US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8338

On August 09 2017 09:51 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Still remember late last year a Trump supporter saying that Trump would probably be responsible for killing us all but he told it like it is.

I can't help but think this is the baby boomer generation in a nutshell.

Twice a day since the beginning of the Trump administration, a special folder is prepared for the president. The first document is prepared around 9:30 a.m. and the follow-up, around 4:30 p.m. Former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Press Secretary Sean Spicer both wanted the privilege of delivering the 20-to-25-page packet to President Trump personally, White House sources say.

These sensitive papers, described to VICE News by three current and former White House officials, don’t contain top-secret intelligence or updates on legislative initiatives. Instead, the folders are filled with screenshots of positive cable news chyrons (those lower-third headlines and crawls), admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.

One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: “It needs to be more fucking positive.” That’s why some in the White House ruefully refer to the packet as “the propaganda document.”

The process of assembling the folder begins at the Republican National Committee’s “war room,” which has expanded from 4 to 10 people since the GOP won the White House. A war room — both parties have one regardless of who’s in the White House — is often tasked with monitoring local and national news, cable television, social media, digital media, and print media to see how the party, its candidates or their opponents are being perceived.

Beginning at 6 a.m. every weekday — the early start is a longtime war room tradition — three staffers arrive at the RNC to begin monitoring the morning shows on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News as they scour the internet and newspapers. Every 30 minutes or so, the staffers send the White House Communications Office an email with chyron screenshots, tweets, news stories, and interview transcripts.

White House staffers then cull the information, send out clips to other officials, and push favorable headlines to a list of journalists. But they also pick out the most positive bits to give to the president. On days when there aren’t enough positive chyrons, communications staffers will ask the RNC staffers for flattering photos of the president.

“Maybe it’s good for the country that the president is in a good mood in the morning,” one former RNC official said.

Contacted by VICE News, Spicer disputed the nature of the folder. “While I won’t comment on materials we share with the president, this is not accurate on several levels,” he said in an email. Asked what about the story was inaccurate, Spicer did not respond.

Of course, every White House monitors media coverage to see how they’re being covered, and the RNC may have decided more staff was needed after the party won the White House. As the political media environment has become faster-moving and more frenzied, the efforts to follow it have also become more robust. The Obama White House usually had at least one very caffeinated point person and two others dedicated to watching Twitter, online publications, print media, and cable news, and then compile relevant clips and send them around to White House aides.

But the production of a folder with just positive news — and the use of the RNC to help produce it — seemed abnormal to former White House officials. “If we had prepared such a digest for Obama, he would have roared with laughter,” said David Axelrod, the senior adviser to Barack Obama during his first two years in the White House. “His was a reality-based presidency.”

“The RNC is always going to work to defend the White House, the administration, and its members of Congress, and our war room’s efforts help capture and drive how our team can echo that defense,” said RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Jancek.

Another current White House official said that the idea for the twice-daily ego boost came from Priebus and Spicer, who competed to deliver the folder and be the bearer of the good news. “Priebus and Spicer weren’t in a good position, and they wanted to show they could provide positive coverage,” the official said. “It was self-preservation.”

In the two-plus weeks following the departure of both Spicer and Priebus, White House officials say, the document has been produced less frequently and more typically after public events, such as Trump’s recent speech at the National Boy Scouts Jamboree in West Virginia. It’s unclear what will change, if anything, once a new White House communications director is appointed to replace the briefly tenured Anthony Scaramucci.

It’s not the first recorded instance of Trump welcoming excessive flattery.

He frequently cites or thanks cable television hosts like Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” who cover his presidency more favorably.

And at a broadcasted Cabinet meeting in June, Trump listened contentedly as the vice president, his chief of staff, and nearly all of the 15 Cabinet secretaries heaped praise on him. Priebus took that opportunity to tell Trump: “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people.”

On August 09 2017 10:12 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

What would be your pick?

Speaking at a Rotary Club gathering in Kentucky on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vented about how President Donald Trump's lack of political experience has led to him setting “excessive expectations” for legislative priorities.

McConnell, R-Ky., told the group in Florence that he found it “extremely irritating” that Congress has earned the reputation of not accomplishing anything.

“Part of the reason I think that the storyline is that we haven’t done much is because, in part, the president and others have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point,” said McConnell, a Republican and the state’s senior senator.

Trump, a political newcomer, as McConnell noted, has a habit of declaring progress on major priorities that do not necessarily reflect the reality of lawmaking.

For example, as the House was in the midst of negotiations about its Obamacare replacement bill in February, Trump announced that Congress was in the “final stages” of its bill and said it would be ready for “submitting” in March. While the House bill was unveiled in March, that chamber didn’t vote on it until May, and health care votes continued until the end of July.

That sort of disconnect has led to Trump’s expressing disappointment when bills — chief among them health care reform — fail to end up on his desk, even though, as with health care, the political reality indicated all along how difficult it was going to be to pass legislation.

“Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before. And I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process,” McConnell told the group. “So part of the reason I think people feel we’re underperforming is because too many artificial deadlines — unrelated to the reality of the complexity of legislating — may not have been fully understood.”

He urged the audience to judge this Congress “when it finishes,” or after the 115th Congress, which convened on Jan. 3, 2017, completes its two-year session. For comparison, he noted that President Barack Obama did not sign his signature Affordable Care Act into law until March of 2010, more than a year after taking office.

The White House has not yet responded to ABC News’ request for comment.

On August 09 2017 10:16 m4ini wrote:


Somethingsomething housing, somethingsomething so easy to get a job.

That'd be my pick anyway.

On August 09 2017 10:20 Ghostcom wrote:


Oh and "student debt?"

Old crotchety white americans?

Late last month, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats called North Korea’s nuclear weapons program a “potential existential threat to the United States.” Coats hedges a bit by throwing in the modifier “potentially,” but he has spoken this way before. Unless he has spectacular secret information, this is woefully inaccurate. North Korea is a growing threat to the United States with its nuclear missile program, and it is indeed an existential threat to South Korea and Japan. But the threat Pyongyang poses to the United States is not actually existential as, for example, Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals are. And is unlikely to become so.

Language is important here. North Korea is a indeed a threat to the United States, but it is a greater threat to America's regional allies. Pyongyang’s ability to strike the United States with a nuclear warhead is, after all, still hotly disputed. Hitting the United States with a missile is not the same as hitting the it with a reentry-survivable nuclear warhead that could evade U.S. missile defense. Nor, even, does one or two or a dozen North Korean nuclear strikes on the American mainland constitute an “existential” threat.

Such a scenario would be terrible, but for North Korea to actually threaten the existence of the United States would take dozens of nuclear strikes across almost all of America’s major cities. The humanitarian costs of even one nuclear detonation would be enormous, of course, and the national psychological shock would be akin to nothing in U.S. history, bar perhaps the Civil War. But this is not the same thing as hitting the United States hard enough that its society begins to fragment and its government collapse. DNI Coats does not use those terms, but presumably that is what an “existential” threat is. Large numbers of civilian casualties, even in the millions, and the loss of several American cities is not existential. Horrible, yes. A dramatic reorientation of American life, absolutely. But not the end of America.

In fact, the United States is actually well postured to survive, or ‘ride out,’ in nuclear war parlance, a nuclear strike. The United States is a large country, with a widely dispersed population. According to the Census Bureau in 2015, it has only ten cities whose populations exceed one million people. And 20 percent of its population lives in rural areas, distant from any realistic North Korean target. That is sixty million people. Residents of large cities like New York and Los Angeles are threatened, but much of the U.S. population is not. It is important to be honest about this.

The American government’s federalism is another benefit. Even if Washington D.C. and other large U.S. metropolitan centers were devastated, multiple other levels of government would continue to operate. States, counties, and cities would continue to function, uphold law and order, and provide points from which to rebuild damaged national structures. By way of example, the collapse of government in New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina did not lead to cascading collapse across Louisiana or the Gulf Coast. Even Imperial Japan in 1945, after months of punishing U.S. bombing, managed to ride out the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a national breakdown.

Nuclear strikes in America will not necessarily lead to apocalyptic outcomes, and we should be cautious about using Coats’ frightening language. Highly centralized states are at greater risk than America. Where one national capital represents the national center gravity—as with Seoul in South Korea, or Paris in France—the risk of a nuclear ‘decapitation strike’ throwing the country into chaos is real. Hence North Korea’s greater threat to highly centralized, and more proximate, Japan and South Korea. But America’s thick decentralization makes it more resilient.

Finally, long-term U.S. political stability suggests socio-political resilience. Assuming again that North Korea strikes Washington and America’s other large cities, it is not obvious that the United States would then fall into some manner of political anarchy or revolution. America is a wealthy, stable state with the world’s longest running constitution (230 years). It’s population has never had any meaningful political traditions besides liberal democracy. There are no serious revolutionaries waiting for social chaos to strike, like in Tsarist Russia or Weimar Germany.

Indeed, Coats himself likely knows all this, which is why he appended “potentially” to his comments. By calling the North Korean nuclear missile threat “existential,” he is probably trying to capture and focus attention, both in the United States and, especially, China. But adding “potentially” allows him to pull back so that he does not appear too alarmist and incur the jeering of the analyst community over something that is really not true. This political and somewhat contradictory phrasing leaves Coats’ actual beliefs rather unclear.

His exaggeration is understandable, however, due to China. In fact, I imagine much of the overheated rhetoric coming from the Trump administration about North Korea is intended to pressure China to finally do something on the issue, rather than accurately portray the threat from Pyongyang. But this is risky threat-inflation. Scare-mongering contributes to the growing drumbeat for airstrikes against North Korea which could ignite a disastrous regional conflict, even though North Korea almost certainly does not intend to offensively strike the United States with its nuclear weapons.

On August 09 2017 11:49 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Religion of peace

The first step of rebuilding the nation, Jeffress said, was the building of a wall around Jerusalem to protect its citizens. “You see, God is not against building walls,” Jeffress said in his sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington.

Jeffress is no stranger to controversy. He has said in the past that former president Barack Obama paved the way for the antichrist and drew wide attention for calling Mormonism a cult during the 2012 Republican primaries. Jeffress knows his comments on North Korea could be considered controversial, even among fellow evangelicals.

It's only one step short of saying Trump has the divine right to rule as a king.

On August 09 2017 12:42 KwarK wrote:
What about that time Joshua blew on a trumpet and built the walls of Jericho?