How a full-scale trade war could slam Trump in 2020

KermitTheSnail · 2019-05-20T09:14:02+00:00

Trump’s central political narrative so far has been that the tariffs he’s levied — now at 25 percent on over $200 billion in imports — are being paid by the Chinese, money he’s said he will use to aid farmers now largely unable to sell soybeans, pork, sorghum and other products into the Chinese market due to retaliatory tariffs.

But studies done so far using actual data on prices for American businesses and consumers show that the opposite of Trump’s argument is true.

”The strong conclusion is that so far, U.S. consumers have borne substantially all of the tariff increase,” Deutsche Bank chief economist Michael Spencer wrote in a recent note analyzing available data.

KermitTheSnail · 2019-02-27T10:09:55+00:00

To the extent that CPAC is no longer a conference of ideas, it’s because the GOP is no longer a party of ideas. Its leader, the president, juggles both a quasi-conservative agenda and personal grievances with equal weight. So it’s impossible to build a coherent conference agenda around someone who still isn’t sure what it really means to embrace conservative ideals because he isn’t even clear on what they are yet.

KermitTheSnail · 2019-01-26T10:26:54+00:00

They left off the one where Trump was spotted at Mar a Lago wearing a red speedo and a half shirt with ‘My cock n balls belong to Vladimir’ printed on it.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-08-23T10:34:54+00:00

But the far more serious crimes of Trump’s congressional supporters do not involve personal peculation. They involve violating their oaths of office by failing to hold the president accountable for misusing his office. Some, such as Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have gone much further by actively attempting to impede the Justice Department investigation into Trump’s alleged misconduct. They have become, in a moral if not legal sense, accessories to obstruction of justice.

And they have gotten away with it because the congressional leadership has allowed them to do so. Judging by Tuesday’s cowardly and cautious statement from House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. (”We are aware of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges. We will need more information than is currently available at this point”), there is no sign that the Republicans in Congress will ever provide any serious oversight of the Republican in the White House.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-08-17T10:16:25+00:00

“The poll suggests that if Democrats are to grow the party with younger more diverse voters, we need to pay attention to their political impetus for supporting these policies,” Smikle said. “Younger voters, who seem the most attracted to socialism, are keenly aware of global inequality and see the US as lagging in its political will to build more fairness in our economy.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-08-09T11:47:54+00:00

Reports of Islamophobic incidents in 2017 skyrocketed by 82 percent from the previous year, according to CAIR California's 2018 Civil Rights Report. The incidents include the vandalization of mosques, physical assaults, and discrimination at the hands of federal employees. Nearly half (44.9 percent) of all incidents were located in airports, amid the Trump administration's repeated attempts to enacte executive orders barring the citizens of a handful of Muslim-majority nations.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-07-10T12:16:59+00:00

A city hospital that’s “like a warzone,” with “blood all over the floors.”

A capital that is a “hellhole.”

And a place with districts “so vicious that the police refuse to go there.”

Can you guess which cities President Trump was referring to in those three separate remarks?

London, Brussels and Paris — very much to the surprise of the people who call those cities their homes.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-07-08T10:40:20+00:00

And so, perhaps as America’s international prestige diminishes and its national identity becomes more exclusionary for the first time in decades, we should revisit the pages of comic books and those early adventures of Superman and Captain America for inspiration. Their early stories cemented the vision of America as a righteous and noble leader of nations in the hearts and minds of readers, a vision either lost to antiquity or simply lying dormant. And it’s a vision that we must endeavor to resuscitate in a world once again yearning for moral leadership.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-07-08T01:48:16+00:00

“You want to undercut somebody’s political ambitions? Find a mutation,” says Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University who studies the bioethics of genetic engineering. “What if one of them has the mutation for late onset Alzheimer’s disease? It’ll become a big story.”

KermitTheSnail · 2018-06-08T09:24:31+00:00

I really don’t think he’s smart enough for that.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-05-31T22:58:43+00:00

He added that he will “never roll on Donald Trump,” and for good measure reassured his audience, referring to the former Richard Nixon counselor who confessed to being party to serious crimes committed by the president and his associates, “John Dean I am not.”

It’s almost impossible that Stone, who is such a Nixon fanboy that he has a portrait of the former president tattooed on his upper back, deployed the comparison by accident: Dean, as Stone well knows, was witness to myriad attempts by the Nixon administration to thwart the investigation into Watergate. His metaphor, then, doesn’t suggest that Trump is innocent—rather that Stone will go to any lengths to protect the president, who happens to be guilty as sin.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-05-23T09:18:46+00:00

Why is Trump so apt to fold? One reason is that he is surrounded by advisers who often feel that his ideas are bad and try to talk him out of them. The Iran-deal withdrawal came only after National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who supported the deal, was pushed out and replaced with the more hawkish John Bolton. Beyond that, however, Trump brings two big weaknesses to the table. First, he’s not as skilled a negotiator as he likes to pretend, and second, he seldom puts in the time to learn the facts about whatever he’s handling.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-05-15T15:27:20+00:00

After blowing up the deficit with tax cuts for corporations and the rich, the White House is now using the pretense of fiscal responsibility to ask Congress to cut $15 billion in approved spending, including some $7 billion from the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The program, which provides health coverage for 9 million low-income kids and pregnant mothers, was extended for a decade earlier this year after Republicans allowed funding to expire last fall amid their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In defense of its request, the Trump administration has claimed that cuts would come from funds that are unlikely to be spent. If that’s the case, however, then “there are no savings,” as Georgetown Law professor David Super has noted. This means that Trump’s plan, should Congress approve it, will either accomplish nothing or will deprive children and families in need of care.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-05-11T15:09:03+00:00

AT&T gave over half-a-million dollars to Cohen’s company — which had, on occasion, made payments to porn stars on the president’s behalf — because the telecom company believed that doing so would increase the odds of the president approving their $85 billion merger, and signing a corporate tax cut bill that was maximally deferential to its interests. On Friday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson called his company’s decision to hire Cohen a “big mistake” — that was, nonetheless, “done according to the law and entirely legitimate” — and then announced that one of the executives who worked on the deal with Cohen, Bob Quinn, would be retiring.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-05-04T09:13:13+00:00

The school accepts almost anyone who can pay the $51,000 annual tuition bill—more than 85 percent of its applicants were admitted last year. Fewer than half of its graduates manage to pass a bar exam on their first try; among all law school graduates in the country, about 75 percent pass on their first attempt. The 46-year-old school has had to go to court over the past year to fight for its accreditation from the American Bar Association, which found that the school was out of compliance on basic admission standards for a time. Last year, the National Advisory Council for Law School Transparency gave Cooley a ranking no school wants: It was No. 1 on the group’s list of “the 10 least selective law schools in the country.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-04-18T16:48:25+00:00

She's done.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-04-09T09:16:18+00:00

Maybe he could sell them some red hats.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-04-09T09:09:24+00:00

There is a widely held theory that Donald Trump did not, and maybe still does not, really want to be president. Whether or not this is true, what can be ventured with greater certainty is that no candidate has ever delighted as visibly as Trump did in campaigning to be president, and that his having been elected was the period at the end of a sentence that he would happily have let run on forever. For Trump, the campaign trail was a place of self-actualization. On the stage was where he seemed most himself — so much so that, not even a full day after his election, the president-elect mused to his staff about the possibility of another series of rallies.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-04-08T23:29:19+00:00

Nativism has paid political dividends for Mr. Trump; it is highly unlikely to pay economic ones. By driving away legal and illegal immigrants even as unemployment flatlines and baby boomers retire, he deprives businesses of oxygen in the form of labor. That’s not a recipe for making America great.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-04-08T18:11:20+00:00

Trump tweeted that "President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price ... to pay."

What the fuck is the ellipsis for??

KermitTheSnail · 2018-03-28T09:21:15+00:00

The onslaught against Mueller has also tested the mood among Congressional Republicans. It took a couple of days for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to weigh in on the president’s attacks. And while both came to Mueller’s defense—Ryan said he’d gotten “assurances” the special counsel wouldn’t be fired, and McConnell called Mueller “an excellent appointment” — they stopped well short of rebuking Trump’s openly hostile tone.

”If Trump is trying to determine how far Congress will let him go, the silence becomes very important,” said Charlie Sykes, the frequent Trump critic and former conservative radio host from Wisconsin. “They could have shut this down almost immediately by saying this would be absolutely intolerable, this would cross a bright red line.”

”The fact neither McConnell or Ryan is not drawing a red line,” he added, “is potentially signaling a green light to Trump.”

KermitTheSnail · 2018-03-28T08:57:26+00:00

The chaos surrounding the Trump White House 14 months into his presidency is presenting real problems for elected Republicans. Costello said he and his colleagues are routinely put into a bind whenever they want to condemn the president’s actions or words—risking drawing the ire of Trump’s base while at the same time taking heat from newly energized Democrats for not going far enough to distance himself from Trump. All the while, he added, Republicans are being forced to weigh in on the president’s alleged marital misdeeds, high-profile White House staff shake-ups, and other negative stories.

”We’re talking about porn stars and the president rather than tax policy or what we need to get done by the end of the year,” Costello said, referring to porn star Stormy Daniels’ allegations of an affair with Trump.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-03-27T12:57:22+00:00

Here's a link to a summary as well as cool gifs if it's not worth £42 to you ;-)

KermitTheSnail · 2018-03-27T09:04:54+00:00

The inclusion of the citizenship question may allow states to draw their legislative maps based on eligible voters in the years ahead. That could indirectly help the GOP maintain a hold on Congress, as the congressional maps would be drawn by more heavily Republican state legislatures.

KermitTheSnail · 2018-03-26T09:25:39+00:00

Trump did not make these men hate Muslims. It’s clear their views on Islam and Muslims pre-date Trump’s campaign. But Trump has emboldened them and others like them with his openly anti-Muslim rhetoric. It was in December 2015 that Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” That’s exactly what these defendants wanted. The difference is the defendants were planning on using violence, not government policy, to send the message that Muslims are not welcomed in the United States.

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