What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[11B4V]

Can I be Space Force?

[The Minsky Moment]

Service guarantees citizenship.

[Legbiter]

Will it have Space Marines?

[The Brain]

And they shall know no thing.

[11B4V]

Will it have Space Marines?

With power armor too, so Ed doesn't need his scooter.

[Razgovory]

Republicans now prefer Kim Jong Un to Nancy Pelosi

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has ordered the killing of members of his own family. He has tortured his citizens for speaking their minds, and overseen forced labor camps that enslave tens of thousands. He is reported to have executed rivals with antiaircraft guns. And he has threatened to unleash nuclear weapons on the United States.

Surely Democrats and Republicans can agree that North Korea's dictator is far worse than any American elected official. Right?

Yet, in an Ipsos poll of 1,000 people conducted June 14-15, more Republicans have a favorable view of Kim than of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). In total, 19 percent of Republican respondents indicated that they viewed him favorably, compared to 17 percent who said the same about Pelosi.

This is the ultimate statistic of the Trump era – one in which partisan tribalism and polarization have become absolutes while truth and morality have become relative.

Kim Jong Un may starve millions, sure, but – prepare yourself for the collective gasp of horror – Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat.

A growing number of Republicans now see politics purely through the lens of Trump's cult of personality. Pelosi stands up to Trump; Kim just shook his hand. Trump says Kim is a "strong" leader who can "run it tough" but says that Pelosi is "weak." That's enough for many Trump followers to conclude that Pelosi is bad and Kim is good. Sure, Pyongyang doesn't look great – but have you seen San Francisco?

This is, to a large extent, Trump's fault. His constant lies, gaslighting, whataboutism and moral debasement have caused many of his supporters to lose their moral bearings. Indeed, shortly before Trump took office, a poll showed that 35 percent of Republicans viewed Vladimir Putin favorably, compared to just 9 percent who felt the same way about President Barack Obama. Those numbers were surely affected by Trump attacking Obama with lies while consistently acting as a moral apologist for Putin, a man who murders journalists, assassinates rivals, and has helped commit war crimes in Syria.

But before we blame Trump exclusively, it is historically inaccurate to claim that he is the exclusive cause of our partisan tribalism or moral relativism toward abusive dictators. There was a brief period in which polls showed Democrats with more favorable views of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez than President George W. Bush (though it's worth pointing out that, while Chavez was a murderous autocrat, he didn't rise to Kim's level of depravity).

The gulf between Democrats and Republicans has been steadily growing for many years before Trump entered office. In 1994, 16 percent of Democrats had a "very unfavorable" view of the Republican Party; 17 percent of Republicans thought the reverse about the Democrats.

By 2014, those numbers had spiked: 43 percent of Republicans had a very unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, with 36 percent – more than one in three – saying that the Democrats are "a threat to the nation's well-being." For Democrats' views of Republicans, the animosity was less intense, but still had grown considerably. In many ways, Trump's victory was the result of tribalism rather than the cause of it.

But since taking office, Trump has departed from all previous administrations by pursuing a "base-only" political strategy aimed at solidifying support among Republicans rather than winning over Democrats. As a result, he has absurdly depicted Democrats as evil incarnate – people who want gangs of illegal immigrants to come to your house and abduct and murder your child. (In truth, not a single congressional Democrat condones illegal immigration and all of them find gangs like MS-13 despicable).

On the other hand, Kim Jong Un recently detained a young American, Otto Warmbier, and left him to die. There is some serious Houdini-level moral contortionism going on within the ranks of the Republican Party for some people to view him favorably while simultaneously demonizing Pelosi.

Americans of all political stripes used to be able to agree that, even if the rival political party wasn't great, it was certainly better than a foreign dictator. That is no longer the case.

American democracy is under threat from such unhinged tribalism. After all, if you think that Pelosi is worse than a dictator who runs prison camps with forced labor, then how could you possibly condone a politician in your political tribe compromising with her?

For too many Americans, a clear sense of moral right and wrong has been sacrificed on the relativistic Trumpian altar of intensifying polarization.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/06/20/republicans-now-prefer-kim-jong-un-to-nancy-pelosi/?utm_term=.304c39150d35

[Eddie Teach]

People are ignorant, news at 11.

[The Brain]

Republicans will be Republicans.

[garbon]

I'd rate both unfavorably but on wildly different magnitudes.

[The Larch]

Apparently Trump threw candy at Merkel at the G7 meeting after the famous picture was taken. 

Trump reportedly threw Starbursts on a table before Germany's Angela Merkel at the G7 summit and said, 'Don't say I never give you anything'

    Ian Bremmer, the Eurasia Group president, told CBS on Wednesday that President Donald Trump threw Starburst candies onto a table at the G7 summit for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and said: "Here, Angela. Don't say I never give you anything."
    Bremmer said the incident occurred near the end of the summit after world leaders pressured Trump to sign the joint communiqué.
    The summit was marked by tensions between Trump and US allies over trade.

Bremmer said that at the end of the summit, Merkel and Trudeau were pressing Trump to sign the joint communiqué, a statement expressing common diplomatic goals and traditionally signed by all parties at G7 summits.

"Trump was sitting there with his arms crossed, clearly not liking the fact that he felt like they were ganging up on him. He eventually agreed; he said OK, he'll sign it," Bremmer said. "At that point, he stood up, he put his hand in his pocket - his suit jacket pocket - and he took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table, and said to Merkel: 'Here, Angela. Don't say I never give you anything.'"

The CBS host Gayle King then asked Bremmer whether it was possible the "Starburst outburst" was just a friendly gesture and an attempt at humor on Trump's part.

"It's hard to, keeping in mind that Trump didn't want to go to the G7," Bremmer said. "He was convinced by his advisers the day before that he needed to. And one thing we know about Trump is when he's told to do things that he doesn't want to do, he doesn't respond to them easily."

Bremmer added that world leaders and diplomats he had spoken to were "extraordinarily disheartened" at Trump's lack of enthusiasm or interest in working with US allies at the summit.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-welfare-department-reorganization.html

Trump to Propose Government Reorganization, Targeting Safety Net Programs

WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to propose a reorganization of the federal government as early as Thursday that includes a possible merger of the Education and Labor Departments, coupled with a reshuffling of other domestic agencies to make them easier to cut or revamp, according to administration officials briefed on the proposal.

The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word "welfare" in its title.

Mr. Trump and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, the architect of the plan, have sought to redefine as welfare subsistence benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and housing aid. It is part of a rebranding effort, championed by conservative think tanks and House Republicans, to link them to unpopular direct-cash assistance programs that have traditionally been called welfare.

"They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative," said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. "The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids."

At the heart of the plan is expected to be an attempt to shift SNAP, which serves more than 42 million poor and working-class Americans, to the new agency from the Agriculture Department. Conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and Koch-related entities, have long sought to de-link food aid from agriculture in hopes of cutting costs.

Senate Republicans, who have already rejected a more modest Trump administration attempt to increase work requirements for SNAP recipients, are unlikely to sign off on the shift, which was first reported by Politico.

As recently as earlier this month, Mr. Mulvaney was also considering merging the Labor and Education Departments, either in the new welfare agency or in a new stand-alone department, according to a person with knowledge of his plans.

Calls to the White House and its budget office were not immediately returned.

The recommendations also include a number of less contentious proposals to streamline the government.

Mr. Mulvaney's proposal is, in part, a back-to-the-future bureaucratic move. From 1953 to 1979, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare housed most of the nation's social welfare and economic support programs. It was abolished by Congress under President Jimmy Carter, and split into the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education, in recognition that no single department could manage all of the old department's functions.

Another proposal included in a draft circulated to officials last week is an attempt to move the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant Program to the Department of Commerce from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an official said.

This year, Mr. Mulvaney zeroed out funding for the grant program, which provides a broad and flexible funding pool for an array of community development, only to have Senate Republicans restore the cuts.

An adviser to a senior Senate Republican said the move to the Commerce Department was an attempt to strangle the program by removing it from career HUD officials who were more sympathetic to the demands of impoverished communities than Commerce Department officials.

Conservatives have been agitating to remove development programs from HUD for years. In 2006, aides to President George W. Bush unsuccessfully pushed to shift 18 programs to the Commerce Department.

Under Mr. Trump's plan, HUD would gain control over the Agriculture Department's rural housing program. A proposal to shift veterans' housing to HUD was considered but rejected, according to an administration official with knowledge of the plan.

The Education Department has been eyeing several programs run by the Labor Department that it believes it would run more effectively, according to an extensive proposal drafted by Education Department officials last fall, and obtained by The New York Times in March.

Among the proposals in that plan was for the Education Department to reroute funding from the Labor Department's program for adult and dislocated workers to invest in federal financial aid grants for the unemployed to use at short-term job training programs. The Education Department also proposed to take over some administration of an overhauled H1-B visa program for skilled workers to enter the United States, allowing it to use visa fees to bolster science, technology, engineering and math education.

The proposed merger of the Education and Labor Departments was first reported by Education Week.

Mr. Mulvaney and White House officials have closely guarded details of their plan, sharing them with political appointees but not career staff members at cabinet departments.

Administration officials said the blueprint for the plan was a 2017 list of reorganization recommendations produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The group's wish list includes the elimination of a handful of well-known federal programs, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Export-Import Bank. It was not clear if Mr. Mulvaney had adopted those suggestions. But he is expected to propose far-reaching overhauls to the consumer bureau, which he runs as a second job.

[crazy canuck]

People tracking Trump's claims report that his false claims per day are increasing.

The part that would be hilarious if it were not so terrifying is this note:

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of "false claims," not lies? Click here for our detailed explanation. The short answer is that we can't be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/analysis/2018/06/21/trump-said-71-false-things-in-14-days-his-dishonesty-is-increasing-over-time.html

[crazy canuck]

People are ignorant, news at 11.

I am wondering, did you read the line that said, "American democracy is under threat from such unhinged tribalism. After all, if you think that Pelosi is worse than a dictator who runs prison camps with forced labor, then how could you possibly condone a politician in your political tribe compromising with her?" before you posted.

[Eddie Teach]

Yes I read that. I've also seen countless polls like this in the past. Democracy is not threatened by people making ignorant responses to these polls.

[crazy canuck]

Yes I read that. I've also seen countless polls like this in the past. Democracy is not threatened by people making ignorant responses to these polls.

Really, you have seen countless polls showing a significant amount of Americans prefer the world's worst dictator over American politicians they disagree with.  Do you live in the same fantasy world as Donald Trump?  You certainly have the same penchant for exaggeration.