The US Hamster Wheel

[Capetonian]

Come on Ben, be fair. It's only wrong when the Trump supporters do it, it's quite acceptable when the losers behave badly.
Chuks doesn't think. He regurgitates and repeats.

[Chuks]

Do you mean 52%, Ben? And according to CBS it's 32%. So? You pick one you like and I'll pick one I like: alternative facts! Anyway, yeah, Trump's popularity is soaring. He's now ahead of Kim Jong Un and level with HPV. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls ... -5493.html

I think that someone should have called the cops on those demonstrators. The women report having been attacked both arriving and leaving? Nobody there to escort them, to look after them after they had that trouble on the way in? That is a bit strange, for a ball attended by veterans, but anyway, if the incident was as has been reported, I think whoever did that should have been arrested for assault. It's not as if the D.C. cops were going to condone that sort of misbehavior, was it? I would hope not.

[BenThere]

Note the 52% poll you linked is a week old. Today's Rasmussen cites approval at 57%. Nice trajectory, ain't it, after only 4 days in office? Seems people like a president who actually works for a living, and is diligently going about doing what he said he would do, eh?

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... rack_jan24

[Magnus]

Chuks, has Trump ever been tried for sexual assault in a criminal court, rather than just sued in a civil court where the burden of proof is much lower? The admissibility of similar fact evidence varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; search online for Moorov Doctrine which has been a major part of Scots law since, I think, 1930, and has led to conviction in cases where separate similar, but unrelated assaults over years.

[Chuks]

No, Trump has never been subject to a criminal trial for sexual assault. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about his history in that regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tr ... llegations

Right now he's subject to a civil complaint of defamation that stems from a complaint about Trump sexually harassing a young woman who was in a Trump beauty contest, because Trump called her accusations lies. (Have a look at all the images of a grinning, leering Trump embracing and even kissing various women young enough to be his daughters and grand-daughters. This is a guy who looks like a sex pest, a real creep.) He will probably have to sit for a deposition in connection with this case, as President! There you go, another sitting President as the defendant in a case stemming from an alleged case of him being a sex pest. Yup, Donald Trump is making history just as Slick Willy Clinton did, except that Trump's deed was allegedly non-consensual, which must make it worse.

It's obvious that Trump is a low-life when it comes to respecting women, respecting the marriage oath, shown by his own words. On the other hand, he's always had access to lots of money; access for a long time to one of the most genuinely frightening, totally ruthless litigators in modern American history, Roy Cohn; access to political influence; access to very many things that seem to have enabled him to get away with seriously bad behavior that a normal citizen would have got into terrible trouble for. (I have never been shown any sense on Trump's part of his ever having behaved badly, aside from that occasional, lame "Sorry if you feel offended," the rich jerk's version of an apology.) Trump's problem might be that, even though he's now in a position of great power, he's been doing wrong things for a very long time, so that something or other might finally catch up with him. He and his partisans are trying to make him out to be a victim of a "witch hunt" done by "sore losers," but it's very easy to see him as a sex predator who might just get what's coming to him.

It's striking that many who try to defend Trump, such as Ben, don't deny much of what he's done, of what he's said, but just dig up stuff that others, such as Bill Clinton, have done along similar lines. (That or else they focus on his empty promises of change, of making America great again and all that bosh.) That's not much real use, though. If I get caught robbing the poor box in the local church it's not going to be much help to me to point to someone else who just crossed the street without waiting for the light to turn green. Sure, Bill Clinton got away with a lot of bad behavior, but does that mean we should let Donald Trump get away with worse?

[Cacophonix]

Chuks, it is such and as useless people (I would say swine but I like pigs) as these who will project us into another dark age and possibly a world war. I have no time for them and will not yield. They disgust humanity, civilisation (and ultimately me)!

There can be no sweetness now. We are at war!

Caco

[Chuks]

When you combine all the polls then you may get a very different number from Ben's, just 39.7%. https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/po ... ble-rating

This sort of thing matters a lot to Donald Trump, but for the rest of us it's just something to play with, I think. One guy comes up with one number, another comes up with a different one; Kellyanne Goebbels comes up with "Most Americans don't care to see his tax returns," but a recent poll wants to tell us that 75% of us very much do want to see them; and so on.

Good news is greeted by Trump and his minions as such, while bad news is greeted as "fake news." Using that approach it's hard to see how the Trump Administration is going to be able to get along with the media for very long. On the other hand, just because Sean Spicer told lies in a manner rather polite during his second press conference the media assembled seemed to think that was just fine. We are back to "business as usual," I guess.

It will be interesting to see thin-skinned Donald forced to bear up under open displays of dislike and contempt from the public, such that he's going to be seeking the solitude of Trump Tower every chance he gets, even if that means running another gantlet of abuse there in New York City, where he's probably even more despised than in D.C.

Going forward we can look forward to the litigation of a suit challenging Donald's lease on the money-losing Trump hotel in D.C. (As a government official he is prohibited from holding a lease from the GSA, the Government Services Agency. It will be interesting to see how he sorts this relatively minor infraction out. Perhaps this will give us a clue to how he plans to handle bigger violations, such as those of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.)

As to that, there seems to be some confusion about what an emolument is. Trump's lawyer wanted to tell us that payment for a hotel stay is not an emolument, since it's a fair exchange, money to Trump in exchange for a hotel room from Trump, as if to say that an emolument would have to be money paid for nothing. That's not correct. Merriam-Webster defines an emolument so:

1
: the returns arising from office or employment usually in the form of compensation or perquisites

2
archaic : advantage

For example, the Kuwaiti ambassador abruptly switched his National Day celebrations from the Four Seasons, where it had been held for years, to Trump's hotel, because he wanted to provide his guests with "a new venue," one that just happened to bear the name of the President-elect. The result then was Kuwaiti cash landing, ultimately, in the pocket of now-President Donald Trump. That was a fairly clear violation of the Clause, as "compensation" paid to Trump from a foreign source.

[Capetonian]

HISTORICAL FACT
Who says building a border wall won't work?
The Chinese built one over 2,000 years ago and
they still don't have any Mexicans.

This may be Trump's justification for building a wall along the Rio Grande.

[Capetonian]

This article, written by an Irish columnist, is interesting and insightful. He probably gets closer to the truth than either the liberal or the conservative media and countless American political punsters.

Ian O'Doherty is a columnist who works for the Irish Independent. His "iSpy" column is published Monday to Thursday and contains news articles blended with comedy and shock-jock opinions.

"A Two Fingers to a Politically Correct Elite": by Ian O'Doherty

Tuesday, November 8, 2016 - either a day that will live in infamy, or the moment when America was made great again? The truth, as usual, will lie somewhere in the middle. After all, contrary to what both his supporters and detractors believe, Trump won't be able to come into office and spend his first 100 days gleefully ripping up all the bits of the Constitution he doesn't like.

But even if the American election's seismic shock-wave doesn't signal either the sky falling or the start of a bright new American era, the result was, to use one of The Donald's favourite phrases, huge. It is, in fact, a total game changer.

In decades to come, historians will still bicker about the most poisonous, toxic and stupid election in living memory. They will also be bickering over the same vexed question - how did a man who was already unpopular with the public and who boasted precisely zero political experience beat a seasoned Washington insider who was married to one extremely popular president and who had worked closely with another? The answer, ultimately, is in the question.

History will record this as a Trump victory, which of course it is. But it was also more than that, because this was the most stunning self-inflicted defeat in the history of Western democracy.

Hillary Clinton has damned her party to irrelevance for at least the next four years. She has also ensured that Obama's legacy will now be a footnote rather than a chapter. Because the Affordable Care Act is now doomed under a Trump presidency and that was always meant to be Obama's gift, of sorts, to America.

How did a candidate who had virtually all of the media, all of Hollywood, every celebrity you could think of, a couple of former presidents and apparently, the hopes of an entire gender resting on her shoulders, blow up her own campaign?

I rather suspect that neither Donald nor Hillary know how they got to this point.

Where she seemed to expect the position to become available to her by right - the phrase "she deserves it" was used early in the campaign and then quickly dropped when her team remembered that Americans don't like inherited power - his first steps into the campaign were those of someone chancing their arm. If Trump wasn't such a staunch teetotaler, many observers would have accused him of only doing it as a drunken bet.

But the more the campaign wore on, something truly astonishing began to happen - the people began to speak. And they began to speak in a voice which, for the first time in years in the American heartland, would not be ignored.

Few of the people who voted for Trump seriously believe that he is going to personally improve their fortunes. Contrary to the smug, middle-class media narrative, Trump voters aren't all barely educated idiots.

They know what he is; of course they do. It's what he is not that appeals to them.

Clinton, on the other hand, had come to represent the apex of smug privilege. Whether it was boasting about her desire to shut down the remaining coal industry in Virginia, or calling half the electorate a

"basket of deplorables", she seemed to operate in the perfumed air of the elite, more obsessed with coddling idiots and pandering to identity and feelings than improving the hardscrabble life that is the lot of millions of Americans.

Also, nobody who voted for Trump did so because they wanted him as a spiritual guru or life coach.

But plenty of people invested an irrational amount of emotional energy into a woman who was patently undeserving of that level of adoration.

That's why we've witnessed such fury from her supporters - they had wrapped themselves so tightly in the Hillary flag that a rejection of her felt like a rejection of them. And when you consider that many American colleges gave their students Wednesday off class because they were too 'upset' to study, you can see that this wasn't a battle for the White House - this became a genuine battle for America's future direction. And, indeed, for the
West.

We have been going through a cultural paroxysm for the last 10 years - the rise of identity politics has created a Balkanised society where the content of someone's mind is less important than their skin colour, gender, sexuality or whatever other attention-seeking label they wish to bestow upon themselves. In fact, where once it looked like racism and sexism might be becoming archaic remnants of a darker time, a whole new generation has popped
up which wants to re-litigate all those arguments all over again.

In fact, while many of us are too young to recall the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of the 1960s, plenty of older observers say they haven't seen an America more at war with itself than it is today.

One perfect example of this new America has been the renewed calls for segregation on campuses. Even a few years ago, such a move would have been greeted with understandable horror by civil rights activists - but this time it's the black students demanding segregation and "safe spaces" from whites. If young people calling for racial segregation from each other isn't the sign of a very, very sick society, nothing is.

The irony and hypocrisy of Clinton calling Trump and his followers racist while she was courting Black Lives Matter was telling. After all, no rational white person would defend the KKK, yet here was a white women defending both BLM and the New Black Panthers - explicitly racist organisations with the NBP, in particularly, openly espousing a race war if they don't get what they want.

Fundamentally, Trump was attractive because he represents a repudiation of the nonsense that has been slowly strangling the West. He represents - rightly or wrongly - a scorn and contempt for these new rules. He won't be a president worried about micro-aggression, or listening to the views of patently insane people just because they come from a fashionably protected group. He also represents a glorious two fingers to everyone who has become sick of being called a racist or a bigot or a homophobe - particularly by Hillary supporters who are too dense to realise that she has always actually been more conservative on social issues than Trump.

That it might take a madman to restore some sanity to America is, I suppose, a quirk that is typical to that great nation - land of the free and home to more contradictions than anyone can imagine.

Trump's victory also signals just how out of step the media has been with the people. Not just American media, either. In fact, the Irish media has continued its desperate drive to make a show of itself with a seemingly endless parade of emotionally incontinent gibberish that, ironically, has increased in ferocity and hysterical spite in the last few days.

The fact that Hillary's main cheerleaders in the Irish and UK media still haven't realised where they went wrong is instructive and amusing in equal measure. They still don't seem to understand that by constantly insulting his supporters, they're just making asses of themselves.

One female contributor to this newspaper said Trump's victory was a "sad day for women". Well, not for the women who voted for him it wasn't.

But that really is the nub of the matter - the 'wrong' kind of women obviously voted for Trump. The 'right' kind went with Hillary. And lost.

The Irish media are not alone in being filled largely with dinner-party liberals who have never had an original or socially awkward thought in their lives. They simply assume that everyone lives in the same bubble and thinks the same thoughts - and if they don't, they should.

Of the many things that have changed with Trump's victory, the bubble has burst. Never in American history have the polls, the media and the chin-stroking moral arbiters of the liberal agenda been so spectacularly, wonderfully wrong.

It was exactly that condescending, obnoxious sneer towards the working class that brought them out in such numbers, and that is the great irony of Election 2016 - the Left spent years creating identity politics to the extent that the only group left without protection or a celebrity sponsor was the white American male. That it was the white American male who swung it for Trump is a timely reminder that while black lives matter, all votes count -
even the ones of people you despise.

You don't have to be a supporter of Trump to take great delight in the sheer, apoplectic rage that has greeted his victory. If Clinton had won and Trump supporters had gone on a rampage through a dozen American cities the next night, there would have been outrage - and rightly so.

But in a morally and linguistically inverted society, the wrong-doers are portrayed as the victims. We saw that at numerous Trump rallies - protesters would disrupt the event, claiming their right to free speech (a heckler's veto is not free speech) and provoking people until they got a dig before running to the media and claiming victim-hood.

Yet none of Clinton's rallies were shut down by her opponents (unlike Trump's aborted Chicago meeting) and the great mistake the anti-Trump zealots should have learned was that just thinking you're right isn't enough - you need to convince others as well.

But, ultimately, this election was about people saying "enough with the *****". This is a country in crisis, and most Americans don't care about transgender bathrooms, or "safe" spaces, or government speech laws. This was about people taking some control back for themselves.

It was about them saying that they won't be hectored and bullied by the toddler tantrums thrown by pissy and spoiled millennials, and they certainly won't put up with being told they're delorable, stupid and wicked just because they have a difference of opinion.

But, really, this election is about hope for a better America; an America which isn't obsessed with identity and perceived 'privilege'; an America where being a victim isn't a virtue and where you don't have to apologise for not being up to date with the latest list of socially acceptable phrases.

Trump's victory was a two fingers to the politically correct. It was a brutal rejection of the nonsense narrative which says Muslims who kill Americans are somehow victims. It took the ludicrous Green agenda and threw it out. It was a return, on some level, to a time when people weren't afraid to speak their own mind without some self-elected language cop shouting at you. Who knows, we may even see Trump kicking the UN out of New York.

Frankly, if you're one of those who gets their politics from Jon Stewart, CNN and Twitter, look away for the next four years, because you're not going to like what you see. The rest of us, however, will be delighted.

This might go terribly, terribly wrong. Nobody knows - and if we have learned anything this week, it's that "Nobody knows nuthin". But just as the people of the UK took control back with Brexit, the people of America did likewise with their choice for president.

It's called democracy.
Deal with it.

===============================================================================================================

[Chuks]

"But, really, this election is about hope for a better America; an America which isn't obsessed with identity and perceived 'privilege'; an America where being a victim isn't a virtue and where you don't have to apologise for not being up to date with the latest list of socially acceptable phrases." So, no need to apologize for "grab them by the pussy," I suppose, for not knowing it's somehow become unacceptable. Good to know, that.


"It was a brutal rejection of the nonsense narrative which says Muslims who kill Americans are somehow victims." Please provide an example of this narrative. I do not think that there is or ever was such a narrative.

A libtard just called. He wants his woolly thinking back!

[Pinky the pilot]

Please provide an example of this narrative. I do not think that there is or ever was such a narrative.

Chuks; I suggest you contact Ian O'Doherty and ask him that question. No use asking anyone of us to do so as we didn't write that article.

Made interesting reading though.

[Chuks]

Oh, I am just having a bit of fun with Mr O'Doherty, being an O'Brien on my mother's side and all. I take him for a numpty and a noddypoll, someone not worth asking any serious questions of. Yes, we are all descended from kings, but some of us must have been dropped on our heads as children even so, to have become the Micks' answer to Howard Stern.

I assume that the poor man wrote that after taking a drop o' the creature. Either that or else he's as deluded and fuzzy-minded as the average fan of Donald Trump, the Donald Trump who descended from, God be thanked, a completely different part of the Gaelic-speaking world, being a MacLeod on his mother's side.

[SOPS]

That is an excellent article. I'm looking forward to our up coming elections in Western Australia. I think One Nation is going to do a Trump, and more power to them. The left had had its day, a good riddence to them. And once again, Chuks makes no sense in what he writes. It just complete dribble to avoid the facts.

[BenThere]

Please provide an example of this narrative.

I'm sure you'll interpret it to your liking, but my example:

During the campaign, Trump called for a halt to immigration from countries that have a record of jihad and ISIS violence until those refugees could be properly vetted. The perception of many was that these refugees weren't being vetted at all. The narrative promoted by Democrats and the media? Trump is anti-Muslim.

I have another example regarding entrants from Mexico who have chosen to enter without complying with the law, enforcement of which was generally abandoned by the previous administration in the interest of increasing the Democrat party voting bloc.

[Chuks]

" The narrative promoted by Democrats and the media? Trump is anti-Muslim." BenThere

Donald Trump: Lied bigly about "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in Jersey City on 9/11 watching the destruction of the WTC and cheering that. Yes, Trump is anti-Muslim, Ben, despite what you might want to think about his attitude towards Muslims!


"I have another example regarding entrants from Mexico who have chosen to enter without complying with the law, enforcement of which was generally abandoned by the previous administration in the interest of increasing the Democrat party voting bloc." BenThere

"Since coming to office in 2009, Obama’s government has deported more than 2.5 million people—up 23% from the George W. Bush years. More shockingly, Obama is now on pace to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed the United States from 1892-2000, according to government data." http://fusion.net/story/252637/obama-ha ... the-score/

[Lone Ranger]

Another Lie

Lets face it when it comes to telling porkies Trump is major league.
What's shocking is how supposedly intelligent (well at least they will tell you so) adults, take his lead, tell there own lies and do their utmost to reinforce his fantasies.

The Post truth era is indeed upon us.

[om15]

A news item made me smile earlier, a Radio 4 news roundup touched on Mr Trump's initiative of re-introducing torture for accused terrorists, the dead pan BBC announced it by quoting Mr Trump that "it is effective, and besides they deserve it".

In general I am quite in favour of Mr Trump, especially with the instant trade deal and special relationship with the UK, however a small part of me does wonder if that might all get torn up should he feel bilious after a dodgy vindaloo, that's the thing about being predictably unpredictable.

[BenThere]

Chuks, are you able to make the distinction between the terms "Muslim" and "Muslims who cheered the events of 9/11"? They aren't the same.

There is also a distinction between "deporting" and "deporting and not interfering with deportees returning". That San Francisco girl, Kate Steinle, was murdered by an illegal who had been deported five times, yet there he was. Would he have counted for five deportations in your calculations?

[Cukup Sudah]

I believe I didn't make it clear enough that my previous post on this thread (#452) consisted entirely of tweets made by Donald Trump. I'm happy to see that 500N, AA and Capetonian made it clear how little they thought of it and labelled it the words of a simpleton .

I can certainly understand why the Women's March had more people attending than Trump's inauguration, as just in this little cosmos those who attended have been labelled silly bitches, morons and otherwise ridiculed and deemed irrelevant. Women have every reason and right to be seriously concerned and have every right and reason to make that clear in a public and worldwide display. As Trump reinstated Reagan's Global Gag Rule in front of 6 men, the old patriarchy and their last grasps at power couldn't have been more obvious. If men could become pregnant, abortion would be available at every 7/11.

On a related note, 1984 now tops Amazon's books best sellers in the U.S.

[Lone Ranger]

A news item made me smile earlier, a Radio 4 news roundup touched on Mr Trump's initiative of re-introducing torture for accused terrorists, the dead pan BBC announced it by quoting Mr Trump that "it is effective, and besides they deserve it".

In general I am quite in favour of Mr Trump, especially with the instant trade deal and special relationship with the UK, however a small part of me does wonder if that might all get torn up should he feel bilious after a dodgy vindaloo, that's the thing about being predictably unpredictable.

Thing is OM, He is consistant in one aspect, he is a serial liar.
I actually agree with some of the things he says, not most but some, though I just can't give any respect to a person who lies and invents negative stories about his opponants knowing full well that even though they are untrue a great proportion of his blinkered followers will believe it despite any facts to the contrary.
You only have to look at the likes of Benthere to see how his technique works.
This will not end well