August 25, 2019

Out Of Tricks and Out Of His Mind, Trump Recycles Middle Class Tax Cut Promise If He Wins Reelection

https://www.politicususa.com/2019/08/24/trump-middle-class-tax-cut.html

Saturday, August 24, 2019 by Jason Easley
Out Of Tricks and Out Of His Mind, Trump Recycles Middle Class Tax Cut Promise If He Wins Reelection


Trump is out of tricks as he has returned to promising a tax cut for the middle class, but only if he wins the 2020 election.

Trump tweeted:



Trump made the same promise of a tax cut for the middle class if Republicans kept the House and Senate in 2018. It didn’t work then for the same reason that it is not going to work now. Trump has no intention of cutting taxes for the middle class.

He doesn’t need a Republican House and Senate to pass a middle-class tax cut. House Democrats would be thrilled to cut taxes for the middle class with no strings attacks. Republicans in the Senate have never met a tax cut that they wouldn’t vote for, so it would be slam dunk legislative pass.

It won’t happen because Trump thinks that offering imaginary tax cuts to voters only if they vote for him is smart politics.

The president’s tweet was also an admission that the first tax cut that Republicans passed was not a middle-class tax cut as they falsely claimed, nor was it intended to be.

Trump lied about the tax cut for the rich, so there is no reason to believe that he is telling the truth about cutting taxes for the middle class.

President Trump is out of tricks so he is recycling his old promises in the hope of fooling voters in 2020.

August 25, 2019

Trump wants to make it harder for the military to vote from overseas

Trump wants to make it harder for the military to vote from overseas
By Oliver Willis -
August 23, 2019


It could cost service members $60 to mail in their ballots.

The Trump administration is set to withdraw from the Universal Postal Union, which could significantly increase the cost of sending ballots through the mail for members of the military and other Americans living overseas.

"Last October, the U.S. gave the required one-year notice stating it would leave the UPU unless changes were made to the discounted fees that China pays for shipping small packages to the United States," the Fulcrum reported on Monday.

Withdrawing from the UPU would prevent overseas citizens from returning their ballots via regular mail service, and Kentucky Elections director Jared Dearing told the outlet they could have to pay in the region of $60 to use a commercial shipping service.

Roughly 500,000 oversea ballots were cast in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has recent history demonstrating opposition to military votes.

Last year, as votes were being counted in Florida's midterm election races, Trump pushed for military ballots to be ignored.

more...

https://shareblue.com/trump-wants-to-make-it-harder-for-the-military-to-vote-from-overseas/?fbclid=IwAR07xdg5AQ0KX3YTi1HXSwGQzLhbOYQ73r9CmGm5q9TJIy-CJ5aYRqx3mIs

August 25, 2019

Trump Orders Americans To Stop Eating Chinese Food

Hey, it could happen.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/24/1881141/-Trump-Orders-Americans-To-Stop-Eating-Chinese-Food?fbclid=IwAR0_Swi7uUjCMHYcLMXdUXGjgOTYwPzLBVMlcaJBtYGv5RIGuAPAHH5Gfrs

Trump Orders Americans To Stop Eating Chinese Food
dailynooze
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Saturday August 24, 2019 · 5:37 PM EDT


As part of his ever-escalating trade war with China, Donald Trump has ordered Americans to stop patronizing Chinese restaurants.

Following Trump’s latest directive, which he put out in a tweet, a few staff members gently tried to explain to Trump that the People’s Republic of China does not own any restaurants in the United States, let alone Chinese restaurants; that this boycotting of Chinese eateries will have no effect on our adversary.



It remains to be seen if Americans will give up their love of Chinese food. Already several Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federation of North America and the National Council of Jewish Woman, have come out strongly in opposition to the proposed ban.

August 25, 2019

Rick Wilson: The great crackup: Trump is coming even more undone

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-the-great-crackup-20190825-3m5btyfh3bd4jaw4dkzmgcxjfm-story.html?fbclid=IwAR0HsmouCWk4WngWguVZ9FD1Au_-b4OZw8qcpUnE0mBzky8Sic-yJr2boEA

The great crackup: Trump is coming even more undone
By Rick Wilson
New York Daily News |
Aug 24, 2019 | 6:45 PM


“Our great American companies are hereby ordered...”

The subtle meter in Americans’ brains that tracks the degree to which the universe seems off its axis has been in a state of constant flux since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but this week the needle slammed hard into the peg on the right side of the gauge. Red warning lights are flashing across Washington as even the now-typical levels of uncertainty and political chaos reach epic proportions.

It’s almost as if we need a recalibration of the insanity of the Trump era, a new set of definitions about what comprises normal presidential behavior.

Because what’s happening now left normal five towns back, stopped for smokes and brown liquor, and tossed the GPS out the window. This week wasn’t normal, and no amount of whistling past the graveyard will make it any different.

Donald Trump’s affect, speech patterns and overall delivery this week have been alternately horrifying and hilarious. A combination of waking hallucinations, verbal tics, lies surpassing even his usual fabulist standard, aphasias and lunatic blurtings, each public utterance was a moment where the eye of his aides either popped or rolled, depending on their level of cynicism.

snip//

Nothing about the week we just lived through is comforting. Nothing about it can be excused or ignored. Donald Trump is not a well man. Here in the dog days of August, Washington should be its usual sleepy self, the political class having wisely fled the humidity and misery of D.C. Instead, Trump’s performance left people both inside and out of the political class wondering about the president’s sanity and fitness for office.

Most states have some form of involuntary commitment law for people who are a danger to themselves and others. In my home state of Florida, it’s called the Baker Act, and I’ve seen it applied to run of the mill folks up to state legislators. It only takes a competent family member and one other adult to get the ball rolling on Baker Acting someone. So I’m thinking about Trump’s next visit to Mar-A-Lago.

Melania, call me.

August 24, 2019

Epstein taken off suicide watch on psychologist's advice

Remind me not to seek advice from this guy.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/08/24/epstein-taken-off-suicide-watch-on-psychologists-advice/23800787/

Epstein taken off suicide watch on psychologist’s advice

New York Daily News
Thomas Tracy
Aug 24th 2019 3:28PM


Sex fiend financier Jeffrey Epstein was taken off suicide watch on the recommendation of a psychologist at the federal detention center where he ultimately killed himself, according to a letter from the U.S. Justice Department.

Epstein, 66, had been placed on suicide watch on July 24, after he tried to hang himself in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.

But he was “later removed from suicide watch after being evaluated by a doctoral-level psychologist who determined that a suicide watch was no longer warranted,” according to a letter sent to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday.

The letter, dated Thursday, came from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd’s office in response to the committee’s demands seeking information about Epstein’s death.

August 24, 2019

Trump's new favorite poll inflates his approval rating by about 10 points

Trump’s new favorite poll inflates his approval rating by about 10 points
Zogby, which Trump has repeatedly touted this week, was once described as “the worst pollster in the world.”
By Aaron Rupar@atrupar
Aug 23, 2019, 4:30pm EDT


Amid signs that the economy is slowing, reputable polls show President Donald Trump’s approval rating sagging. Trump responded this week by repeatedly trumpeting a disreputable Zogby poll that pegs his approval rating at 51 percent.

Trump, who this week referred to himself as “the chosen one,” seems constitutionally unable to accept the fact he isn’t as popular as he believes himself to be. And so his go-to move in times like this is to lash out at the media and cherry-pick data that paints himself in the most favorable light.

“This despite the Fake News and Polls!” Trump tweeted on Friday morning, alluding to the Zogby number on Twitter for the second time this week.

snip//

Zogby, however, is not a reliable pollster. That’s because the firm, which skews to the right and which FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver once described as the “worst pollster in the world,” isn’t transparent about its methodology.

This problem is apparent in the polling Trump has repeatedly touted this week. The “Zogby Analytics Poll Methodology” page merely notes that Zogby “conducted an online survey of 897 likely voters in the US,” but doesn’t detail how the sample was chosen. And given how out of step its findings about Trump’s approval rating are with other polls, it appears Zogby’s sample contains more Trump supporters than a firm would find in one that’s truly representative of the electorate.



more...

https://www.vox.com/2019/8/23/20829686/trump-zogby-poll-approval-rating

August 24, 2019

Mitch McConnell's Nightmare Continues As Kentucky Coal Miners Expose Him As A Fraud

https://www.politicususa.com/2019/08/24/mcconnell-nightmare-coal-kentucky-miners.html?fbclid=IwAR1XZoiGgSeeZhCrObCBD66iN6H35g_3kv9nhJoVCQkRnu0CJrCar0AyIW8

Posted on Sat, Aug 24th, 2019 by Sean Colarossi
Mitch McConnell’s Nightmare Continues As Kentucky Coal Miners Expose Him As A Fraud


Mitch McConnell might think he has the votes of coal miners locked down, but a new ad released by his Democratic opponent, Amy McGrath, shows that they’re mad as hell and ready to vote him out of office.

In the campaign spot, a coal miner explains how he and a group of other miners with black lung took a 10-hour bus ride to urge McConnell to save their disability benefits.

When the group of coal miners arrived, the Senate majority leader was only willing to spend a single minute with them.

“My stepfather and grandfather died of black lung. Now I could lose my son,” the man in the ad said. “Mitch McConnell let the coal companies walk away from us, and then after one minute, he did too.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1165247584304336898

The coal miner in the ad said:



Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have been conning coal workers

With their campaign rallies touting their support for coal, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have been pulling a massive con job on coal workers. It takes more than wearing a hard hat and saying you “dig coal” to be an advocate for coal workers.

Not only have Trump and McConnell been dishonest when they say they can save the dying coal industry, but they are leaving workers behind, particularly when it comes to their health benefits and pensions.

Ultimately, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell don’t care about coal workers. They care about coal companies. That’s a very different thing.

Mitch McConnell is a fraud, and the people of Kentucky – and America – are beginning to wake up to this reality.

August 24, 2019

Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro sends in the military to battle huge blazes...

Saturday, Aug 24th 2019 10AM 84°F 1PM 85°F 5-Day Forecast
Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro sends in the military to battle huge blazes sweeping across the Amazon as scientists warn fires and deforestation are reaching an irreversible tipping point

By Sophie Tanno For Mailonline

Published: 08:24 EDT, 24 August 2019 | Updated: 11:49 EDT, 24 August 2019


Brazilian forces will be deployed to battle the huge blazes sweeping parts of the Amazon today, after the country's president authorised the use of military.

Jair Bolsonaro pledged that the military will 'act strongly' to control the wildfires, as he signed the decree on Friday evening following a late-night crisis meeting with his cabinet.

Bolsonaro yesterday indicated he was considering sending in the army, amid international outcry over the disaster.

Brazilian forces will deploy to border areas, indigenous territories and other affected regions in the Amazon from today to assist in putting out fires for a month, according to the presidential decree authorising use of the army.

The armed forces will work with public security and environmental protection agencies, the decree says.

more...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7390261/Brazils-president-Jair-Bolsonaro-sends-military-battle-huge-blazes-sweeping-Amazon.html?ito=social-facebook&fbclid=IwAR1Cf8OXXNGxLh0DDcfT7Ss5J6R3xO829Yle5FnUWvdUO4A1m7wTAKT68NU

August 24, 2019

The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs

The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs
One person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.
10:35 AM ET
Franklin Foer


When Jair Bolosonaro won Brazil’s presidential election last year, having run on a platform of deforestation, David Wallace-Wells asked, “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” Bolsonaro didn’t pour lighter fluid to ignite the flames now ravishing the Amazon, but with his policies and rhetoric, he might as well have. The destruction he inspired—and allowed to rage with his days of stubborn unwillingness to douse the flames— has placed the planet at a hinge moment in its ecological history. Unfortunately, the planet doesn’t have a clue about how it should respond.

In part, the problem is that so much of the world is now governed by leaders who share Bolsonaro’s sensibility. Even before Bolsonaro presided over the incineration of the world’s storehouse of oxygen, he led a dubious regime. His path to power began with the corrupt impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, followed by the arrest of his higher-polling electoral rival.

In part, the problem is the dismal state of international institutions, which haven’t been so tattered since World War II. In the face of global critics begging Bolsonaro to stop the destruction of the Amazon, he shouts about the threats to Brazil’s sovereignty. For that complaint to land, he would need democratic legitimacy, and this revanchist has none; yet those critics do nothing more than sputter inconsequential rage.

If a country obtains chemical or biological weapons, the rest of the world tends to react with fury — or at least it did in the not-so-distant past. Sanctions rained down on the proliferators, who were then ostracized from the global community. And in rare ( sometimes disastrously misguided) cases, the world decided that the threat justified a military response. The destruction of the Amazon is arguably far more dangerous than the Weapons of Mass Destruction that have triggered a robust response. The consequence of the unfolding disaster—which will extinguish species and hasten a worst-case climate crisis—extend for eternity. To lose a fifth of the Amazon to deforestation would trigger a process known as “dieback,” releasing what The Intercept calls a “doomsday bomb of stored carbon.”

It is commonplace to describe the Amazon as the “world’s lungs.” Embedded in the metaphor is the sense that inherited ideas about the sovereignty of states no longer hold in the face of climate change. If the smoke clouds drifted only so far as the skies of Sao Paulo, other nations might be able to shrug off the problem as belonging to someone else. But one person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.

more...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/amazon-fires-show-limits-sovereignty/596779/

August 24, 2019

The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren

August 23, 2019 2:04PM ET
The Very Real Possibility of President Elizabeth Warren
Can she beat Trump? There’s a plan for that
By Jamil Smith



Not too many campaign websites first ask visitors if they are unsure about the candidate in question. But if you click the “I’m not sure yet” button on the ElizabethWarren.com launch page, you can enter your email before answering the question “What’s holding you back?” one of three ways. Two replies are typical for 160-some days before the Iowa caucuses: “I’m not ready to make a decision” and “I have questions about Elizabeth’s policy positions.”

It’s the one between those, though, that most captures the zeitgeist of the still-young primary contest for the Democratic presidential nomination: “I’m not sure Elizabeth can win.”

A few thousand people who disagreed with that sentiment piled into the Shrine Expo Hall on the University of Southern California’s campus early Wednesday evening. A good hour before Warren’s town hall began with a raffle to determine who would get to ask her questions later that night, the faint odor of spilt, fermented beer wafted through the lower level, stage left — likely some resilient residue from an earlier event. The smell itself didn’t fit the early-evening, family vibe of the Massachusetts Senator’s supporters, and frankly, they hadn’t been there long enough for it to smell like a post-victory celebration locker room. But the spirit it conveyed was a perfect match: Most everyone there to see Elizabeth Warren was as giddy as if the title were in sight.

There was, however, that damned specter of “electability” also was wafting through the room. It was much less odorous but no less repugnant. This phantom is conjured in virtually all discussions about the Democratic primary contest, derived largely from archetypes of older white men whom Americans are more accustomed to seeing run for office and therefore electing. It smothers critical thinking about the presidential race so much that it appears that many are convinced that “electability” is indeed a living, breathing thing when it is in fact an apparition, a hasty creation of the party elites and pundit classes that serves as a convenient substitute for the vetting that desperately needs to occur before a nominee goes up against President Trump next fall. Even though more than 160 days remain between now and the first Iowa caucus, this unanswerable question lingers more prominently than do major quandaries about candidate qualifications.

snip//

Warren communicates as much with her body language as with her words. Making a few jokes that land early, she exhibits a disarming manner — “Let me tell you a little bit about myself,” she says, before going into her family history and her college career, her limbs getting looser as she breaks down her points. Her voice is invigorating all the way through, and even as she is breaking down a topic to its bones, it doesn’t feel like only rah-rah fodder for the NPR crowd. This is a fairly multiracial group who clearly gives a shit about whether they get a president who can do the job after winning the election, and she is respecting their intelligence.

more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/president-elizabeth-warren-possibility-875817/?fbclid=IwAR2aidd22reH8sFsn4lqWWmtgaLAwL_S-SfaT5R12KDyuh4YcMjOz5l-Z0Q