find the money to pay back it’s debt TO Social Security. The interest from that Trust Fund will keep the needed tax increase about 1% smaller than it otherwise will need to be. And the needed increase of one tenth of one percent per year will eliminate the projected “actuarial” shortfall entirely.. and that should eliminate the “sky is falling” argument of those who want to destroy Social Security.
Trouble is that neither the Left nor the Right are interested in actually solving the SS shortfall. The Right wants to kill Social Security by calling it welfare. The Left wants to kill Social Security by turning it into welfare.
After this year, SS can still be “saved” by the one tenth percent per year increase in the payroll tax, but will not have the advantages alluded to here. Because the Trust Fund is being drawn down, the needed tax rate to prevent an actual shortfall in about 2030 will rise fairly rapidly. If nothing is done, the tax rate would need to rise about 2% all at once in about 2030 or so. This would not be a real burden to people even at that, but they will see it as such… be told to see it as such… and the bad guys will seize the opportunity to cut benefits, raise the retirement age, and even “tax the rich” as the first step to turning it into welfare as we knew it and guaranteeing that event he honest rich — who currently are NOT burdened by SS – wiil be burdened by it and join the campaign against it.
Even raising the tax rate about 1 and a half percent now would solve the projected shortfall for the rest of the century. This solution is objected to by those who want to confuse you because it would leave a need for another “significant” tax raise in 2093. That raise would be about one half of one percent.. at a time when wages will be more than 100% higher than they are today. I think we can leave that problem to those who will face it. It’s not my favorite solution, but those who tell you we must “solve the SS problem once and for all” are hoping you are stupid enough to think they are saying something sensible.
I hadn’t been watching, but apparently the Supreme Court has been steadily reducing the Fifth Amendment to a mere game of words. You no longer have any protection whatsoever against being compelled to testify against yourself.
And that means whatever you say, or are claimed to have said, to the police WILL be used against you. And if you refuse to talk to them, that WILL be used against you in court as proof that you are guilty. After all, why would you refuse to talk unless you had something to hide.
Unfortunately, neither the Supreme Court…. or even the Obama administration… can even conceive a time might come when the government makes something illegal that an honest and decent person would think he was morally compelled to do.
For more on this “You Have the Right to Remain Innocent” by James Duane.
“Today [the Republicans] voted to deny Oregon the right to establish its own retirement system that would have given all workers access to a retirement plan similar to that for public employees.”
I cannot find the bill you’re talking about. Can you post the bill number?
warren
heard it on the news. Oregon was not specifically mentioned, but Oregon is one of the states proposing a state-wide retirement system. I don’t have time to look it up. or the google skills.