Donald Trump

JeBurkhardt

mickeyrat said:

JeBurkhardt said:

mickeyrat said:

dankind said:

Kat said:

OnWis97 said:

Kat said:

Anyone under Marshall Law yet? 

Marshall Law?  Didn't he play shortstop for Detroit?

Oh duh. I meant martial law. lol

Marital law?

her debt is my debt, my debt is my debt.

my money is our money, her money is her money....

You forgot her side of the bed is hers, and your side of the bed is hers as well.

dogs supercede her there

I have an 80 pound pit mix. There is no way she is sleeping with us. I barely have enough room for myself as it is. 

mickeyrat

JeBurkhardt said:

mickeyrat said:

JeBurkhardt said:

mickeyrat said:

dankind said:

Kat said:

OnWis97 said:

Kat said:

Anyone under Marshall Law yet? 

Marshall Law?  Didn't he play shortstop for Detroit?

Oh duh. I meant martial law. lol

Marital law?

her debt is my debt, my debt is my debt.

my money is our money, her money is her money....

You forgot her side of the bed is hers, and your side of the bed is hers as well.

dogs supercede her there

I have an 80 pound pit mix. There is no way she is sleeping with us. I barely have enough room for myself as it is. 

2 15-18 lbders

JeBurkhardt

mickeyrat said:

JeBurkhardt said:

mickeyrat said:

JeBurkhardt said:

mickeyrat said:

dankind said:

Kat said:

OnWis97 said:

Kat said:

Anyone under Marshall Law yet? 

Marshall Law?  Didn't he play shortstop for Detroit?

Oh duh. I meant martial law. lol

Marital law?

her debt is my debt, my debt is my debt.

my money is our money, her money is her money....

You forgot her side of the bed is hers, and your side of the bed is hers as well.

dogs supercede her there

I have an 80 pound pit mix. There is no way she is sleeping with us. I barely have enough room for myself as it is. 

2 15-18 lbders

Sounds like fun!

The Juggler

Bentleyspop said:

I wish she was my mom....

Mom Goes Viral After Keeping Trump Presidency Hidden From Her Son for Past Four Years. https://www.newsweek.com/mom-goes-viral-after-keeping-trump-presidency-hidden-her-son-past-four-years-1556411

So she started the lie about who was president when her child was 2? 

My mom could've told me Cookie Monster was president and I would've believed her. How is this news?

HughFreakingDillon

The Juggler said:

Bentleyspop said:

I wish she was my mom....

Mom Goes Viral After Keeping Trump Presidency Hidden From Her Son for Past Four Years. https://www.newsweek.com/mom-goes-viral-after-keeping-trump-presidency-hidden-her-son-past-four-years-1556411

So she started the lie about who was president when her child was 2? 

My mom could've told me Cookie Monster was president and I would've believed her. How is this news?

exactly. how dumb. 

Poncier

The Juggler said:

Bentleyspop said:

I wish she was my mom....

Mom Goes Viral After Keeping Trump Presidency Hidden From Her Son for Past Four Years. https://www.newsweek.com/mom-goes-viral-after-keeping-trump-presidency-hidden-her-son-past-four-years-1556411

So she started the lie about who was president when her child was 2? 

My mom could've told me Cookie Monster was president and I would've believed her. How is this news?

Welcome to the America that has a former failed businessman (dozens of times over) and reality TV host as President and has made billionaires out of the Kardashians for no apparent reason.
We are living in Idiocracy.

Kat

How about that?

Washington (CNN)Televangelist Pat Robertson, a prominent conservative backer of Donald Trump, said Monday that the President is living in an "alternate reality" and should "move on" from his 2020 election loss.
snipped

OnWis97

A guy who thinks homosexuality causes hurricanes thinks Trump is living in an alternate reality. And he's right.

The Juggler

He was and is an historically unpopular president. Thank god for that....


https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/22/opinions/real-reasons-trump-election-result-failure-frye/index.html

The real reason Trump is failing to overturn the election

Opinion by Timothy Frye

Updated 4:32 PM ET, Tue December 22, 2020

White House sources are sounding the alarm about Trump 03:46

Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor in the Political Science Department at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming book "Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia." The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)Autopsies on President Donald Trump's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election results are piling up. Some point to judges who rejected his unfounded claims of voter fraud. Others argue that democratic norms moved state election officials, prosecutors and civil servants to uphold the rule of law at critical moments. Still others claim that Trump's incompetence doomed the project from the start.

But these views miss an important piece of the puzzle. Trump's four-year effort to subvert democracy failed in large part because he was historically unpopular and politically weak relative to other would-be autocrats.

Some unloved politicians manage to subvert democracy, but a common path to autocracy in the modern world is for a genuinely popular leader to use high public approval ratings and overwhelming legislative victories to cow opponents and undermine institutional checks on their power. The threat to democracy is less an unpopular incumbent trying to steal an election than a would-be autocrat transforming temporary popular support into long-term institutional advantage.

Autocrats like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Vladimir Putin in Russia all came to power through more or less democratic elections and became popular before they started to dismantle democratic checks on their power.

Orbán's Fidesz party won a two-thirds majority in parliament in 2010 and then took steps to undercut the judiciary, weaken the Central Bank and create state bodies that stifled the free press.

Following a failed coup in 2016, Erdoğan used his close to 68% approval rating and dominant position in parliament to make constitutional changes that, according to one Vox article, gave the executive "frightening amounts of new powers." In 2017, Erdoğan persuaded a majority of Turkish voters to back changes that transferred vast governmental power to the President and opened the door for him to stay in office until 2029.

In his first year in office, Chávez had an 80% approval rating, which he then parlayed into constitutional changes that vastly expanded executive control. Chávez used a newly empowered National Constituent Assembly populated with loyalists to propose constitutional amendments that extended the presidential term to six years, expanded presidential powers and removed one house of the National Assembly.

In his first term in office, Putin's approval rating averaged around 74% (and, yes that approval rating is more or less accurate). In 2004, he was re-elected President in a landslide and proceeded to cancel gubernatorial elections, change electoral rules to sideline the opposition and concentrate political power in the Kremlin.

In the wake of high oil prices that spurred economic growth, foreign policy victories or the collapse of opposition parties, these leaders used great popularity to bully political allies, push potential rivals to the sidelines and demoralize opposition voters. The result has been an uneven electoral playing field, biased judicial institutions and far fewer rights for the media and voters.

Trump's ridiculous exit strategy

Support on the street and in the halls of power is critical because it gives opposition parties greater leverage to block the executive. It also alters the calculations of those who would check the aspiring autocrat's power. If the ruler is unpopular and does not control the legislature, then judges, the military and business elites may expect a power grab to fail and oppose the ruler. If the ruler is popular and controls the legislature, however, they may go along in expectation that others will as well.

Trump, to some degree, appears to share these leaders' contempt for a free press and checks on executive power, but he lacks the popular and elite support they enjoyed. According to 538's poll of polls, Trump is the only modern US president to never reach a 50% approval rating in his four years in office. His average approval rating was just 41% according to Gallup -- a full eight points less than former President Barack Obama's.

Trump's share of the popular vote in 2016 was just 46.4%. Since 1900, only Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Richard Nixon in 1968 and Bill Clinton in 1992 won office with a smaller share of the vote and, unlike Trump, these three winners faced a third-party challenger who peeled off a significant number of votes.

Trump's legislative position was also weak relative to the autocrats he sought to emulate. Trump's party held a thin majority in the Senate in 2016 and lost the House by a significant margin to the Democrats in 2018. And Trump's appeals to Ukraine and China to dig up dirt on his political opponent, his attempts to undercut the free press and his suggestion to postpone the 2020 election were done from a position of weakness rather than strength.

This is not to overlook the damage done to democracy on Trump's watch. Among other things, Trump and his Republican enablers have normalized corruption and nepotism, degraded public discourse, invited foreign involvement in US elections, abused presidential pardons, deepened racial divides and politicized the bureaucracy in ways rarely seen in American history. Trump's refusal to concede after a clear loss is sweet music for autocrats across the globe and a stain on American's reputation.

But his effort to subvert democracy has failed.

Attempts to undermine election results may falter because formal institutions curb executive power, public servants with pro-democratic norms save the day or a leader chooses the wrong strategy. But they are especially likely to fail when the leader is weak. In the end, public opinion and political power are the ultimate checks on aspiring demagogues.

Halifax2TheMax

Tricky Team Trump Treason Tax Cheat’s 20 pardons make me so proud to be ‘Murican. So proud. With more to come to make me even prouder.

mrussel1

Lost in the shuffle of everything going on,  Trump pardons the war criminals from Blackwater.  There are no depths to his repulsive behavior. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/trump-pardons-war-criminals-again/

Gern Blansten

Yeah that is unreal.  There were children killed by those fuckers

Gern Blansten

And why do I feel like we have yet to be outraged?  I can't imagine who he will pardon before he leaves if he is throwing these out now.

tbergs

mrussel1 said:

Lost in the shuffle of everything going on,  Trump pardons the war criminals from Blackwater.  There are no depths to his repulsive behavior. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/trump-pardons-war-criminals-again/

I read the WaPo article on the same thing last night and it was disturbing. One of them was given a life sentence for that disgusting mess, but you know, Erik Prince is a Trump supporter so gotta give back.

JeBurkhardt

tbergs said:

mrussel1 said:

Lost in the shuffle of everything going on,  Trump pardons the war criminals from Blackwater.  There are no depths to his repulsive behavior. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/trump-pardons-war-criminals-again/

I read the WaPo article on the same thing last night and it was disturbing. One of them was given a life sentence for that disgusting mess, but you know, Erik Prince is a Trump supporter so gotta give back.

What is the point of influence pedaling and sending cash to politicians if you can't call in those markers when you want or need something? Until we hold politicians accountable for the cash grab that elected positions become, this will never change.   

gimmesometruth27

to say i was disgusted by the pardons is the understatement of 2020. there is no fucking bottom.

mrussel1

gimmesometruth27 said:

to say i was disgusted by the pardons is the understatement of 2020. there is no fucking bottom.

Yeah I 'm not thrilled with the white collar stuff, but I'm not going blow a gasket about it.  Blackwater is different.  That was murder. 

OnWis97

mrussel1 said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

to say i was disgusted by the pardons is the understatement of 2020. there is no fucking bottom.

Yeah I 'm not thrilled with the white collar stuff, but I'm not going blow a gasket about it.  Blackwater is different.  That was murder. 

The only white collar stuff that upsets me is people that have liked/supported Trump.  That he's rewarding those that suck up to him and/or supported him in 2016 is pathetic.

As for Blackwater, yeah, definitely awful and definitely worse than even his pardioning of the Trump lovers. But beyond that, it doesn't even make sense.  It seems like he's giving the neocons a nod.  His base hates the neocons almost as much as they hate the left (even though most are former neocons). I haven't read a single story or editorial on it so maybe there's a very Trumpian rationale, but I'm surprised by it.

mrussel1

OnWis97 said:

mrussel1 said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

to say i was disgusted by the pardons is the understatement of 2020. there is no fucking bottom.

Yeah I 'm not thrilled with the white collar stuff, but I'm not going blow a gasket about it.  Blackwater is different.  That was murder. 

The only white collar stuff that upsets me is people that have liked/supported Trump.  That he's rewarding those that suck up to him and/or supported him in 2016 is pathetic.

As for Blackwater, yeah, definitely awful and definitely worse than even his pardioning of the Trump lovers. But beyond that, it doesn't even make sense.  It seems like he's giving the neocons a nod.  His base hates the neocons almost as much as they hate the left (even though most are former neocons). I haven't read a single story or editorial on it so maybe there's a very Trumpian rationale, but I'm surprised by it.

I don't know.  He has indicated in his tenure that he was okay with torture and he certainly doesn't see killing brown people the same as killing white people.  I honestly think this is as much about his racist beliefs as some nod to neocons or that he thinks they were justified in the assault.  

tbergs

This is an excerpt from the WaPo article.

There are approximately 14,000 people in line for pardons and commutations. For years, criminal justice advocates have criticized Republican and Democratic administrations alike for backlogs that left thousands of rehabilitated people seeking mercy to languish in prison.

Trump has moved even more slowly than his predecessors, who acted on hundreds or thousands of petitions by the end of four years in office. And rather than consult with the Justice Department’s pardon attorney for recommendations, Trump has routinely subverted the process and largely favored political allies and those who are well-connected for clemency.

The White House statement about Trump’s actions Tuesday noted who had recommended each pardon and commutation, a group that included Republican members of Congress and other Trump allies. Of the 20 people who received clemency, only seven had active petitions for pardons or clemency listed in online Justice Department records.