[johnu]

johnu, on 2019-April-05, 03:20, said:

O'Rourke compares Trump's immigrant rhetoric to Third Reich

Quote

At a town hall in Iowa on Thursday, O'Rourke called out "the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals but as animals and an infestation," in response to a question on how he would address attacks from Republicans.

The former congressman from Texas says, "Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich. I would not expect that in the United States of America."

It has not been confirmed that the American Nazi Party has disavowed Dennison for his over the top hate speech.

Why is nobody defending Dennison?

[johnu]

Republicans and Fox Propaganda Network are working overtime to denigrate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's work history as a bartender.

Why is it that Republicans have such a low regard for working people??? Just joking, the all too obvious answer is that they aren't rich

Ocasio-Cortez: 'I'm proud to be a bartender. Ain't nothing wrong with that'

Quote

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) said she was proud of her humble roots as she delivered a speech at the National Action Network convention on Friday.

"I'm proud to be a bartender," the self-proclaimed democratic socialist said. "Ain't nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with working retail."

"There's nothing wrong with working retail, folding clothes for other people to buy," she continued. "There is nothing wrong with preparing the food that your neighbors will eat. There is nothing wrong with driving the buses that take your family to work."

"There is nothing wrong with being a working person in the United States of America and there is everything dignified about it," the New York Democrat said.

"I, in fact, am encouraged when people remind the country of my past, not because of anything about my story, but because it communicates that if I could work in a restaurant and become a member of the United States Congress, so can you," she added.

Maybe those Republicans and Fox Propaganda should stick to trying to pick on the deceased, and living people who are unable to respond to lies and misinformation like those on Mueller's team.

But wait, some people from Mueller's team are setting the record straight about Barr's attempt to mislead the American people. Oh well, they can still kick dirt on the deceased who aren't going to hit back and set the record straight.

[johnu]

johnu, on 2019-April-05, 22:20, said:

Why is nobody defending Dennison?

Because it is true?

Trump Homeland Security Official Suggested Antifascists Were ‘The Actual Threats’

Quote

Katie Gorka, a Trump administration political appointee in the Department of Homeland Security, suggested in a July 2017 email that the agency, which had just canceled funding for a group dedicated to deradicalizing white supremacists, redirect its efforts to focus on the real threat: anti-fascists.

Folks, you can't make this stuff up.

[y66]

From What the Rest of the World Can Learn From the Australian Economic Miracle by Neil Irwin at NYT:

Quote

As Americans worry about the potential end of a 10-year expansion, it’s worth studying the Aussies, whose winning streak is about to turn 28.

Quote

Maybe the real reason Australia has made it so long without a downturn is an absence of complacency. No one is brimming with overconfidence that all is well and always will be.

“What has happened in the last 27 years is a series of shocks, each of which, thanks to policy and luck, we were able to overcome,” said Stephen Grenville, the former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia and now a fellow at the Lowy Institute. “That’s the nature of the economy we’re in now — an economy with shocks plus flexibility.”

It isn’t the absence of bad stuff happening in the economy that has kept Australia growing for so long. It is the nation’s economic flexibility and policymakers’ rejection of complacency.

So maybe the pessimism isn’t a paradox at all. And maybe we would be more worried about Australia’s economic future if house prices had kept soaring toward unsustainable highs, or if young people had made economic decisions with a sense of reckless invincibility and engaged in borrowing and spending behaviors accordingly.

The Australian experience is evidence that the “business cycle” is a misleading way to think about economic growth. Recessions aren’t like thunderstorms, an inevitable, random event that may be violent but provide much-needed water to crops.

Maybe recessions are more like car crashes. They may never be completely eliminated, but making the right choices can make them rarer and less damaging when they do happen.

In trying to learn the lessons of Australia, that may be the biggest of them all. There will always be bad things that happen in an economy. The best way to keep them from causing the mass pain that accompanies a recession is to combine sound policy, a flexible and dynamic economy and — perhaps most important — just the right amount of fear.

[Winstonm]

andrei, on 2019-March-23, 17:36, said:

Do you know RM report is out?

https://www.youtube....h?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

[johnu]

MAGA, #1 exporter of hate in the world.

How Far-Right Extremists Abroad Have Adopted Trump’s Symbols As Their Own

Quote

A Canadian, Bissonette hadn’t voted for Donald Trump. He lived in a French-speaking province, far from the U.S. president’s campaign rallies and “America first” appeals. But some of the first photos to emerge of the 27-year-old after he stormed a Quebec City mosque and killed six Muslim men in January 2017 showed him wide-eyed with a slight smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” cap casting a shadow over his pallid face.

“Make America Great Again” has become more than a U.S. political slogan. For Bissonette and other white nationalist, radical right and anti-immigrant extremists all over the world, it’s a symbol; a kind of political messaging that transcends the specifics of country and language.

[johnu]

Al_U_Card, on 2019-March-29, 14:35, said:

Obama bowed to King Faud, W held his hand. Superman doesn't appear to be available and Mother Theresa had a dark side so, Trump might actually be working for the US. Self-aggrandizement does not preclude that eventuality. Since no one kept their promise to leave the US if DT was elected, what will happen when he is re-elected? Is head-explosion insurance available?

There's a difference between diplomatic courtesy and selling out your country like Dennison has done with Russia. I would say that I'm surprised that you don't know this, but I would be lying.

Actually, lots of Americans apparently moved to Canada (and other countries) after Clinton screwed the pooch.

We moved to Canada because of Trump

Of course, lots of people said they were going to leave the country if Clinton didn't win, but are still in the country. Just like some people (e.g. Chas_NoHonor_NoDignity) say they are going to stop posting in this forum, and continue to do so.

[awm]

johnu, on 2019-April-06, 19:35, said:

Actually, lots of Americans apparently moved to Canada (and other countries) after Clinton screwed the pooch.

We moved to Canada because of Trump

Even some Americans on this forum did this! We’re enjoying Switzerland and will probably stay even if Trump gets bounced out in 2020.

[kenberg]

awm, on 2019-April-07, 05:36, said:

Even some Americans on this forum did this! We're enjoying Switzerland and will probably stay even if Trump gets bounced out in 2020.

If I may pursue this a little. I remember when you were thinking of moving, and my impression was that you were thinking of moving anyway, although Trump was perhaps some motivation. And you now might well stay, even if Trump is booted out.

This is often roughly the case, I think. Back in the mid 60s a friend had a son who was approaching draft age and he was very clear about seeking a job in Canada, and taking his son with him, for that reason. For my own part, in 1966 my deferment was canceled, just about everyone's was, and I was re-classified as 1-A. I did not move, but of course some did. I think it takes something like that to be a driving force for moving. That's not to say it isn't a factor, but with you as well as with others, I got the idea there was a good chance you would be following a professional opportunity even without the Trump effect.

A related question: I am lazy about investments. I keep thinking maybe I should sell off whatever I have in stocks (I'm not Warren Buffett but like many my age I have some) but so far I have just let sleeping dogs lie.So the question is: Do I or do I not believe that the Trump presidency is going to lead to economic disaster? My general view is that having a huckster such as Trump in the Oval Office is a disaster waiting to happen. But I have not yet acted on that belief. So do i or don't i really believe it? Selling off some stocks would be a good deal less dramatic than moving out of the country, still I have done neither.

So: I'm glad you are enjoying Switzerland. I like chocolate, I have given up skiing. My thoughts are along more modest lines. Both my daughters, and two of Becky's three kids, live in Maryland. But there are times I get really tired of Maryland. Minnesota was a great place to grow up but it gets cold there. Switzerland is not on my list, but maybe the Pacific coast (of the U.S.), especially Oregon or Washington. Still, we have not put up a for sale sign.

As to the even more modest issue of being on this thread, i seem to wander on and off. Leaving a thread is not like deserting your family, the wanderer is allowed to wander back.

[awm]

kenberg, on 2019-April-07, 06:33, said:

If I may pursue this a little. I remember when you were thinking of moving, and my impression was that you were thinking of moving anyway, although Trump was perhaps some motivation. And you now might well stay, even if Trump is booted out.

Elianna has lived a more international life than I have; she was born in Israel and lived there until she was six, then traveled back for many summers during her childhood. She also did a semester abroad in Hungary. So she's lived outside the US much more than I have (I lived in England for a year as a kid when my father did an "exchange" with a college in the UK, but otherwise have only lived in the US). Anyway, Elianna always thought it would be a fun adventure to live in Europe, but I was somewhat more hesitant about the whole thing. The election of Trump was what made me willing/interested in moving... but it's not just Trump himself being president but realizing that so many Americans wanted him to be president (or anyway just didn't care) even though he was racist, sexist, completely unqualified, a liar, etc.

In terms of work, I'm lucky to have a very generous employer at Google and they made it easy for me to transfer to a position in Switzerland (even paid for some of the move). But I wouldn't say it was really a "career opportunity" -- more of a horizontal transfer between two very similar jobs at the same company. Our choice of Switzerland was somewhat influenced by the work situation (Google has offices in many other countries too, but in terms of the sort of work available and already knowing some of the people this was much more appealing than the other options). Elianna had never even BEEN to Switzerland before our move!

Anyway, Switzerland is a good place to live in many ways. They have incredible public transit and pay everyone a living wage (while there is no legal minimum wage, the de facto minimum is over $20/hour). The starting salary for teachers in Zurich is over 100k/year (but you do have to speak fluent German, which is a bit of an obstacle even though Elianna is getting close). They also have great chocolate and cheese of course, and skiing (which we don't partake in) and hiking (which we do). It's not perfect -- there is racism here too (although mostly in the form of staring rather than open hostility) and smoking is quite a bit more popular here than it was in the states. Certain things are very expensive (of course anything that requires labor, but also food because of some protectionist policies to keep Swiss farms alive). There's bridge here of course, it's a small country so there aren't that many pairs and the level isn't so high (but on the plus side, we have more chance to represent Switzerland than the US).

[hrothgar]

I am envious...

Let me know if Google needs other US ex pats in Die Schweiz....

[y66]

To move, wander or stay put? My wife and I have been discussing this topic for several years. She will be retiring soon. We agreed to stay put for 12 months after she retires so she can do some things she's wanted to do but been too busy to do with the house and the yard which she loves. After that, we'll see. I suspect we'll end up hedging our bets and try to come up with an affordable mix of staying put, wandering, and spending a few months in Oregon near our grandkids and their parents who we are quite fond of. I spent a month exploring Portland neighborhoods last year and found several I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy living in and equally sure they will not cure my restlessness although they and the rest of Oregon might cure 90 percent of it. A few years ago I met a couple in Maine who seem to have figured this out for themselves. She's an artist. He's a retired professor from U Maine and a former stonemason. They live on the coast of Maine from April thru November and in a guest house on her son's property in New Mexico in other months when they're not traveling. It sounds like it could be an expensive lifestyle but I think the reason it works for them has more to do with their love of honest labor -- they restored their house themselves -- than their bank account. They did not seem restless to me. Maybe physical labor helps.

I enjoyed this part of Amy Qin's story about this year's Pritzker Prize winning architect:

Quote

In 2017, Mr. Isozaki donated his vast collection of books and quietly moved with his partner, Misa Shin, from Tokyo to Okinawa in search of warmer climes. The couple rented a nondescript apartment with a view of the sea in a peaceful residential neighborhood.

If you have a nondescript apartment in a fun neighborhood in Portland that you're willing to rent out for a couple months a year, please post details here. A view of the Willamette River or Mount Hood is optional but definitely a plus.

[kenberg]

I think that this talk about how we decide where to live is useful if we want to try to put this country back together. At first glance we might say that this is the Trump thread and so who cares just why people do or do not move to where. But we somehow have become very disengaged, with nobody much understanding what drives anyone else.

And no doubt part of the problem is that here I am chatting online with people that I have never met in person instead of having the neighbors over for beer and poker the way my parents did.

[Winstonm]

I read the other day that Italy is one of the more affordable countries. Montepulciano in Tuscany is a nice little place, although my favorite spot so far has been Matera in the south.

I was surprised Portugal was not mentioned.

[y66]

From the NYT Editorial Board:

Quote

Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.

The terms of Ms. Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president on Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Ms. Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Ms. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.” Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Ms. Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.

She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border. Last May, stories surfaced about Mr. Trump publicly berating her in front of the entire cabinet for failing to stop the crossings. Ms. Nielsen was said to have drafted a resignation letter at the time.

In her resignation letter released on Sunday, Ms. Nielsen noted, “For more than two years of service beginning during the Presidential Transition, I have worked tirelessly to advance the goals and missions of the Department.”

This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, hopelessly weak.

Sadly, Ms. Nielsen’s response to her boss’s displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. Last summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Ms. Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.

“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border,” she said on Twitter last June. “Period.” She repeated as much to Congress as recently as March.

Nor was immigration the only issue on which Ms. Nielsen floundered. On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Mr. Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

Ms. Nielsen’s departure is seen by some as part of a broader restructuring of her department. Just two days before meeting with the secretary, the president withdrew his nomination for the next head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, saying that he wanted to go in a “tougher direction.” Presumably he plans to chart a similar course with Ms. Nielsen’s successor.

For now, Ms. Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies. It comes as the swell of migrant families across the border pushes the system toward collapse.

Within this leadership vacuum, it seems likely that more influence will be exerted by Mr. Miller, who inspires and reinforces Mr. Trump’s harshest ideas on immigrants and immigration.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said of Ms. Nielsen’s departure, “It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.”

If Ms. Nielsen wants to perform one last act of public service, she could come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective set of policies.

Morally anemic, strategically incoherent, inhumane, ineffective, every utterance an obfuscation? Not enough apparently for this administration.

[barmar]

y66, on 2019-April-07, 21:21, said:

Morally anemic, strategically incoherent, inhumane, ineffective, every utterance an obfuscation? Not enough apparently for this administration.

Individual-1 is the master of all those, few can measure up to his standards.

[cherdano]

rmnka447, on 2019-March-30, 19:52, said:

Barr impresses me as a very straight shooter who wouldn't tarnish his already illustrious reputation by trying to hoodwink the public about what Mueller came up with when that information will eventually become public.

Here is a comment from a TPM reader and member of the appelate bar:
https://talkingpoint...rr#more-1211525

Quote

But there is another, overlooked data point that makes clear that we should be very suspicious about how Barr approaches his responsibilities as AG – including his redactions to the Mueller report and his supervision of the ongoing Trump investigations in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere.

The Administration’s decision a few weeks ago to change its position and argue that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional didn’t get the attention it deserves. It is a shocking breach of the Justice Department’s duty to make reasonable arguments in support of the constitutionality of federal laws. There many such reasonable arguments in support of the ACA – as numerous conservative scholars have explained in blog posts and briefs since the DoJ announcement; it is the position that the Administration is now endorsing that is entirely unreasonable.


The New York Times’ reporting indicated that AG Barr opposed this change in position. But he appears perfectly willing to carry it out. That tells us a number of things, all of them disturbing.

First, AG Barr is not going to do very much to defend key Justice Department norms against assaults by the White House. Barr’s nomination was greeted with relief by many, who believed he would restore the old DoJ norms.

But his willingness to go along without a whimper with a fundamental breach of a longstanding DoJ norm shows that just isn’t true. Sometime between now and May 1 (when the DoJ brief is likely due), Barr will have to send a letter to Congress repudiating Jeff Sessions’ determination just last June that most of the ACA is constitutional; in other words, that Sessions was willing to make unreasonable arguments to defend the ACA.

(...)

Sean Spicer had a good reputation before joining the Trump administration. And the Trump inauguration crowd size was really HUUUGE, MUCH BIGGER than Obama's.

[johnu]

y66, on 2019-April-07, 21:21, said:

From the NYT Editorial Board:


Morally anemic, strategically incoherent, inhumane, ineffective, every utterance an obfuscation? Not enough apparently for this administration.

Dennison had already scraped the bottom of the barrel to come up with his appointees before he was halfway through filling posts. He has had to go to long closed waste dumps to find barrels of toxic sludge to find his latest appointees.

[y66]

Bloomberg's evening news summary has this item:

Quote

Kirstjen Nielsen’s departure leaves Trump’s cabinet historically bare, and a key question is whether he’s emptied it on purpose or is just incompetent. Either way, it leaves him unusually weak. – Jonathan Bernstein

Would it be too much trouble for Bloomberg to do a poll? And also ask how many of the people who say "on purpose" also say doing illegal stuff is not a problem.

[Winstonm]

Individual-1 supporters in action

Quote

Waffle House employees told police that two men walked into the restaurant, and another table of men began to harass them, calling them racial slurs for Hispanic and black people. Three employees said the two victims – Justin Hartford, 18, of Mount Cory, and Zarrick Ramirez, 18, of Findlay – did nothing to provoke the others.

“As soon as we walked into the Waffle House, they started saying ‘here come the s—-.’ And telling us how Trump was going to take care of us immigrants,” Hartford said....

....“As soon as he pays, he runs up and punches me in the face,” said Hartford, who goes to Liberty Benton High School. “It all came so fast. I was just getting hit and hit.”

Ramirez, who goes to Findlay High School, was also getting beaten, he said. By time it was over, “he was drenched in blood,” Hartford said of his friend.