Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

With the departure of White House chief of staff John Kelly, the misinformation emanating from President Trump has only escalated.

What's happening: Alumni of this White House see a possible reason. Although Kelly was thwarted in many of his efforts to control the president, one place he made authentic inroads was clamping down on the paper flow to the Oval Office. "Anyone who circumvented that process was going to have a serious problem," said a former official who saw the transformation up close.

"It has devolved into anarchy," added another alumnus of Trump's White House.

• "Someone mentioned to me a few days ago it's like the old [pre-Kelly] days of the administration, just with less people," this former official continued.
• "The wild, wild west. ... At least during the early days, he had a bit of a buffer with Hope [Hicks] and [longtime bodyguard] Keith [Schiller] there."

Wednesday was Kelly's last formal day in the White House, but his influence had declined since he announced his departure on Dec. 8.

Since then, Trump has made several unusually specific factual assertions that were quickly shown to be inaccurate, suggesting more unvetted information may be reaching him than had been the case in the heyday of Kelly's control:

• Arguably the most notable one ... During Wednesday's devil-may-care, 95-minute https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-cabinet-meeting-12/, Trump said that back in 1979, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan "because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there." A Wall Street Journal editorial scolded: "We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President."
• Walls as a weapon ... Trump tweeted last Sunday: "President and Mrs. Obama built/has a ten foot Wall around their D.C. mansion/compound." The WashPost https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/31/trump-claims-theres-foot-wall-around-obamas-dc-home-neighbors-say-theres-not (reported): "Obamas' neighbors [said] there is no such wall. The 8,200-square-foot structure, despite several security features, is completely visible from the street."
• At the Cabinet meeting, Trump said: "[T]he Vatican has the biggest wall of them all." Dan Scavino, Trump's director of social media, had tweeted during the campaign: "Vatican City is 100% surrounded by massive walls." The N.Y. Times reports: "Vatican City has walls, but they do not enclose the entire territory and visitors can easily enter some parts."
• Also during the Cabinet meeting, per the N.Y. Times, "Trump mocked India for doing no more in Afghanistan than building a library, which generated ... head scratching [in New Delhi] because, according to Indian news media, the country has not built a library in Afghanistan in many years."
• And then there's the president's depiction of how tariffs work. "China is paying us tremendous tariffs. We’re getting billions and billions of dollars of money pouring into the Treasury," he said Friday at a Rose Garden https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-meeting-congressional-leadership-border-security/. The N.Y. Times points out: "The United States does not send China a bill for the cost of tariffs, which are often passed on to American importers or consumers."

Be smart: The WashPost called the Cabinet meeting "a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/04/fact-checking-trumps-free-wheeling-cabinet-session/ (fact-checking nightmare)."

• Better rest up: The president believes he pays no price for https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/30/year-unprecedented-deception-trump-averaged-false-claims-day/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.96105c973a9d (escalating inaccuracies), even ones that have been repeatedly debunked. ("https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/10/meet-bottomless-pinocchio-new-rating-false-claim-repeated-over-over-again/?utm_term=.5c1a51d0e9bc (Bottomless Pinocchios)," the WashPost Fact Checker calls them.)
• With most of his human guardrails gone, the unvetted language of Trump's rallies is once again a staple of his governing.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

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[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested raising the top tax rate to 70 percent in order to raise money to fund climate change investments. Conservatives were dismayed by the proposal while liberals and leftists generally defended the proposal by pointing to the fact that top tax rates in the US were once 91 percent and by pointing to tax scholarship that says rates that high (or even higher) are optimal.

One thing missing from the discussion so far is the point that a 70 percent top tax rate exists, not merely in midcentury US tax codes or in academic papers, but also in the real world right now. Sweden has a 70 percent marginal tax rate and it kicks in, not at $10 million like AOC proposes, but at around $98,000. AOC’s proposal is quite modest by comparison.

...

Those doing cross-country comparisons often fail to properly account for the employer-side payroll tax and thereby hugely understate the tax rates of countries like Sweden, which rely heavily on those kinds of taxes. But despite their name, these taxes are ultimately paid by workers and therefore come in just like personal income taxes do when measuring how much a unit of labor is being taxed.

What a 70 percent tax rate would look like is thus much less hypothetical than people imagine it to be. Sweden is not perfect but it’s a successful high-income country where ordinary people have a higher standard of living than their US peers.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

• Donald Trump sought the presidency on a fantasy: with Mexico's money, he would build a "great wall" of concrete-and-steel across America's southern border.
• Ever since he won, Trump has obscured his inability to make the fantasy real.
• He has fogged the air on whether he seeks a wall or something else, whether he needs money from Congress or not, whether the wall is "desperately needed" or already largely built.

It doesn't make sense to most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters they oppose a border-long wall. Democrats insist it would send the wrong message about national values without achieving its purported goals.

While beseeching lawmakers for taxpayer money, Trump still claims "Mexico is paying for the wall." He cites unspecified proceeds from a revised North American Free Trade Agreement.

In fact, no such proceeds exist; the revised trade deal has been neither ratified nor implemented. The false claim illustrates Pelosi's description of how Trump confounds negotiations.

"He resists science, evidence, data, truth," the new speaker told NBC's Savannah Guthrie. Pelosi now has the power and inclination to spell that out.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[hunterbro]

I wonder if posting this hogwash so obsessively is exhausting. For sure, it's beyond troubling. I mean seriously.... do you have ANY sort of life whatsoever?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“I’m older now and I’m just upset about what’s going on,” he explains. “When you see someone like [Trump] becoming president, I thought, well, OK, let’s see what he does – maybe he’ll change. But he just got worse. It showed me that he is a real racist. I thought maybe as a New Yorker he understands the diversity in the city but he’s as bad as I thought he was before – and much worse. It’s a shame. It’s a bad thing in this country.”

Trump, who launched his political career by propagating conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, has drawn moral equivalence between white nationalists and anti-fascist protesters and turned back the clock on racial diversity in the White House. De Niro, who has six mixed-race children, admits: “Yeah, I worry, and one of my kids is gay, and he worries about being treated a certain way. We talk about it.”

Like many white liberals, he says, he was “naive” about Obama’s two election wins and their implication of a post-racial America. “I felt we were on a new thing. I didn’t realise how against him certain people were – racially against him, offended that he was there.”

Would he call Trump a white supremacist? “Yes,” De Niro says instantly. And what about a fascist? “I guess that’s what it leads to. If he had his way, we’d wind up in a very bad state in this country. I mean, the way I understand it, they laughed at Hitler. They all look funny. Hitler looked funny, Mussolini looked funny and other dictators and despots look funny.

“What bothers me is that there will be people in the future who see him as an example and they’ll be affected in some way, but they’ll be a lot smarter and have many more colours to their personality and be more mercurial and become someone with the same values as he has but able to get much further and do more damage as a despot. That’s my worry. There are people who look up to him: ‘I want to be like him.’ But they’ll do it much better and they’ll be more smart about it.”

De Niro is speaking just after Trump has described his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, as a “rat” for cooperating with federal investigators, prompting news networks to play clips from some of the actor’s greatest mobster hits, such as Goodfellas, The Godfather Part II and The Untouchables. He muses: “I mean, a mob boss calls people ‘a rat’. That means you lied and somebody snitched on you, so you did commit the crime. So that’s interesting and he makes mobsters look bad because there are mobsters who will shake your hand and keep their word. He can’t even do that.

“He’s a con artist. He’s a huckster. He’s a scam artist. And what bothers me is that people don’t see that. I think that The Apprentice had a lot to do with that, which I never saw but once, maybe. It’s all smoke and mirrors, it’s all bullshit.”

 

[Oregongearhead]

Heres the problem with a steel-slat only wall .....PORTABLE SAWS !!

 

[Swiper]

Heres the problem with a steel-slat only wall .....PORTABLE SAWS !!

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What you fail to comprehend is that by the time they get to the fence and start cutting which that saw and blade will not work and or not in time because the drones and sensors will sense them. which then will dispatch border patrol to capture them. it’s a barrier to stop or hinder illegal immigrants and drug smugglers access to the united states until border patrol can capture them.

or, i’m sure your solution and the DemocRATS is to just have drones flying around so we can watch them sneak into United States. by the time they get in it’s too fucking late. then they’ll claim their phony asylum. which is what you guys want anyway. that’s why you’re against any kind of barrier on the border because you don’t care if people risk their lives and come here illegally.