Melania Trump took a separate car to the State of the Union because she now knows that her husband had an affair with a porn star right after the birth of their child and then paid over a hundred grand in blackmail cash to keep the other woman from talking to the press.
Still, she showed up and smiled, which is awfully big of her.
The speech itself was so flat and monotonous that I’d forgotten most of it before he even finished.
He took credit for things he’s not responsible for and lied about a bunch of numbers, but he really didn’t propose much. The GOP has no idea where to go from here. So, I guess they’ll just fuck with the FBI and the Justice Department and pretend that they can pass things without any Democratic votes, like an infrastructure bill that they won’t pay for.
As for the Dreamers, as much as I’m concerned for them, it’s not a good idea to pay a ransom for them. Trump has set this up as a way to fundamentally alter our entire immigration system in a very unfair and racist way, and that’s not a trade worth making for hostages that the GOP does not want to deport en masse while television cameras capture the indefensibly sad and outrageous stories. A bluff must be called here. I hate to say it, but it’s the right thing to do in these circumstances.
So, if that means a shut down, that’s fine with me. And if that means the DACA protections lapse, that’s a price the Democrats have to be willing to pay. It’s right on the politics and it’s right on the merits. We have a legal immigration program that’s under assault and it can’t be reformed the way that Stephen Miller wants to reform it.
I also object strenuously to the idea of spending tens of billions of dollars on a stupid wall that will be a symbol of racism visible from space running along our southern border. This should not be done just to help Trump save face. It would be a blot on the country and a stain on the record of everyone who votes to fund it.
The offer to Trump should be sensible border protection and enforcement investments rather than unrealistic boondoggles. He’s tying to play the bully here but he doesn’t have the cards to win this hand.
Rather than asking what Trump needs to rescue the DACA recipients, the Dems should be demanding funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before they’ll even consider funding anything else.
I chose not to watch the debacle. I have a weak stomach and Trump’s voice makes me want to throw things.
While you, as usual, offer sound advice for what should be done, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not going to be a headline-grabber. It’s not a barn-burner cause like The Wall or other immigration issues. Talking about sensible financial solutions is boring, don’t cha know.
I expect the Republicans are going to resume their FBI sabotage now and focus on stonewalling Mueller. All their grand bragging about reaching across the aisle, a big fat lie from the get go, will be shelved until they need to useit again, if and when the Democrats ever show some backbone and start making demands of their own, on our behalf.
Makes ME want to throw UP!
Martin persists in holding out against being conditioning in learned helplessness, lending doubts to the idea that he is a true Democrat. For my part I have accepted that Schumer is going to make every decision in the light of the senate races in West Virginia and North Dakota, which we will then, of course, lose anyway.
Come on in! The water’s lukewarm!
They got massive tax cuts for the 1% and their corporations. That’s all they really care about. They would like to dismantle all business regulation, but as long as they are in power with managers like Ajit Pai refusing to enforce existing law, it doesn’t matter that much to them.
I don’t think a deal with the Dreamers is possible. Trump and his Administration wants them gone. The whole republican leadership, while not necessarily wanting them gone, does not care enough to buck the base that Trump is appealing to on this issue.
Booman, several times you have made comments that republican leadership does not want the publicity that would come with deporting Dreamers. Well sure, they don’t `want’ it, but what have they done over the last decade that shows bad publicity will effect what they do (or don’t do)?
Trump is a racist. There is no doubt on that. He has surrounded himself with racists. He takes advice every day from racists, whom he has given the highest jobs in his administration. But Trump is not the problem we face, not the real problem. The real problem we face is republicanism. Trump is a reflection of what the base voter wants.
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Yes there is no doubt that Der Trumper is a symptom and the “conservative” movement (and wholly-owned Repub party) is the real problem. The immediate question is what steps can be taken to try to protect the DACA kids when their semi-protected status ends in March, because as you say, Repubs have no interest in helping them.
Booman envisions that mass deportations would somehow be “covered” by the useless corporate media, and that Repubs would somehow quail before this specter, but of course that won’t happen. I’d say instead that most elected Repubs would want to be filmed with the ICE thugs going in for the assault!
In any event, many Dreamers are already being seized and deported by the GICEtapo without the slightest TeeVee coverage. Instead of progressives wringing our hands, it seems that some organized efforts to gather Dreamers together in identified urban centers to protect them from the ICE thugs needs to be accomplished. Could (for example) the urban police forces of sympathetic CA cities be required to use their armored urban battlegroups to defend Dreamer collection centers?
The antebellum North had its Underground Railroad. In the Second American Civil War, the Dreamers seem fated to play a similar role…
Off Topic.
Ruy Teixeira (who let me add should probably be unemployed so read it skeptically) has now come out with an election analysis that assigns more power to the white working closer voters and less to the Latino voters than even conventional wisdom thought.
link here
I confess, I dislike both Ruy and Latino Decisions who constantly claim the opposite.
The DC Democrats are still waiting for the demographics that will rescue them and the party.
Republicans have been going with a version of “a chicken for every pot” (later amended to “every white pot”) for nearly a century without ever delivering, but it continues to sell often enough that they didn’t go the way of the Whigs after 1930 and after 1945, with a few downturns, their power has continuously increased and at a faster clip after they discovered that deficits don’t matter when Republicans control the national budget.
I deduce from your last sentence you don’t have a lot of hope the Democrats will do the right thing. I don’t either.
I refused to watch the SOTU: it’s always the rosiest scenario to begin with and this one was sure to be packed with more lies than usual.
I honestly don’t know what to do. The bad guys are winning.
Given that the resentful white electorate has turned against immigration (especially non-white immigration) and cannot be turned back in favor of it again–and in this they are merely mirroring the nativist electorates in other Western democracies such as the UK—Der Trumper is playing his signature issue fairly well. And because of his singular focus on hated immigration, the incompetent white electorate is giving their poor-man’s Mussolini a pass on all other issues, from tax cut paybacks to Putin collusion to corporate deregulation to permanently wrecking the environment. And of course the incompetent white electorate have been in favor of the Repub vote suppression strategy for quite some time now, as they hate the actual reality of a democracy.
Tough choices for the Dems, who has been fated to play the role of having to protect defenseless minorities, and undocumented ones at that! The first step in the next budget battle is to state endlessly that the Repub party, not just their white nationalist prez, is holding the innocent DACA kids hostage, and would be delighted to kill the hostage, their phony “protests” notwithstanding. Second, make clear that the Dems are willing to ransom the helpless hostage, but that they aren’t willing to pay everything demanded by the kidnapper for the hostage. That means they must offer something–and only one thing–to the vicious white electorate and its Fuhrer, however repulsive this may be.
I’d offer the most disgusting (yet reversible) thing, a couple tens of billions for Der Trumper’s ridiculous “Wall”. That seems a fair price for saving the 800,000 DACA kids, as long as they are indeed permanently protected from our federal GICEtapo sturmtruppen. In the eyes of the rest of the world, allowing Trumper his Wall as payment for these hostages is a public demonstration of exactly how loathsome he and his “conservative” allies are, and just how low FailedNation, Inc. has sunk. But reasonable minds can differ on the ransom. What is important for Dems is getting the “hostage-ransom” rhetoric into circulation.
Trump’s Wall (to differentiate it from “The Wall,” the only US war memorial that’s worth a damn) is stupid, but not nearly as stupid as all the US foreign military installations that transfer dollars into the foreign local economies. Assuming no Mexican or foreign contractors, materials, and labor for Trump’s Wall, the dollars spent on it wouldn’t be off-shored. So, trade stupid for stupid — every dollar for Trump’s wall requires a two dollar reduction in foreign military installation budgets and the aggregate Pentagon budget. (IOW redeploying US troops from foreign locations to US soil is an accounting trick and NOT the required reduction.)
heh – let Trump and the Pentagon fight out over the stupid.
Seconded, but too sensible to be enacted. Repubs would just kill the hostage.
Ultimately, in the grand sweep of history, the decline of the US economy will be laid at the feet of the Pentagon and the preposterous bloated military.
Depends on the deal put on the table. The current one offered by Democrats demonstrates bad deal making. Trump can have his wall that is broadly viewed as stupid if he concedes on DREAMers that is broadly supported. For Trump the upside is yuuge and the downside chump change. How will Democrats counter Trump bragging about all the good jobs his wall created?
Why are Democrats holding a budget issue hostage for a non-budgetary public policy/social issue?
In the early going, Democrats didn’t drive a hard-bargain with Reagan who got his tax cuts AND increased military budget. However, when that led to a massive increase in the deficit, they put on their gloves and demanded and got a tax increase. (Of course that was back when Republicans still embraced the notion that deficits matter.) That didn’t take out Reagan, but Republicans lost Senate seats in the ’84 and ’86 when Democrats took control and in the House, Republicans lost most of their ’80 gains in ’82, picked up just over half of that loss in ’84 but lost almost all of that in the next three elections.
GHWB didn’t fare as well as Reagan had by making the same deal.
Republicans did blink on the government shutdown due to no deal, but neither party wants to take the heat for a shutdown. So, they’ll make a deal and Trump will get his stupid wall just as Republican presidents over the past 37 years have gotten their stupid pet projects and DC Democrats go silent and pretend they weren’t participants in the bad deals.
As far as I can see, the budget bill is the only leverage Dems have at the moment, given that history demonstrates “conservatives” will never agree to a sane immigration bill. That DACA is not really “budgetary” is hardly dispositive of the issue. But of course reasonable minds can differ on the ransom one is willing to pay.
It’s not really much more than how far will you go to stop Trumper and his Repubs from fucking with these defenseless young people who are hated because of their ethnicity?
. . . leverage you can use is leverage that you have.
We could discuss why that is but here that’s a waste of time. So, the question is how to most effectively leverage almost no formal power? Republicans were in the same boat, or worse depending on how one measures such positions, in 2009 and look at where they are now. Forget their crude hardball tactics — that only works against Democrats. Pull back and consider the entire matrix of leveraging limited power and how to pierce through vulnerabilities and they have oodles of vulnerabilities.
“Why are Democrats holding a budget issue hostage for a non-budgetary public policy/social issue?”
I dunno, $20 billion or thereabouts just on the border security fight sounds like a budgetary issue to me. It’s also not the only budgetary issue that remains.
“Depends on the deal put on the table. The current one offered by Democrats demonstrates bad deal making.”
What do you think the current deal offered by Democrats is? Schumer has pulled back his offer of funding for The Wall/border security, for example.
Apologies for interrupting your usual propagandistic claims that Both Sides Are Equally Bad or its close cousin, Democrats Are Responsible For All Bad Actions Of Unified Republican Party Governance Because Reasons.
These are absurd claims to continue to make when we look at the actual differences between the actions and statements of the current Federal Executive and Legislative branches and the Federal Executive and Legislative branches we enjoyed in 2009 and 2010. It’s refreshing to look at a good faith interpretation of those differences, casting our attention away from the Bizarro claims you make of those things.
Nevertheless, you’re persisting.
Owowowowow!!! Ouch.
“Is our children learning?”
Oy! My apologies!
I am wondering how that actually will work.
At this point, the executive branch is ignoring any directives or requests from the legislative branch.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/371398-ice-defies-house-judiciary-request-deports-p
alestinian-man
This was a House Judiciary committee request, and ICE ignored it.
Both chambers passed additional sanctions on Russia with overwhelming majorities. No sanctions.
Even if Congress passes a DACA protection, what is to prevent ICE from ignoring it and deporting it? As long as the Republicans do not hold ICE responsible for ignoring the laws?
Well, what can one say other than that we are in a clear constitutional crisis? Der Trumper’s executive branch is flouting the law and the legislative branch–while the (democratically illegitimate) “majority” party cheers their authoritarian criminal on during his SOTU charade. Sieg Heil, indeed. Presumably the minority party could make this obvious crisis a major item of their daily message agenda and ask (every day) why the worthless corporate media will not cover flagrant law-breaking by a criminal executive.
The federal courts are a possible recourse to a law-breaking executive, but of course ours are controlled by Roberts’ Repubs. So this is likely a dead end.
This is how democracies die, and ours is dying, which is why contingency planning for Blue states and cities needs to be put on the front burner. That would mean resisting illegal actions by Trumper’s GICEtapo.
No. I am not willing to build his fucking wall. Can he and his friends keep the,government open without democratic votes? Are they willing to show the world as they round up innocent people and deport,them? So, sorry, I am not there on funding the wall. He needs to go to Mexico like he said he would for,the funding.
There’s more and more screen time on the logistics of the Wall lately. MSNBC’s clip on how most of Bush’s border security wall items are still in court over a decade later and that with Texans loudly and defiantly opposing the imminent domain issues along the border it’s highly unlikely that the Wall would even get underway in Texas for another decade or more.
So, if the Dems were to give in on funding a wall that will likely not ever be built in exchange for securing Dreamer security, maybe that’s a workable perspective.
Tourism and immigration are already faltering despite a weakened US dollar. This country needs immigration, we need it across the board.
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So, if the Dems were to give in on funding a wall that will likely not ever be built in exchange for securing Dreamer security, maybe that’s a workable perspective.
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Didn’t they already do this? Then Trump backed out as soon as Schumer left the room, and the racists started yelling at him.
I honestly think Trump and his cohorts would rather see the Dreamers deported that get the wall financed. I think that the Democratic leadership knows that.
Remember this? That happened in Murrieta, CA. It’s in what is called the `inland empire’. If people don’t see the benefits of immigrants in the inland empire (and plenty there do not) there is no hope for places that don’t have many immigrants.
Trump is obsessed with the wall because he has early onset, but the racists will not be all that upset if it does not get built. What they want to see is brown people being collected up and kicked out. Rounding up the Dreamers will give them the publicity that ordinary deportations do not. Right now ICE is specifically going after activists . It’s the same issue…..those particular deportations give the base the publicity that keeps them worked up. It’s a bonus that they are also fighters for immigrants.
The racists want headlines. Deporting Dreamers gives them that.
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Yes, of course already offered up the wall funding, but then Schumer took offer back.
Deporting Dreamers is a visual Rep don’t want to see in an election year so rather than keep Dreamers hostage it’s more their style to just allow an extension of the deadline until after the election.
Agreed. The border Wall will never get built, other than the portions that already exist. In addition, many businesses are getting concerned about a shortage of young labor of whom the Dreamers are certainly a component. Republicans will never pay attention to the Democrats or immigration advocates but they may pay attention to complaining businesses who are their patrons.
I agree with you. And I also don’t want a border wall as a symbol of our racism. If need be shut the government down. But I doubt it will happen. There are a number of democrats who will feel compelled to vote for whatever Trump proposes and I have my doubts Schumer is capable of leading the party.
There is another issue though that may grab a lot of democrats and that is infrastructure and jobs, you know jobs. Who can say no to that? The problem here though is he will allow private investment which, in turn, will mean toll roads and bridges to pay for it to private investors. Those tolls by any other name are called new taxes, except the Kochs and their friends will not be paying it. I sorta, kinda object to that game. Tax cuts for the elites and tolls for the peons.
I also have my doubts it will help a place like NY with its massive needs for upgrades to its transportation systems. Blue states may not fare well here. But we will see what he proposes.
OT – Goodbye Trey Goudy !!!
Plutocrat tax cuts don’t increase revenues but they do increase the Wingnut Welfare budget!
Hillary is planning his exit party, I hear.
He’s not going anywhere for eleven months. Unless he gets a promotion in the interim. “…instead I will be returning to the justice system.” IOW — that’s what he’s available for, now or a year from now.
Didn’t I read here a few months ago that Senator Bob Menendez was a goner?
Politico Justice Department seeks dismissal of Menendez case.
Bothsiderism at its finest!
I hope Putin pays you well.
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With no universal health care, and Richie Rich types pricing the lower and middle classes out of college, is the function of The Wall to keep them out or us in?
No money for the people, all the money in the world to almost literally burn on The Wall and the military and other boondoggles, not to mention all the vacations. Every time I see AF1 I can’t help but think of the tremendous waste of moving one dude around in a jumbo jet. Waste R US.