Let's make America Grate Again.

[TSherbs]

Is this a surprise, Ted?

No, just a reminder of what a poor judge of character Trump was and is. He boasted that he was the best hirer ever (or something like that...like how he boasted that he knew war better than the generals), but Trump never met a suck-up (or pretend suckup) whom he did not invite into his residence....

[dneal]

Speaking of administration hires…

Nonbinary Biden official Sam Brinton charged after stealing luggage at airport, using it for a month

Nonbinary Biden official Sam Brinton charged after stealing luggage at airport, using it for a m.png

I also found this odd


Search CNN - Videos, Pictures, and News - CNN.com.png

[Chuck Naill]

Good to see a normal welcome for the French president.

[Chuck Naill]

Not sure where to place this quote from Heather Cox Richardson,
"Biden asked Congress on Monday, November 28, to act to prevent a rail strike, but there was a long history behind this particular measure, and an even longer one behind the government’s pressure on railroad workers.

The story behind today’s crisis started in 2017 when former president Trump’s trade war hammered agriculture and manufacturing, leading railroad companies to fire workers—more than 20,000 of them in 2019 alone, dropping the number of railroad workers in the U.S. below 200,000 for the first time since the Department of Labor began to keep track of such statistics in the 1940s. By December 2020, the industry had lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains.

Those jobs did not come back even after the economy did, though, as railroad companies implemented a system called precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. “We fundamentally changed the way we operate over the last 2½ years,” Bryan Tucker, vice president of communications at railroad corporation CSX told Heather Long of the Washington Post in January 2020. “It’s a different way of running a railroad.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substac...m_medium=email

I wonder how many RR workers know that Trump caused their present condition.

[TSherbs]

It is the federal government's job, periodically, to tell essential workers (to the welfare and security of the country) that they must honor their contracts (get back to work or be fired).

[Chuck Naill]

It is the federal government's job, periodically, to tell essential workers (to the welfare and security of the country) that they must honor their contracts (get back to work or be fired).

I never worked for a union or had a contract; I am sure it has its benefits as well as risks. I have a retired relative who said he could be "called out" to take a train somewhere at any moment. While they make decent money, obviously there is the problem with trying to have a somewhat predictable life. Even medical workers know if they are on call.

I do remember Reagan firing the Air Traffic Control workers around 1980.

[TSherbs]

It is the federal government's job, periodically, to tell essential workers (to the welfare and security of the country) that they must honor their contracts (get back to work or be fired).

I never worked for a union or had a contract; I am sure it has its benefits as well as risks. I have a retired relative who said he could be "called out" to take a train somewhere at any moment. While they make decent money, obviously there is the problem with trying to have a somewhat predictable life. Even medical workers know if they are on call.

I do remember Reagan firing the Air Traffic Control workers around 1980.

Yes, I sympathize with the workers. But as with the air-traffic controllers, there are national interests at play also.

[Chuck Naill]

It is the federal government's job, periodically, to tell essential workers (to the welfare and security of the country) that they must honor their contracts (get back to work or be fired).

I never worked for a union or had a contract; I am sure it has its benefits as well as risks. I have a retired relative who said he could be "called out" to take a train somewhere at any moment. While they make decent money, obviously there is the problem with trying to have a somewhat predictable life. Even medical workers know if they are on call.

I do remember Reagan firing the Air Traffic Control workers around 1980.

Yes, I sympathize with the workers. But as with the air-traffic controllers, there are national interests at play also.

Also, the same retired RR worker said his trains killed a couple dozen people over his career trying to outrun the train. He had to walk back, inspect, and call it in. it took a toll.

[TSherbs]

Lengthy prison terms today for two more of the Whitmer kidnapping plotters.

[Chuck Naill]

Lengthy prison terms today for two more of the Whitmer kidnapping plotters.

"I guess they say she was threatened," Donald Trump

[Chuck Naill]

For those of us, 3 or four, this is vindication that Trump was flawed from the beginning. He fooled many and continues to do so.


"Yesterday, former president Trump took to his Truth Social media platform to announce that he would be making “a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” today. Since he recently threw his hat in the ring for president in 2024, there was a great deal of speculation about what political move this would be.

When it came today, it turned out that his announcement was for digital trading cards with images of him as a superhero…available for $99 apiece. Radio personality John Melendez promptly called them “Broke’mon cards.”

Ron Filipkowski, a former federal prosecutor and Republican who now monitors right-wing extremism, tweeted: “All I can say is that those of us who have lost friends, fought with relatives, resigned positions, been called traitor, left our party, all because we saw very clearly what a con-man, huckster and fraud this man is, have never felt more vindicated.”

The reduction of the former president to a cartoon grifter seems likely to have political repercussions. Right-wing media personality Baked Alaska, who is facing six months in jail after pleading guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing inside a Capitol building for his participation in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, tweeted: “i can’t believe i’m going to jail for an nft salesman,” with a sad face emoji."

https://heathercoxrichardson.substac...m_medium=email

[TSherbs]

"We told you so" is on many people's lips.

Where's his family on this?

[Chuck Naill]

"We told you so" is on many people's lips.

Where's his family on this?

How could you see him for what he was, and others couldn't? Like the federal prosecutor said, he divided us from our families and friends. Some of our friends and fellow employees died because they went along with his pandemic nonsense. Such tragedy!!

[Chuck Naill]

Someone mentioned DeSantis...

"But getting vaccinated is mainly about protecting yourself. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

The immediate answer is the widespread belief on the right that the vaccines have terrible side effects. This belief is hard to justify: If it were true, shouldn’t there be a lot of evidence for such claims, given that more than 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide?

Ah, but the usual suspects claim that sinister elites are suppressing the evidence. Which brings us back to DeSantis, who announced on Tuesday that he was forming a state committee to counter federal health policy recommendations — and asking for a grand jury investigation into unspecified “crimes and misdemeanors” related to coronavirus vaccines.

OK, I doubt that anyone believes that DeSantis knows or cares about the scientific evidence here. What he’s doing instead is catering to a Republican base that equates listening to experts, on public health or anything else, with “wokeness,” and demonizes anyone saying things it doesn’t want to hear.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/o...-election.html

Sound familar?? This is why Republicans need another option.

[TSherbs]

"We told you so" is on many people's lips.

Where's his family on this?

How could you see him for what he was, and others couldn't? Like the federal prosecutor said, he divided us from our families and friends. Some of our friends and fellow employees died because they went along with his pandemic nonsense. Such tragedy!!

I answered this on the other thread....

[TSherbs]

A David French piece on the power of the Trump con:


How Much Longer Can Trump's Con Endure?
By David French

Many years ago, a con man came to my church. I belonged to a small working-class congregation in rural Kentucky. Although most of the members had jobs, many folks were struggling, living paycheck to paycheck and desperate for some degree of financial security.

Enter the con man. He was starting a new multilevel-marketing plan featuring diet pills. MLMs are nothing new, and many of them operate quite legally across the country. Legal MLMs make their revenue primarily from their products. An illegal MLM, by contrast, is little more than a pyramid scheme, with participants earning money almost exclusively by recruiting new participants.

A pyramid scheme is inherently unstable. The instant its recruiting pool dries up (which can happen remarkably quickly), it runs out of cash. Most people lose money, but the founder of the scheme can often pocket extraordinary profits.

I knew the MLM at my church was a scam the moment I heard the pitch. “If you want to take the pills, fine, but don’t worry about selling them. Just bring in your friends, and let your friends bring in their friends, and you’ll start building your business, fast!” At first, I wasn’t concerned. The pitch was so obviously too good to be true that I didn’t think my friends would fall for it. But I was wrong. I’d underestimated people’s dissatisfaction with their jobs and the appeal of a new opportunity. The con man’s product was a pyramid scheme, but he marketed something else. He marketed hope.

I was the only lawyer at the church, and—as luck would have it—I’d just finished working on a securities-fraud case that involved a pyramid scheme. I knew the law. I also knew how the pyramid worked, and I set about explaining it to my friends. I even went to one of the pyramid sales pitches and talked it over afterwards.
Remember, this was years ago. I was young, barely out of law school, and I thought that the folks at my church would be happy to hear the truth. I presumed they’d be glad to dodge a fraudulent bullet. After all, they weren’t hearing warnings from just anybody; I was their neighbor. I was a deacon. I had even represented the church in a successful First Amendment lawsuit.

None of that mattered. Not only did most of my friends completely reject my warnings, but a few of them were also furious with me. I was shocked and hurt. In my mind, I was only trying to help. In my mind, I was using the gifts God gave me to protect those closest to me from harm.

But that was in my mind. What was in the minds of my angry friends? It took years for me to see it clearly, but now I do. On the one side, there was a man who offered hope and relief from the crushing financial burdens of their lives. But what did I offer? At best, it was the status quo. I didn’t come with any hope. I promised no relief at all.
I’m thinking about cons today because of yesterday’s “major announcement” from Donald Trump. After teasing something dramatic, he unveiled a set of digital Trump trading cards, available for a whopping $99 apiece. The trading cards are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, unique digital files that only the owner can possess.
At the height of the NFT craze, in 2021, people were paying absurd sums of money for digital files. In March 2021, an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2.9 million. This past May, auction bids for the same NFT “topped out at just $14,000.” Trump jumping into the NFT market is like jumping into the pet-rock market in 1976 or investing in Dutch tulips in March 1637.

But don’t tell Trump’s most devoted fans. According to a real-time tracker, Trump allegedly made more than $4 million only a day after his announcement.
Indeed, this is hardly Trump’s first con. Yesterday, HuffPost reported that Trump spent only a small fraction of the money he’d raised, ostensibly, to aid GOP Senate candidates. The rest, he hoarded for his own presidential campaign.

The most spectacular and dangerous of Trump’s cons was his “Stop the Steal” effort after the 2020 election. In addition to conning tens of millions of Republicans into believing a free and fair election was broken and corrupt, he raised $250 million to support an “Election Defense Fund” that the January 6 select committee says did not exist.

One can write books about Trump’s various cons, yet, until recently, his Republican support remained rock-solid, despite his obvious lies and grift. The reasons are complex, but they’re related to the story I told at the start of this newsletter. Ever since I first raised concerns about Trump, in 2015, I’ve experienced one long case of déjà vu.
As friends and neighbors expressed anger and frustration with my opposition to Trump, I felt like I was back in my small church, stealing hope from people gripped with fear. “Make America Great Again” was a genius slogan, and by the end of the primary season in 2016, the alternative to MAGA was exactly the thing that Republicans feared so much: the status quo of Democratic control of the Oval Office.

In fact, Hillary Clinton was so despised that many millions of Americans viewed her as worse than the status quo. Never Trumpers like me threatened to take away Republican hope and give Republicans nothing in return—nothing but the very reality they were hoping to escape.
There’s an important lesson here, applicable to pyramid schemes, politics, and a host of cultural challenges where people find hope and purpose in all the wrong places. You can’t fact-check a person out of hope and purpose. They’ll resent you even if you’re right.

Instead, it’s always preferable, if at all possible, to replace something bad with something better. That’s a key reason Trump is losing altitude now. It’s not that his behavior has been meaningfully worse since he left office (it’s hard to top January 6 as an act of dangerous political malice); rather, Republicans are starting to realize that someone else is likely a better ambassador for their policies and values.

In other words, arguing against Trump no longer means arguing for a Republican defeat. Trump’s opponents can offer their own version of hope. So far, that “someone else” seems to be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (I’m far from sold on DeSantis, but that’s a piece for a different time), but for the moment, the identity of the alternative is less important than the existence of an alternative—and it’s that very existence that just might finally break the spell of the Trump con.

[Chuck Naill]

That's a great example of what many of us have been enduring, @tsherbs!! Thanks for sharing.

Yesterday I sent a link, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-wo...cond-amendment, on how the NRA rewrote the Second Amendment to two associates. Only one responded with something about states' rights. In other words, their response had nothing to do with the Second Amendment. While I knew I was right and had been right the whole time that the SA has nothing to do with American gun ownership, regardless of Heller, I now realize that arguing otherwise will put me in poor standing with my acquaintances.

So, what am I doing by arguing that the Alamo wasn't about Texas independence, but becoming a slave state? Well, for me it is important to own the truth so that it can be said at an appropriate time. Maybe understanding that Trump was a con the whole time cannot be said right now, but some day it can be. And this truth serves to show that DeSantis the same in some ways. Respect produces sway. Only those that know us and respect our character will ever listen anyway. The only way to sway is coming from a position of character.

I read a lot of op-eds. These folks are often blistered for what they write. If we are not willing to be blistered, we might as well keep our mouths closed.

[TSherbs]

Thanks, Chuck. Another reason to post things is that in writing them out, we figure out just what we think. We clarify our ideas to ourselves. There is value in that, too.

I can say, at least for my own clarification, that I believe from the start that Trump's primary motivation has been to pump his brand and monetize the exposure. Venture after venture is about trying to monetize his brand, the recent NFT kitsch is no different. He's a huckster and always has been. Plenty of Americans love hucksterism; sell, sell, sell. It's what America does.

There are other aspects to his candidacy (the populist motivations), but I have commented on that elsewhere.

[Chuck Naill]

This was a referenced article in an op-ed I was reading this AM.

"There is only one reason among all of the many cited by Thiessen that Republicans are turning away from Donald Trump now: because he cannot win. Everything else they were perfectly willing to put up with, and they would put up with it again—if only they believed that he stood a chance of helping keep them in power.

Really."
https://www.thebulwark.com/youre-onl...ing-trump-now/

[TSherbs]

This was a referenced article in an op-ed I was reading this AM.

"There is only one reason among all of the many cited by Thiessen that Republicans are turning away from Donald Trump now: because he cannot win. Everything else they were perfectly willing to put up with, and they would put up with it again—if only they believed that he stood a chance of helping keep them in power.

Really."
https://www.thebulwark.com/youre-onl...ing-trump-now/

good column

I agree completely: Trump's deeply flawed and disgusting behaviors were fully apparent for anyone who cared before he was president and also while he was president. To be slack-jawed now and not have been before is simply a matter of political convenience.