• In total there are 3 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 3 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

I Hope This Is What People Want

A forum dedicated to friendly and civil conversations about domestic and global politics, history, and present-day events.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

Trump team prepares dramatic cuts

Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned.

The changes they propose are dramatic.

The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/31499 ... matic-cuts
User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

Well, he is officially the 45th president of United States now. It's horrible beyond words to think about it very deeply. His inaugural ball has the lowest turnout ever. Where Obama had 400,000 people, Trump has about 10,000. Virtually no decent musical acts. They either outright refused or bowed out once they realized how deeply this man is hated.

What's truly pathetic is that Trump had a chance to do some fence-mending between November 9th and January 20. He could have issued olive branches and apologies to those he feuded with and offended. He could have stopped that goddamn tweeting and at least tried to act like a decent human being with the knowledge of the power he now wields and the awareness of just how easily it can go tragically wrong if he doesn't use it wisely. He could have spoken of unity and cooperation. Instead Trump has chosen to do none of these.

Trump is not only a narcissist and a sociopath, he is a sadist. He enjoys hurting people. The gusto with which he hurls insults with people he shouldn't be bothering with demonstrates a shocking inability to let any perceived slight pass not only because he is thin-skinned to what will prove to be a tragic degree but because it's an opportunity to hurt someone, to belittle them, to wipe his ass with them, to show everybody how he is not to be fucked with. His labeling of people--Little Marco, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary, his body-shaming of women who criticized him even mildly, displays a stunted sense of propriety which he wields with clumsy heavy-handedness to cover his lack of knowledge of just about everything that isn't Donald Trump. The more crass and crude he is about it, the more his brain-damaged followers love him.

In the days since he was declared the victor of the 2016 presidential election, Trump has chosen to be at least as divisive and hateful as he ever was. And he chooses to do it on Twitter, he chooses to target people fighting to keep jobs from leaving by pointing them out to his followers on Twitter to attack and send death threats to. He chooses to target teenaged girls who dare to question his intentions with disparaging tweets that send them fleeing into hiding when the death threats start flying. He chooses to destroy foreign policy without any warning whatsoever in 140 characters or less. He attacks civil rights heroes who question his legitimacy after he refuses to heed the intelligence services whose job it is to keep him informed by insulting his constituents in Georgia as ghetto rats running around committing crime. And he further insults his intelligence services by taking the word of Putin and Assange over them.

Yes, he could have showed us that we misjudged him by acting like a fucking president. But he chose not to do that. Instead he chose to show us that he is exactly what I said he is. And now it's too late. He has thoughtlessly squandered his opportunity to try and bring Americans together and takes office as the most hated president that anyone currently living will ever see in their lifetimes (unless the republican party isn't done shoving even more unqualified hatemongers down our throats).

The only thing I am grateful to Trump for is that he showed us in all its nakedness what the republican party truly is--the white people's defense party. Think I'm full of shit? Go ask any republican or any Trump supporter and they will tell you that Trump is for white people, that he is the only candidate with enough balls to stand up for white people, that he spits in the face of all the democratic race-traitors selling the white way of life down the river by pandering to smelly apes and greasy banditos for their votes. Of course, their racism vanishes the second they run across a black Trump supporter, then they transform into beacons of racial unity.

This is it, folks. The die is cast. No turning back.
User avatar
DWill

1H - GOLD CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 6966
Joined: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:05 am
16
Location: Luray, Virginia
Has thanked: 2262 times
Been thanked: 2470 times

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

According to The Hill newspaper, Trump will turn in his cell phone and be issued a secure Blackberry (a Blackberry, really?). Hope DJT can learn to tweet on the new device--NOT.

I like the wisdom of the ancient Greeks here: A man's character is his fate. It's likely to be that simple a proposition with this new president, for all the reasons DB just cited.

While we're at it, let's take a moment to appreciate a man who filled the office of the president with supreme dignity for eight years, and who led an administration devoid of any scandal (indeed, as someone said, the only scandal was the Secret service being unable to stop people from trying to harm the first family in the White House). Whether you like or dislike Barack Obama (and I like him), you have to grant that he was class.
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

OF COURSE this is exactly what the people wanted - why else would we have voted him in office? :lol:

Art helps. Thanks Shepard Fairey!

Image


Image
User avatar
geo

2C - MOD & GOLD
pets endangered by possible book avalanche
Posts: 4779
Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:24 am
15
Location: NC
Has thanked: 2199 times
Been thanked: 2200 times
United States of America

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

It will be interesting to see if Brooks is right here. That this Trump administration will lean more towards anarchy than fascism. Then again, anarchy can lead to fascism.
The Internal Invasion
by David Brooks

This is a remarkable day in the history of our country. We have never over our centuries inaugurated a man like Donald Trump as president of the United States. You can select any random group of former presidents — Madison, Lincoln, Hoover, Carter — and none of them are like Trump.

We’ve never had a major national leader as professionally unprepared, intellectually ill informed, morally compromised and temperamentally unfit as the man taking the oath on Friday. So let’s not lessen the shock factor that should reverberate across this extraordinary moment.

It took a lot to get us here. It took a once-in-a-century societal challenge — the stresses and strains brought by the global information age — and it took a political system that was too detached and sclerotic to understand and deal with them.

There are many ways to capture this massive failure, but I’d rely on the old sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. All across the world, we have masses of voters who live in a world of gemeinschaft: where relationships are personal, organic and fused by particular affections. These people define their loyalty to community, faith and nation in personal, in-the-gut sort of ways.

But we have a leadership class and an experience of globalization that is from the world of gesellschaft: where systems are impersonal, rule based, abstract, indirect and formal.

Many people in Europe love their particular country with a vestigial affection that is like family — England, Holland or France. But meritocratic elites of Europe gave them an abstract intellectual construct called the European Union.

Many Americans think their families and their neighborhoods are being denuded by the impersonal forces of globalization, finance and technology. All the Republican establishment could offer was abstract paeans to the free market. All the Democrats could offer was Hillary Clinton, the ultimate cautious, remote, calculating, gesellschaft thinker.

It was the right moment for Trump, the ultimate gemeinschaft man. He is all gut instinct, all blood and soil, all about loyalty over detached reason. His business is a pre-modern family clan, not an impersonal corporation, and he is staffing his White House as a pre-modern family monarchy, with his relatives and a few royal retainers. In his business and political dealings, he simply doesn’t acknowledge the difference between private and public, personal and impersonal. Everything is personal, pulsating outward from his needy core.

The very thing that made him right electorally for this moment will probably make him an incompetent president. He is the ultimate anti-institutional man, but the president sits at the nerve center of a routinized, regularized four-million-person institution. If the figure at the center can’t give consistent, clear and informed direction, the whole system goes haywire, with vicious infighting and creeping anarchy.

Some on the left worry that we are seeing the rise of fascism, a new authoritarian age. That gets things exactly backward. The real fear in the Trump era should be that everything will become disorganized, chaotic, degenerate, clownish and incompetent.

The real fear should be that Trump is Captain Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.

That’s ultimately why this could be a pivotal day. For the past few decades our leadership class has been polarized. We’ve wondered if there is some opponent out there that could force us to unite and work together. Well, that opponent is being inaugurated, not in the form of Trump the man, but in the form of the chaos and incompetence that will likely radiate from him, month after month. For America to thrive, people across government will have to cooperate and build arrangements to quarantine and work around the president.

People in the defense, diplomatic and intelligence communities will have to build systems to prevent him from intentionally or unintentionally bumbling into a global crisis. People in his administration and in Congress will have to create systems so his ill-informed verbal spasms don’t derail coherent legislation.

If Trump’s opponents behave as clownishly as he does — like the congressmen who are narcissistically boycotting the inaugural — the whole government will get further delegitimized. But if people redouble their commitment to constitutional norms and practices, to substance and dignity, this thing is survivable.

Already you see the political system uniting to contain Trump. In negotiations on the Hill, administration officials feel free to ignore his verbiage on health care and other issues. Members of his team are already good at pretending that Trump doesn’t mean what he clearly does mean, on matters of NATO and much else.

I’ve been rewatching “Yes, Minister” these days. That was a hilarious British sitcom about a permanent government apparatus that contained and overruled a bumbling political master. America will need a beneficent version of that sort of clever cooperation.

With Trump it’s not the ideology, it’s the disorder. Containing that could be the patriotic cause that brings us together.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opin ... ction&_r=0
-Geo
Question everything
User avatar
geo

2C - MOD & GOLD
pets endangered by possible book avalanche
Posts: 4779
Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:24 am
15
Location: NC
Has thanked: 2199 times
Been thanked: 2200 times
United States of America

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

LanDroid wrote:OF COURSE this is exactly what the people wanted - why else would we have voted him in office? :lol:

Art helps. Thanks Shepard Fairey!
My son is a big fan of Shepard Fairey and even knows what the man looks like. So he was sitting in his car in downtown Charleston a couple of weeks ago, waiting for his girlfriend. And Shepard Fairey comes along, stapling some of his flyers to sign posts. My son jumped out and introduced himself. He even got someone to snap a photo of them.
-Geo
Question everything
User avatar
DB Roy
Beyond Awesome
Posts: 1011
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:37 am
9
Has thanked: 43 times
Been thanked: 602 times

Re: I Hope This Is What People Want

Unread post

DWill wrote:According to The Hill newspaper, Trump will turn in his cell phone and be issued a secure Blackberry (a Blackberry, really?). Hope DJT can learn to tweet on the new device--NOT.

I like the wisdom of the ancient Greeks here: A man's character is his fate. It's likely to be that simple a proposition with this new president, for all the reasons DB just cited.

While we're at it, let's take a moment to appreciate a man who filled the office of the president with supreme dignity for eight years, and who led an administration devoid of any scandal (indeed, as someone said, the only scandal was the Secret service being unable to stop people from trying to harm the first family in the White House). Whether you like or dislike Barack Obama (and I like him), you have to grant that he was class.
I'd have to say that he's the best president if not in my lifetime then certainly since I've been old enough to vote. Right now, I'd elect him for life if it would keep this douchebag from taking over.
Post Reply

Return to “Current Events & History”