2.09.2019

Saturday #1

2020

Tulsi Gabbard  - Except for being a bit squishy on LBGTs, she sounds pretty good.



Trump

Trump Is Wrong. When The Opposition Party Runs The House, The President Gets Investigated. - I think "Trump is wrong" is better than "Trump is Lying" here. You can't lie if you just don't know what the fuck you are talking about.





















Corruption

The committee paid a total of $700,000 to the Trump International Hotel for event spaces for four days in January 2017. At the time, a consultant working for the inaugural committee expressed her concern over email that the price quoted by the Trump hotel — $175,000 per day for several event spaces — was too high, as ProPublica and WNYC reported in December. 
“Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” wrote Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, an experienced New York-based event planner, suggesting a fair rate for the event spaces would be at most $85,000 per day, less than half of what was ultimately paid. That fee did not cover catering.


Tax Cuts

PAUL RYAN, POLITICAL SUPERGENIUS
“Ask people how much they paid in taxes, nobody knows. Ask them how much they got in their refund, people know,” Howard Gleckman , a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told the Intercept’s David Dayen this week. “Everyone focuses on size of the refund, and it does affect perception.”
In other words: It looks as though the Republican Party implemented their signature tax bill in a manner that will lead many people who received tax cuts to believe that Donald Trump raised their taxes.
Yep, people are in general, dumb as shit about taxes.  The R's tried to take advantage of it. I hope it bites them in the ass.

Israel and US Politics

Jimmy Carter believed he lost a second term because he opposed settlements, alienating Jews — Eizenstat - US politicians have to be careful with the settlements. The wrong policy stance can cost you an election.
When George H.W. Bush died last year, we revisited the idea that he was a one-term president in part because he vigorously took on the Israel lobby over settlements in 1991, and paid a price. Even Tom Friedman said that was the political lesson of the Bush presidency for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, neither of whom did much to oppose settlements.

And everyone knows that settlements bedeviled the Obama presidency. “It is time for these settlements to stop,” Obama declared in Cairo, till he faced reelection, and reversed course two years later under pressure from Netanyahu and Jewish organizations, and vetoed a settlements resolution at the U.N. And then he reversed course again– and in one of the last acts of his presidency, Obama allowed an anti-settlements resolution to go through in December 2016 (a move that Donald Trump sought to undermine by reaching out to the Russians).

What I did not know till I read the new book, “Jimmy Carter, The White House Years,” by his former top domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat, is that Israeli settlements also bedeviled the Carter administration. 





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