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David,,,,, thank you so much. False equivalence makes me want to puke. It's ALWAYS one party that works hard to take food away and medical care away from hungry and sick kids. It's ALWAYS one party that works hard to take basic rights away from citizens,,, It's ALWAYS one party that tells the country we can't afford this and that but cuts taxes of the wealthiest among us. The GOP gives politicians a bad name.
"Name one extreme left elected official and his or her extreme-left position(s)."
The problem with that approach, as I know only too well from years of losing arguments with a hard-right acquaintance, is that any position that isn't theirs is automatically defined as "extreme left". Trump does exactly the same thing. For example, he'll name some Democratic politician and crucify him/her as "wanting to have open borders allowing anyone at all to come in to vote for the Democrats", when actually the Democratic politician may just be trying to rationalize the existing situation (they're here, they're working, can we please just deal with it?) and provide a path to citizenship.
There is no logic, there are no provable facts, there is simply an unending spewing of vitriol and hate. If they say that something is so, then it is. No questions allowed.
My comments, for whatever they are worth, focus on the motivation of the elected GOP members who do the bidding of the economic elite. It's clear they don't care about balanced budgets, individual liberty, smaller government or anything else they might blather about. They only care about the concentration of wealth in their grubby little hands. That they have used race and gender and xenophobic crap to fool people into voting against themselves is an old story and they will use it as long as it works. But watch out when it no longer does. I hope I live long enough.
@OJ, oh, sure, I know that part, nicely put. Anyone who takes a reasonable view of reproduction rights, gun controls, over-incarceration, financial institution regs, drug controls, carbon taxation, defense contraints, consumer protections, carried interest, minority promotions and protections, and on and on --- all issues on which the well-done polls show quite a bit of consensus, again and again and over and over --- gets glommed w this radical libtard crap. It is quite astounding. Bad-faith charges, the rot of constant impugning, it is all on the right aka the so-called mainstream GOP. Listen to Savage and Levin and the rest sometime. They actually are not close to being representative of the flyover populace. And they know it.
Bob C lives, and writes altogether reasonably, in my birth state, with the seditious sickfuck Jim Jordan as a rep, seriously.
I agree that race has long been a tool used by elites to divide the lower class masses--see the Southern Strategy--which the article I just linked above challenges in interesting ways. But that doesn't quite explain why certain members of the elite feel so vindictive towards the poor and towards social policies that would help them when the same elite have more money than they could ever hope to spend in numerous lifetimes. Once a person has more than, say, $10 million, he or she has enough to live a comfortable life without ever having to work again. So what is this fierce opposition to helping the less fortunate via taxation if it isn't based in some psychological pathology? If you're a Koch brother with billions of dollars, why this incredible animosity toward any public work or social program? This kind of cruelty--taking healthcare away from kids for instance-- seems so pointless.
Because I think of him as one of the good guys in the fund industry, I'll quote John Bogle who has commented on this topic in speeches and his book Enough :
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough."
I just read the two linked articles. Making sense, yes. Still, there is no justification for the Trumpster-ites simply turning off their consciences. You turn off your conscience, and you become something other than a thinking, caring human being.
I'm just back from 3 weeks in Asia. Hong Kong is clean and efficient and up-to-date, and at least according to my view, from my very brief time there--- more equitable than the USA has become. But admittedly, I went around in the hotel and shopping districts. Also visited Macau briefly. Because our host is related to us through my wife, we caught a glimpse of the less than comfortable and affluent scene, there. But at least the roads are not just chunks of pavement connected by craters.
And guess what? This coming May, there will be no need to take the hour-long ferry ride between the two, if you own a car. There is an amazing bridge/tunnel soon to open, over there.
The Philippines is STILL a hot mess. Cities thrown together. People living in squalor. Cripes, humans are living in oversized doghouses over there. Turns my stomach. I left feeling indignant. But at whom? At the government--- which is supposed to SERVE people? Or at the people, for not rising up? Too many of them are so utterly fatalistic: "if I was supposed to be "rich," God would have made me rich..."
The Trumpster's "shithole" countries might well be shitholes, but saying so in front of God and everyone is not the way to make anything better, in my opinion. (And he left The Philippines off his list, I guess. Probably not on his radar.)
Agreed. But the corruption and malaise in The Phils is ages-old. And sadly, it seems like it will ALWAYS be so. The corruption is built-in; people do not even see it as corruption. And I dunno whether or if it's connected, but I've seen that the church (almost all of Filipinos are Catholic) still operates as if the 1960s and 70s reform at 2nd Vatican Council never happened. Their church still operates in what I'd characterize as a medieval or feudal fashion. But for context, John Paul 2nd's pontificate served substantially to drag the church back into the past, too. The evidence of that is virtually worldwide, and especially because his pontificate lasted so long. But the Phils. church seems to operate apart from it all. It's never left the old Spanish days, and the old Medieval Spanish ecclesiastical modus operandi. Strictly individualized religious faith and outlook. The smelly, corrupt system is just taken for granted. And clearly, taking the smelly, corrupt system for granted DOES affect people's economic conditions.
Yes, Duterte and Trump are certainly two of a kind. The only thing that separates them is that we still have a thin veneer of legal protection that so far has prevented Trump from doing the things that he would really like to do, if only he were allowed. He has frequently castigated the legal system for maintaining those protections, so his intentions are hardly a secret.
(PK NYT today) ... you go out for dinner with a wealthy acquaintance. “I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and orders you a hamburger. Then he orders himself an expensive steak and a bottle of wine, which he doesn’t share. And when the waiter comes with the check, he points at you and says, “Charge it to his credit card.” Now you understand the essence of the Trump tax cut ....
Comments
Bob C knows better. I am very surprised at him.
The problem with that approach, as I know only too well from years of losing arguments with a hard-right acquaintance, is that any position that isn't theirs is automatically defined as "extreme left". Trump does exactly the same thing. For example, he'll name some Democratic politician and crucify him/her as "wanting to have open borders allowing anyone at all to come in to vote for the Democrats", when actually the Democratic politician may just be trying to rationalize the existing situation (they're here, they're working, can we please just deal with it?) and provide a path to citizenship.
There is no logic, there are no provable facts, there is simply an unending spewing of vitriol and hate. If they say that something is so, then it is. No questions allowed.
https://forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/27/pastors-not-politicians-turned-dixie-republican/#558ffa9b695f
Bob C lives, and writes altogether reasonably, in my birth state, with the seditious sickfuck Jim Jordan as a rep, seriously.
Because I think of him as one of the good guys in the fund industry, I'll quote John Bogle who has commented on this topic in speeches and his book Enough : Click here for more: johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/Georgetown_2007.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/opinion/clubbable-but-in-the-worst-way.html
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/18/16880524/donald-trump-democracy-republicans-trumpocracy
I'm just back from 3 weeks in Asia. Hong Kong is clean and efficient and up-to-date, and at least according to my view, from my very brief time there--- more equitable than the USA has become. But admittedly, I went around in the hotel and shopping districts. Also visited Macau briefly. Because our host is related to us through my wife, we caught a glimpse of the less than comfortable and affluent scene, there. But at least the roads are not just chunks of pavement connected by craters.
And guess what? This coming May, there will be no need to take the hour-long ferry ride between the two, if you own a car. There is an amazing bridge/tunnel soon to open, over there.
The Philippines is STILL a hot mess. Cities thrown together. People living in squalor. Cripes, humans are living in oversized doghouses over there. Turns my stomach. I left feeling indignant. But at whom? At the government--- which is supposed to SERVE people? Or at the people, for not rising up? Too many of them are so utterly fatalistic: "if I was supposed to be "rich," God would have made me rich..."
The Trumpster's "shithole" countries might well be shitholes, but saying so in front of God and everyone is not the way to make anything better, in my opinion. (And he left The Philippines off his list, I guess. Probably not on his radar.)
bbc.com/news/world-asia-36251094
... you go out for dinner with a wealthy acquaintance. “I’ll take care of everything,” he says, and orders you a hamburger. Then he orders himself an expensive steak and a bottle of wine, which he doesn’t share. And when the waiter comes with the check, he points at you and says, “Charge it to his credit card.”
Now you understand the essence of the Trump tax cut ....