Today in Trump

[Spicoli]

[Spicoli]

"What's your plan for health insurance"...Trump answer was basically 'all we had was Obama care, but we made it good' . Liberally 8 years in and running for the oval office and you get "well I have a concept of a plan". FFS. The higher tariffs he wants question turned into a pisser. Trump got away with a lot of unchallenged belligerence and steamrolled the moderators with "gimme a minute" follow ups that ran into the carnival mirror fantasy land that is his mind right now. But in the and he really did get Rope-a-dopped.

[Master]

There will be no rematch!

Trump rules out another presidential debate against Harris

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9l9500vg7o

[Kirkland Laing]

"What's your plan for health insurance"...Trump answer was basically 'all we had was Obama care, but we made it good' . Liberally 8 years in and running for the oval office and you get "well I have a concept of a plan". FFS. The higher tariffs he wants question turned into a pisser. Trump got away with a lot of unchallenged belligerence and steamrolled the moderators with "gimme a minute" follow ups that ran into the carnival mirror fantasy land that is his mind right now. But in the and he really did get Rope-a-dopped.

They could maybe have brought up the fact he claimed he had a plan in 2016 but it turned out to be a request to the senate to come up with a healthcare plan within sixty days. They actually did. The GOP senate healthcare plan was ...... a capital gains tax cut. Their plan was to scrap Obamacare and leave the problem of providing healthcare of uninsured people to the states. Which was exactly the position that existed before Obamacare came along and managed to insure ten percent of the population. The subsidies that enabled the ten percent to be insured came from a tax on capital gains which would be abolished if Obamacare was scrapped.

Or they could have asked him about the tariffs he imposed in 2017. These were on various imported products like washing machines. Turns out tariffs are a tax on Americans, that's the whole point of a tariff, it makes imported goods more expensive than similar domestically produced goods and means people buy the domestically produced goods. Except what actually happened was American producers put their prices up in line with the foreign goods price increases and just made more profit. Or they could have asked him why he gave tariff waivers to super wealthy corporations like Apple and whether imposing tariffs on all imported goods might leave open the possibility of a president giving waivers to favoured firms over other firms maybe in exchange for monies paid in various ways. Of course the first thing I think about when I think of Donald Trump is financial probity so I'm sure that wouldn't happen. It's not like a similar system and a corrupt president caused Argentina to go from being one of the world's foremost economies to being Argentina. And of course there's the massive inflation that across the board tariffs would inflict on the American economy. Or retaliatory tariffs from other countries and what they would do to American exports.

There are lots of questions that the liberal media could ask Trump about his policies considering there's a track record with endless other corrupt looking stuff just on these two issues that I haven't covered in this post to keep it reasonably brief. They want a four thousand page policy document from Harris due to the fact that she's flipped on a few things she said running in a nomination primary like every other pol running for party nomination does. Trump can flip flop his abortion position three times in the last week with no blowback but Harris needs to explain in detail stuff from a years ago nomination race when every single journalist knows all pols play to their base. It would be nice to see a bit of consistency. Never mind. I think he's going to win anyway.

Some interesting bits and pieces.

A bunch of Reagan administration people back Harris:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ronald-...s-walz-ticket/


Tariffs explained to the New York Times:

https://jabberwocking.com/tariffs-ar...rk-times-says/



Springfield asked the immigrants to come:

https://twitter.com/SwissWatchGuy/st...86852117926201

And there's only a couple of thousand of them there according to the census bureau and BLS. And they arrived some time ago.



Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club hosted a convicted Jan. 6 rioter and alleged Nazi sympathizer twice this summer, where he was celebrated and gave speeches. At one event, Trump sent a video praising the attendees as “amazing patriots.” At the other, he won an award.

https://twitter.com/TomDreisbach/sta...07890208768212

Click the link. Look at the photograph. Just look at it.





Grandma is going to have her social security payment slashed to alomst nothing but she's going to be making so much money picking strawberries she'll come out ahead. The GOP plan for mass deporation and to solve social security without asking rich people to chip in:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...81629647737060

This guy is actually pretty good on how things work for a pundit:

https://www.slowboring.com/p/house-r...an-for-america


https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-...class-tax-hike



https://www.slowboring.com/p/obamaca...s-back-and-its

[Kirkland Laing]

Donald Trump infamously said at the presidential debate he had the “concept of a plan” to replace Obamacare. As is often the case when Trump commits verbal self-harm, it fell to J.D. Vance to turn his car wreck of a statement into an intelligible position.
What Vance came up with is not only surprising but, if understood properly, far more damaging than Trump’s original statement. The Trump plan, according to Vance, is to permit insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions.
Vance explained the Trump plan during an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker: “He, of course, does have a plan for how to fix American health care, but a lot of it goes down, Kristen, to deregulating insurance markets, so that people can actually choose a plan that makes sense for them.”
Vance is advocating a partial or complete return to the system that existed before Obamacare. In that world, prior to 2014, it was very difficult to find affordable coverage unless you were on Medicare, Medicaid, or got insurance through your employer. There was a market for individual insurance, and it was possible to buy plans if you didn’t get coverage through a government plan or through work. But that market was dominated by “adverse selection” — the only way insurers could make money was to weed out any customers likely to need medical care.
Cheap plans could be sold to people who were young and healthy. Oftentimes, those plans denied coverage for any preexisting condition, or had hidden limits on the amount the insurer would have to pay, so if you got very sick, you would discover you faced ruinous costs not covered by your insurance.
Obamacare turned that dysfunctional individual market into a market that offered affordable plans even for people who aren’t young and healthy. It did this by restricting the degree to which insurers can charge higher rates based on age (they can only make older customers pay a maximum of three times the rate they charge young customers). More importantly, it prevented insurers from screening out customers with a preexisting condition or denying coverage for necessary procedures.
Those regulations do have costs. They prevent insurers from cherry-picking young and healthy customers with cheap bare-bones plans — which means young and healthy people might pay more than they did before Obamacare. But it also means the individual insurance market actually makes coverage and medical care available to people who need it.
In the early stages of Obamacare’s rollout, Republicans hoped and believed the ACA exchanges would collapse. Republicans predicted a “death spiral,” in which customers refused to buy insurance in the exchanges and rates went up, driving out more customers and causing rates to climb further, until the exchanges no longer functioned. That did not happen. More than 20 million people now get insurance through the individual market.
But at the time, Republicans fervently believed the death spiral would happen, and they devised a plan in response. The plan was to roll back Obamacare’s regulations. Insurers would be permitted once again to cherry-pick the market for young and healthy customers. Luring young and healthy customers into the markets with cheap plans, Republicans argued, would end the death spiral.
Republicans don’t talk about this idea much any more, because the basis for it (the Obamacare death spiral) has failed to occur and because letting insurance companies discriminate against people with preexisting conditions is horribly unpopular.
Vance tries to pitch this idea in the friendliest possible way, but the idea is unmistakable. Vance explains that Trump wants to:

implement a deregulatory agenda so that people can pick a health care plan that fits them. Think about it: a young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. And a 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.


We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits all approach that puts a lot of the same people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.

Vance is correct that young people have different needs than old people, and healthy people have different needs than sick people, and putting them all in the same risk pool means charging young people more than they would otherwise pay. (Again, insurers can currently charge old customers up to three times the rate they charge the young — Vance thinks they should be able to charge the old even more.) What he doesn’t tell the audience is that allowing insurers to give cheaper plans to the young and healthy means letting them charge more — much, much more — to people who aren’t young and healthy. Perhaps some people have a member of their family who has an expensive medical condition. Those people would be unable to obtain decent coverage, as was the case before Obamacare.
Understanding health-care policy is a siloed journalistic skill, and Welker did not seem to recognize the radicalism of Vance’s plan. Instead, she summed up his answer, “What I hear you’re saying is Obamacare stays in place.” That is close to the opposite of what Vance said — he announced that Trump wants to reverse the regulatory protections in Obamacare that have made the individual markets affordable for people who have preexisting conditions or imperfect health records. Trump’s concept of a plan would take access to medical care away from millions of Americans.

[Kirkland Laing]

Understanding health-care policy is a siloed journalistic skill.


He's taking the piss here. It's embarrassing that a national Sunday show journalist ( I think this was on Meet The Press ffs) doesn't know Janet and John level facts about how Obamacare operates. But I'm certain she does and just doesn't want to get into it with Vance because then she's going to be attacked as being part of the liberal media. You can't have a job like that and not know basic stuff.

[Kirkland Laing]

It was the spring of 2018 and President Donald J. Trump, faced with an accelerating inquiry into his campaign’s ties to Russia, was furious that the Justice Department was reluctant to strike back at those he saw as his enemies.

In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.

Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.

“How about I do this?” Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump, according to an account verified by witnesses. “I’m going to write you a memo explaining to you what the law is and how it works, and I’ll give that memo to you and you can decide what you want to do.”

[...]

Even as they made that argument, the lawyers remained so concerned about being ignored by Mr. Trump that they smuggled drafts of the memo out of the White House complex so they would have a record of their efforts to restrain him if his demands for retribution got him, and them, in political and legal trouble.

They were right to be worried.

Within a month, Mr. Trump plunged ahead with one of his most successful efforts to have a Democratic critic investigated. He publicly demanded and ultimately got an inquiry by federal prosecutors into whether John F. Kerry, the former secretary of state, had broken the law by remaining in contact with Iranian diplomats while Mr. Trump was moving to end a nuclear deal with Tehran that Mr. Kerry had helped to negotiate during the Obama administration.

The Kerry investigation was not an outlier.

Through the rest of Mr. Trump’s time in office, he never let up on pressuring federal agencies to take action against his perceived enemies even as he was counseled against it by aides like Mr. McGahn and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff from the middle of 2017 until the beginning of 2019.

Those who would find themselves facing down the power of the federal government ranged from high-profile figures like Mrs. Clinton to F.B.I. officials like Mr. Comey to people formerly in Mr. Trump’s personal orbit like Michael D. Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, and Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” who worked in communications at the White House in 2017.

Mr. Trump’s efforts were so sustained and troubling to top West Wing aides that at least two of them took from the White House notes they had written that memorialized how he said he wanted to use the powers of the federal government against his rivals.

In a few of the cases where Mr. Trump wanted investigations, there was legitimate basis for action. But in many others, there was little or no legal justification. None resulted in a criminal conviction.

[..]

Mr. Trump sought to use the government to go after four broad categories of perceived enemies and critics.

One was F.B.I. officials, whom he sought to portray as biased or corrupt as they investigated him. Another was political rivals, whom he sought to tar with allegations of the same kind of wrongdoing, like collusion with foreign countries, that he was under investigation for.

He also wanted government power deployed against news organizations that produced coverage he did not like, as well as against people from his personal and business life he felt had betrayed him.

His most intense focus was on F.B.I. officials who were involved in the Russia investigation. They included Mr. Comey, Mr. McCabe and Mr. Strzok, all of whom would come under the scrutiny of the Justice Department and, in the case of Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe, who were subjects of unusual and invasive I.R.S. audits. (A later investigation by the tax agency’s inspector general found no evidence that the audits could be traced back to political pressure.)

Mr. Trump also pushed aggressively for an investigation based on his belief that the entire Russia investigation stemmed from a conspiracy against him by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. Mr. Barr named a special counsel, John H. Durham, to undertake that inquiry. It ended without uncovering anything like the plot suspected by Mr. Trump.



https://dnyuz.com/2024/09/21/as-pres...ften-got-them/





Worth reading the whole thing. This is what's coming if he wins in November. There's going to be nobody in a top job at the DOJ who will stop him. He'll have either appointed them from his list of tenth rate yes men who supported the coup and will support any level of illegal acts he wants to pursue or the career people who work there will resign and he'll just press on without them.

741 former high-ranking national security officials (233 general and flag officers) signed letter endorsing Kamala Harris for president. 15 four-star generals, 10 former cabinet secretaries, 10 service secretaries, and Repub leaders who served under Trump.

https://twitter.com/JenGriffinFNC/st...58861312598084

Trump isn't up to the job apparently.





Caught on tape

"Kim Jong Un speaks and his people stand up at attention. I want my people to do the same."

This alone should be a disqualifying statement for someone seeking to be President.

https://twitter.com/JoshEakle/status...98836115640421



The global inflation surge has receded, but it remains the single biggest reason why Donald Trump stands a terrifyingly high chance of winning a second term. Voters remain angry that prices rose, especially for groceries, and many of them believe Trump can reverse that, because food cost less when he was president.

The problem is that Trump does not have any ideas to bring down prices. His ideas would, in fact, do the opposite.

At a town hall yesterday, a voter asked Trump what he would do to bring down grocery prices. His answer, typically, rambled through various topics but did include one relevant policy response:

Our farmers are being absolutely decimated right now. And, you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. We’re gonna have to be a little like other countries, we’re not gonna allow so much com— we’re gonna let our farmers go to work.

So, the Trump plan to make food cheaper is to restrict food imports.

That is not exactly a surprise. Trump has been touting a gigantic tariff as an elixir to solve every economic problem. As the campaign has progressed, he has seemed to grow more infatuated with its potential, casually doubling its proposed size and recommending it as the answer to an ever-wider array of problems.

There is a reasonable strong consensus for targeted tariffs for security (such as tariffs on strategic goods produced by China, a global military competitor). This second category of tariffs was designed to nurture important domestic firms that pay high wages, typically manufacturing complex goods like automobiles or airplanes. This form of tariff is rejected by most economists, but it does have some intellectual support.

Trump is proposing something that goes well beyond either of these categories. He wants to impose a tariff not just on strategic items, or even on goods related to manufacturing, but on every import, including food.

There is absolutely no economic basis for imposing a tariff on food. (You might want to protect domestic agriculture if you were reliant on imports to feed the population and worried that wartime enemies could starve you out, but that does not apply to the United States and never has.) Food tariffs simply increase food prices, for the “benefit” of impelling more of your domestic population to work in agriculture. Is there a strategic, economic, or social reason to reallocate workers from manufacturing and services (or retirement) to farm work? There is not.

It is obvious even to noneconomists that restricting food imports will cause food prices to rise, rather than to fall. But Trump does not understand even the simplest economic concepts. His mind is so fixated on zero-sum thinking that, when presented with a problem (food prices are too high), the only cause he can think of is that other countries must be hurting us, and he will resolve the problem by hurting them (preventing them from selling us food).

Republican elites are mostly ignoring this plan and hoping Trump can somehow be talked out of implementing it after he gets into office. The flaw with this plan is that Trump, for all his expertise in the areas of inheritance, tax fraud, media manipulation, and swindling, does not understand economics. He also has unlimited faith in his own brilliance. It is possible external circumstances may propel him back into the White House, but he truly has no solutions to the problems that people expect him to solve.

[TitoFan]

Bottom line:

There's TRUCKLOADS of VERY GOOD REASONS why Trump should never be allowed anywhere near the White House again.

Unfortunately, there are some unfortunate truths standing in the way.

1. The MAGA cult is immune to anything that puts Trump in a bad light. They couldn't give less of a shit what Trump says or does. The only truth (prophetic, at that) Trump has ever uttered is that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue, and people would still vote for him.

2. The electoral process may not have been rigged with Trump lost to Biden. But you can be damn well sure it's going to fixed now. The MAGA cult has done (and is still doing) everything in their power to skew the system to let their guy win. It's a travesty... it's third-worldly shit... and it's happening before our very noses.

3. Trump uncovered a very sad and inconvenient truth. The U.S. has no shortage of racist, militant, ignorant, fanatical bastards who would willingly start another civil war over Trump. Trump may be in different places on a lot of lists. But in the list of THE MOST DIVISIVE PRESIDENTS IN U.S. HISTORY..... Trump is far away #1. No one else even comes close.

So all the Tweets, soundbites, shitty debate performances, outright lies in the world aren't going to make one damn bit of difference come November.

[Kirkland Laing]

Bottom line:

There's TRUCKLOADS of VERY GOOD REASONS why Trump should never be allowed anywhere near the White House again.



2. The electoral process may not have been rigged with Trump lost to Biden. But you can be damn well sure it's going to fixed now. The MAGA cult has done (and is still doing) everything in their power to skew the system to let their guy win. It's a travesty... it's third-worldly shit... and it's happening before our very noses.

Yale law grad explains what happens if Harris wins but officials refuse to certify the results:








https://twitter.com/HackingButLegal/status/1837757623665353125