Trump has done nothing but shut down key parts of government since he took office but you wouldn’t know it listening to Democrats and media

January 23, 2018 ~ jlpagano

Whether it’s through stupidity, unwillingness or incompetence, the Democrat leadership cannot get across the simple message that Donald Trump’s agenda of racism, misogyny and pro-corporatism is bad for the American people, and the mainstream media isn’t much better.

YouTube clip by Dan Rather on The Young Turks on January 22, 2018

‘The Government Shutdown Ends With a ‘Promise’ For DACA Vote From the GOP – The News With Dan Rather‘

“…if most of the media ignore the year-long slow-motion shut down and if Democrats don’t raise enough stink about it, maybe it’s because too many of us have signalled that we’re on board”

Shortcomings with relief efforts in Puerto Rico. Throwing millions off their medical insurance by hacking away at Obamacare. Going after Medicare and Social Security. Gutting the staff at the State Department. Rescinding regulations for the sake of it.

Those are just some of the actions Donald Trump has taken since being sworn in just over a year ago, yet in recent days he has been able to frame the word ‘shutdown’ as meaning something that is only harmful to the US military, which already receives more funding than any other nation by a long, long way.

At first I was annoyed at myself for not realising that what the President has done since taking office is effectively a massive shutdown in itself, but I’m not involved with politics and government on a daily basis – the point is so simple and obvious that we have to wonder why his primary opposition, namely the Democrats and, as he calls them, ‘The Fake News Media’, haven’t been highlighting it all weekend?

Thankfully we have people like the legendary Dan Rather to get the message out there. And as he points out, it’s possible that the general public is also complicit to an extent.

As I recently pointed out here on FPP, the likes of Chuck Schumer with his ‘bowl of Jello’ and Nancy Pelosi with her ‘poop Sundae’ simply don’t have the charisma necessary to deliver the kind of soundbites needed to combat Trump’s twitter tirades. Meanwhile we have Dick Durbin gleefully using the word ‘bipartisanship’ as if it also necessarily means ‘fairness for the American people’.

Besides…if anything should have clinched the message battle for the Democrats re the latest shutdown it should have been that absolutely disgusting ad which suggested they would be responsible for any future murders by illegal immigrants. That was nothing short of Hitler-esque propaganda [script most likely written by Stephen Miller] which speaks volumes for the intelligence levels of the demographic at which it was aimed.

The party badly needs new leadership. Whether or not Mitch McConnell keeps to his word on DACA by February 8, the Democrats have left themselves wide open for negative press between now and then for having caved far too easily over the spending bill.

And there I was, very close to writing a post here praising them for finally showing a bit of fight. Why do I allow myself to get so deluded? JLP

#IANWAE

PS – As I’m about to publish, Trump has tweeted this :

Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees: “Trump World and WH sources dancing in end zone: Trump wins again…Schumer and Dems caved…gambled and lost.” Thank you for your honesty Jim!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2018

I rest my case.

US Democrats have an open goal yet no strikers on the pitch to put it away

January 19, 2018 ~ jlpagano

THE ISSUE

At the time of posting, the US government is within hours of shutting down because the two main parties are engaged in a blaming war with each other, and one that the Republicans are being allowed to win.

THE MEDIA

Podcast by ‘Pod Save America’ on January 18, 2018

‘‘The Shithole Shutdown’‘

“If this government shuts down it’s not because of the Dreamers, it is because of what Donald Trump and Tom Cotton and Stephen Miller want to demand in exchange for doing something that they have promised that they would do, which is protect the Dreamers.”

THE COMMENT

It was a good line; all Nancy Pelosi had to do was deliver it.

The Minority Leader of the US House of Representatives was trying to describe the Republican offer to put off the government shutdown for another month in a deal which had absolutely nothing in it to protect those on the DACA programme who are currently living in fear of deportation.

The line was something like ‘They offered us a bowl of poop with a cherry on top and tried to tell us it was a chocolate Sundae’. She hesitated drastically just before saying the word ‘poop’ – she clearly didn’t want to say it. But she did anyway, and she made what could have been a great soundbite into an even bigger poop Sundae.

I have absolutely no doubt that she was talked into using those words by her staff, and that her hesitation came from a reluctance to resort to that kind of talk.

Well I’m sorry Nancy but if you’re not prepared to get into the fight, maybe it’s time you stood aside and let in someone who is.

And while I do believe that the likes of Pelosi and Schumer and Feinstein are too old for what’s required to take on this particular White House and Republican congress, I don’t necessarily mean ‘old’ in the sense of a numerical age. There are people close to my age who have a similar mindset.

But if issues like the Dreamers and the CHIP programme are being held hostage by the Republicans and the government gets shut down because of it, it’s up to the Democrats to fight tooth and nail to get their side of the story into the public domain, and it really shouldn’t be that difficult. Look how easily the lads from Pod Save America [former staffers for Barack Obama] make it sound.

The Democrats, and indeed everyone living in the real world outside Utrumpia, badly need spokespeople who can properly deliver this simple message. And it shouldn’t take TV personalities like Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey to do it either. JLP

#IANWAE

If the White House can introduce countries like Nambia and Normay, then so can I…let’s talk about #Utrumpia

January 17, 2018 ~ jlpagano

THE ISSUE

To support President Trump and his agenda, you either have to believe everything he says or at least decide that it is to your advantage to make it look as though you do. Either way, you are living in a world which I call ‘Utrumpia’.

THE MEDIA

Unemployment for Black Americans is the lowest ever recorded. Trump approval ratings with Black Americans has doubled. Thank you, and it will get even (much) better! @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2018

PLUS

Podcast by FiveThirtyEight.com on January 16, 2018

‘Immigration Showdown‘

“...even if you were to take this generous interpretation of this data on it’s own, we’re still talking about a ‘doubling’ from eight to sixteen percent, which is not necessarily something to crow about?”

THE COMMENT

Mexicans are rapists. The crowd at the 2017 Inauguration was the largest there has ever been [period]. Hillary only won the popular vote because there were millions of votes cast illegally. There were fine people on both sides at Charlottesville. There was no collusion with Russia. Trump is a very stable genius.

All politicians lie. Actually, all humans do. But what Donald Trump has done to elevate himself to the highest office in the USA is on a whole new level, even for politics.

He has actually created a world for himself. One where he establishes his own parameters and premises. I call it ‘Utrumpia’. What you see in the opening paragraph is merely a selection of the ‘realities’ in this world.

One of the ‘best qualities’ of this mystical realm is that anything and everything about it can change, because anything and everything is defined by what Donald Trump says in his latest tweet, no matter how much it contradicts something he has stated before or, in the case of the example I’m using for this post, no matter how much the actual facts and figures prove his assertions to be wrong.

As soon as I saw the tweet on his perceived increase in support from the African-American community [courtesy of Utrumpia’s premier news network], I was hoping that the number-crunchers from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com would take his claims to task, and in their latest podcast, they do just that.

But it’s not my intention to dig too deeply into this one issue, rather to highlight the wider one that is his overall strategy, although to call it a strategy would suggest we’re buying into his ‘stable genius’ claim…it could be more accurate to call it a ‘delusion’.

From this day forth you are going to see many references to Utrumpia on this website. It is unfortunately a place we will have to visit quite often while its creator resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. JLP

#IANWAE

The Young Turks’ Cenk Ungur lets loose on corporate Democrats as time runs out to secure DACA deal

January 16, 2018January 16, 2018 ~ jlpagano

The Republicans and Democrats need to agree on a budget before Friday otherwise the government will ‘shut down’, ie there will be no money to pay federal employees. As the Senate must have at least 60 votes to pass a spending bill, even though the Democrats are in a minority their cotes are needed and thus they have some leverage and they are hoping to use this to finally secure a deal for the so-called ‘Dreamers’ or children of illegal immigrants who have proven themselves to be productive members of American society.

YouTube clip by The Young Turks on January 15, 2018

“…you’re weak, you’re losers, you’re pathetic. How do you expect us to get excited, to show up to the polls, for these loser Democrats who can’t figure out a way to fight against fucking Trump???”

The reason we are outraged by Trump’s recent ‘shithole’ remark [not even going to bother with the word ‘alleged’…we all know he said it] is not because such words that shouldn’t ever be used in politics…in his case, it was all about the fact that he was referring to entire nations of people.

Of course there are times when the use of ‘salty’ language is absolutely necessary, and in this clip of the Young Turks, host Cenk Ungur rightly calls out the corporate Democrats for their meagre attempts to use their leverage in the government spending bill to secure proper legislation for the Dreamers.

It’s not often that Ungur gets this animated – though to be clear, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing because if he went on a tirade for every clip he’d be no better than Alex Jones. This is definitely the kind of time-sensitive issue where a verbal kick up the backside is exactly what it required. Whether it will do any good remains to be seen – I’m not so sure Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi know how to use YouTube, let alone subscribe to the Young Turks.

#IANWAE

Donald Trump and the sheer stupidity of his supporters…sorry, but there is no other word for it

December 23, 2017December 23, 2017 ~ jlpagano

And so another year nears it’s end…this will probably be our final post before 2018.

Since his inauguration, so much has happened under the Trump administration that you wouldn’t know where to begin.

I would just like to focus on one aspect to sum up the year.

Put as simply as possible…I never thought it possible to say this about another human being in a serious context, but here goes…

If Trump supporters actually believe his assertion that everything in his tweets, on Fox News and on Breitbart is true, and everything on CNN, MSNBC, NYT and WaPo is made-up Fake News – and let’s be clear, his claims definitely do reach to those extremes – then THEY ARE STUPID.

That’s a horrible thing to say, but I’m afraid the English language doesn’t have another word for it.

Of course sometimes the mainstream media gets things wrong or leaves things out. And tough and all as it is to believe, once in a while Trump and co get something right [if for the wrong reasons sometimes, like shutting down the Trans Pacific Parntership].

But the President never gives specific examples of ‘Fake News’. And to be fair, it’s not as though the media does a whole lot to stand up for itself. Surely there’s a legal case to be made for accusations that they just sit around and make up stories out of thin air? I would have thought the President may be pushing too far the assumption that they wouldn’t wish to disclose their sources.

His hypocrisy and exaggeration is so obvious that nobody with any decent level of intelligence can possibly get behind it….unless they are ‘in on the act’ for their own personal benefit, of course.

We can only home that smarter arguments will prevail in 2018 and beyond.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all. JLP

#IANWAE

The story is that Roy Moore lost, not that the other guy won…what’s his name again?

December 13, 2017 ~ jlpagano

THE ISSUE

In one of the most widely reported elections in US Senate history, in the heavily-Republican state of Alabama which Trump won in 2016 by 28 percentage points, accused paedophile Roy Moore was defeated by his Democratic challenger Don James. No, sorry, it was Dan Jenkins. Or was it Doug Jones. Nah, I was right the first time. I think.

THE MEDIA

Article by CNN.com on Wednesday, December 13, 2017

‘Roy Moore won’t concede‘

“You know, part of the thing — part of the problem with this campaign is we’ve been painted in an unfavorable and unfaithful light.”

THE COMMENT

I think I can safely say that I’ve never been this happy about the results from an Alabama Senate race.

You might think this is ‘Fake News’ but when I opened half an eyelid at 4:30am Irish time this morning and looked at my phone, the banner on the CNN notification read : ‘Roy Moore loses’. Surely in pretty much any other race the headline would refer to the guy who won? Well, this wasn’t any other race.

This was an amazing win for the Democrats, albeit with a perfect storm of controversy on the other side, but they still had to pick the right guy and run the right campaign to get him over the line, so bravo.

What interests me right now is how the President will react, and more importantly, how his inner circle will react. Do they sit down with him and come up with a proper spin to present to the media? Or do they sit down WITHOUT him first and come up with a spin to present to HIM? I think we all know it’s the latter.

No doubt the spin will be something like ‘Roy would have lost by even more [Moore?] were it not for the President’s endorsement’. Sure.

#IANWAE

Trump’s #Charlottesville reaction highlights the need to stop using ‘left’ and ‘right’ to describe political spectrum

August 14, 2017 ~ jlpagano

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”

Before I start on the theme of this article, have you ever seen a US president more obsessed with his predecessor? It has gotten to a stage where he just throws his name into his statements without any real context.

Anyway…you have no doubt read volumes on what happened in Charlottesville and it is not my wish to delve too much further into the horrific events, at least not here.

What I want to point out is something I feel is crucial for the progressive platform to gain more followers, and it is a very simple one.

Rumour has it that human civilisation once believed premises like the earth being the centre of the universe, or at other times that it was a flat plain as opposed to a spherical planet. Maybe such misconceptions don’t effect people’s everyday life, but then again it’s hard to have a philosophical grasp on existence when you don’t even have the fundamentals correct.

So what I’d like to challenge is the way we label political ideologies as ‘left’ and ‘right’, because it suggests some kind of balance between the two. On the most basic level, what we call the left represents a society that is fair to everyone while the right does not.

But to properly understand where the conflict comes from you first must appreciate how it started. Whether you believe in evolution or creation, there must have existed a time when the human race had no elitism. Then as it became clear that certain resources were more valuable than others, some people took control of them and were selective about those with whom they were shared.

Over time those who had control over the resources got better and better at holding on to that power. Countries with tyrannical leaders simply run roughshod over their opposition, while those which claim to be democracies use a variety of tools to make sure elections go the way of the ruling classes.

Donald Trump became president on the back of one of these tools, ie supporting a specific group of voters he felt could help get him elected; in this case middle to lower class white men who felt that the civil rights movement had somehow discriminated against them.

Because this movement provided votes for the Republican party, it is considered to be on the ‘right’. And because the obvious racist and fascist leanings of this movement, it has become fashionable to label them as ‘alt-right’. Even with this distinction though, the fact that it is called any kind of ‘right’ seems to lend it equal status to whatever is called the ‘left’.

As the mainstream media fully supports the left-right paradigm, the President can claim, however wrongly, that he is being fair to ‘all sides’.

What we who have been shoved on the ‘left’ of this pseudo-spectrum must do is renounce it. A society that purports to be fair to all citizens is not half the argument. It is the only one. Of course we won’t all agree on how it is to be achieved, but given we believe in fairness, chances are the discussions are going to be devoid of such words as ‘fire and fury’.

Anyone who feels they have to ‘tone down’ their views to somehow ‘be fair’ and ‘not exclude the conservative opinion’ is basically validating the very argument that conservatives want.

The white men who marched on Charlottesville are bigots. Nothing they feel was ‘taken from them’ was really theirs in the first place. To offer them any sense of legitimacy is not being fair, it’s not being balanced. It is turning back the clock on American society to a time when the ruling classes needed only the crudest, most basic tools to hold on to power, as opposed to the more intricate ones they use today.

Progressives need to stop allowing themselves to be defined by a scale that doesn’t really exist.

#IANWAE

Corporate Dems vow to do things ‘better’ – let’s hope that includes listening

July 23, 2017 ~ jlpagano

Whatever you might think about Donald Trump and his administration, their tenure in the White House, a shade over six months old now, has been a rollercoaster ride with something new to report each and every passing day.

The biggest drawback to this obsession with the latest Washington shenanigans is, of course, the fact that although Trump & co might provide us with easy one-liners and online memes, there is also a very serious side to the story in that we are talking about the government of the most powerful nation in the world.

It’s all very well to ridicule the man in power right now – but it’s pointless unless you can suggest a reasonable alternative.

That alternative is the broad tent that is the Democratic Party, and the 2016 campaign in particular has divided it into two distinct factions….the “corporate wing”, essentially those in the most senior positions in Washington right now, and the “progressive wing”, ie those who follow the social equity platform of the likes of Bernie Sanders.

Here is a recent quote from the Washington Post to ponder…see if you can guess which side of the Democratic tent it came from…

“When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself. So what did we do wrong? People didn’t know what we stood for, just that we were against Trump. And still believe that.”

Obviously I want you to think that’s a Progressive, when in actual fact it’s one of the most senior corporate Democrats, Minority leader of the Senate Chuck Schumer.

Ever since the election, Schumer and his counterpart in the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi have been as much under attack from their left as from their right, probably more so. And most of it was deserved.

But there has to be a point at which even progressives realise that the Schumers and Pelosis still represent the front line of the resistance to the current terrifying incarnation of the Republican Party, and once and a while they need to be given a bit of slack, especially when they are making noises that sound like they come straight out of the Bernie Sanders playbook.

I’m not one to give the Democrat leadership too much praise – the best thing that be said about the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is that at least their corporate policies aren’t as bad as their opposition. What I would rather do is change the narrative – it’s not about how much or little we appease the wishes of the “one percent”, rather it’s about formulating policies that are fair to everyone whether it benefits the rich or not.

To promote this mindset I fully understand the need to hold big-donor politicians to account no matter what their stripes. But what do we do when they start using slogans that reflect our agenda?

“A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future”

Of course it’s natural to be sceptical when they start to look as though they’re drinking the Bernie KoolAid. But care must be taken to ensure healthy scepticism doesn’t morph into petulant rejection.

For now anyway, I am willing to give the likes of Schumer a chance. After all, it can’t have been easy to keep 48 Democratic senators united against Trumpcare – you can be sure one or two of the “Blue Dogs” (more right-leaning Democrats) were courted by the GOP and none have budged.

If the Democrats really want to adopt progressive values to their platform – remember they did at their convention last year only many feared it was empty promises on paper – they need to be supported, voted for, and put under pressure when there are any signs of them failing to deliver.

After all, that’sq what being a ‘Democrat’, with a large or small d, is meant to entail. JLP

#IANWAE

The US news cycle in the Trump era

May 29, 2017August 11, 2017 ~ jlpagano

It’s all about the “news cycle” these days.

And it has gotten to a point whereby we are almost afraid to mention the “wrong thing” at the water cooler lest we be, at best, left behind by a conversation, and at worst, accused of being irrelevant.

Here in Ireland, there only seems to be one topic on the go on any given day and that is determined by what gets covered by RTÉ. One thing I will say about the US…at least there is enough room for something resembling a battle over what people consider to be political priorities.

According to the corporate Democrats, it’s all about whether or not Trump & his cohorts were in collusion with the Russians.

According to the Republicans, it’s all about pushing their pro-big business agenda, while at the same time making small anti-Trump noises once in a while in case he brings them with him if/when he goes down.

According to Trump, it’s all about him, and anything he doesn’t like is merely “fake news”.

According to the mainstream media, it’s all about either taking a Democrat or Republican position or desperately trying to be “fair” ie finding a position somewhere in between them.

According to the Alt Right online media, it’s all about trying to trying to bend the news cycle towards the conservative viewpoint by any means necessary.

According to the more progressive online media, it’s all about deconstructing all of the above, taking breaks every so often to get us to buy razors through the post.

And last but certainly not least, you have Bernie Sanders. Whether you agree with his politics or not, you can’t deny that when he goes to the media, be it mainstream or social, it’s all about the issues. No scandal, no smoke and mirrors, no dog whistling, just the issues, with facts to support his argument.

Like this on his Facebook page from yesterday…

Trump is trying to cut $191 billion from the food stamps program, our nation’s most critical anti-hunger program. All over this country we have millions of kids struggling with hunger. Trump is telling them: sorry, we need to put that money into our military, when we already spend more on defense than the next 12 countries combined. This pathetic budget will be rejected by the American people.

We could all do with being more like Bernie when it comes to discussing government.

#IANWAE