Showing posts with label Barack Obama 2019. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama 2019. Show all posts

Monday, December 30, 2019

Friday, December 20, 2019

Hey Rush, what's undeniable is that Trump's GDP is no better than Obama's pathetic GDP

2% in 3Q2019 reported today, when Trump promised 4%, even 5%. Ain't happening. All we get is more of the same meh, 2.9% tops in 2018.

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Monday, December 16, 2019

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Biden in the cat bird seat: Just as Bernie tanked after promising criminals will get to vote, Warren has tanked after hedging on Medicare for all

Ezra Klein, here:

One lesson of the past few weeks is that the Medicare-for-all debate has become a minefield for Democrats — and it’s not clear that any candidate has a safe path through it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has dropped 14 points since October 8, when she briefly led the Democratic field in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Most attribute her decline to her handling of Medicare-for-all — the financing plan she released made her the target of attacks from the moderates, and then the transition plan she released, which envisions a robust public option in the first year of her presidency and only moving to Medicare-for-all in year three, left single-payer advocates unnerved about her commitment to the cause.

The Democrat left has been its own worst enemy.

In addition to alienating working people by going soft on crime, the people who bear the brunt of it,  Bernie has notably lost ground with the working class by flipping on immigration restriction. Every new immigrant drives down their wages when immigrants are not taking their jobs outright.

For her part, on top of hedging on Medicare for all, Warren has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of crazy in this campaign, including a ban on all fracking in the US and ending the Electoral College. Combined with the recent lying about the little details of her life, voters justifiably doubt her sincerity on these larger issues and suspect that she cares about little except getting the power into her hands.

Hence the default candidate still on top, Joe Biden.

America's political institutions are still so structured that even when radicals like Obama do win, those institutions frustrate their aims. The upside of this is that harmful radicalism is usually stopped in its tracks. The downside is that mediocrities and grotesques are produced.

Just as Obama was content to let his Clinton retreads handle the Great Financial Crisis resulting in the still poor full time employment, moribund GDP, unaffordable housing and low interest rates catastrophic to income portfolios of the present time, Obama provided zero leadership on healthcare reform. This resulted in the competing Democrat House and Senate versions which consumed his first year in office, and eventually produced the Affordable Care Act camel, a horse designed by a committee. He sure did enjoy watching basketball in the private residence, though, and went on to make the Bush tax cuts permanent after winning re-election in 2012. Some radical, huh?

The same thing has happened with Trump. Although promising us the moon about immigration, healthcare reform and foreign wars, he instead delivered tax reform mostly for the corporations and huge spending increases for the military industrial complex, which is the basic consensus of the Republican caucus in Congress, foolishly hoping that they would give him a little somethin' somethin' in return.

Nothing doing. Even trade realignment will disappear when Trump does.

Trump's problem is that he never had a political faction holding any seats in Congress to drive his agenda. He just assumed the existing members would adopt his positions, which is pretty damn naive considering how he attacked and alienated them all throughout 2015-2016. Instead, Trump has steadily moved away from his own positions and adopted theirs, for his own political survival.

Trump's porous bollard fencing instead of the real wall he promised is simply the most public symbol of this, going back as it does to the George W. Bush administration.

The only radical realignment we have seen is the realignment of the radicals with their respective parties, and Election 2020 will be the same old, same old fight between them.

Those who won't realign get discarded.

This is the tyranny of the legislative. And the only way to remedy this is to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, the great mistake of 1951. Only the threat of a Trump or an Obama perpetually in the White House will restore the balance of power between the three branches of government and advance the interests of the people who vote for the president.

As things stand, the best we can hope for is a president desperately stacking the courts to increase his power in a tyranny of the judiciary, which is hardly the remedy intended by the founders and is unacceptable to Americans loyal to the constitution and the nation as founded. The three stooges of the law schools on display at the impeachment hearing yesterday are proof enough of that. 

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Elise Stefanik is on the side of The Body Snatchers' Donald Trump, not the one we voted for

The Trump we voted for promised a 10-point America First Plan which was ALL ABOUT IMMIGRATION, not climate, not tax cuts, not Obamacare, etc., especially ending DACA immediately by executive order and building NEW actual wall, not replacing existing with bollard fencing.


Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Marie Yovanovitch, Obama's US Ambassador to Ukraine, blocked visas for Ukrainian law enforcement in 2018 before Trump fired her in 2019

Ukrainian law enforcement officials believe they have evidence of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes. But, they say, they’ve been thwarted in trying to get the Trump Justice Department to act.

Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s International Legal Cooperation Department, told me he and other senior law enforcement officials tried unsuccessfully since last year to get visas from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev to deliver their evidence to Washington.

“We were supposed to share this information during a working trip to the United States,” Kulyk told me in a wide-ranging interview. “However, the [U.S.] ambassador blocked us from obtaining a visa. She didn’t explicitly deny our visa, but also didn’t give it to us.”

One focus of Ukrainian investigators, Kulyk said, has been money spirited unlawfully out of Ukraine and moved to the United States by businessmen friendly to the prior, pro-Russia regime of Viktor Yanukovych.

Ukrainian businessmen “authorized payments for lobbying efforts directed at the U.S. government,” he told me. “In addition, these payments were made from funds that were acquired during the money-laundering operation. We have information that a U.S. company was involved in these payments.” 

That company is tied to one or more prominent Democrats, Ukrainian officials insist.

In another instance, he said, Ukrainian authorities gathered evidence that money paid to an American Democrat allegedly was hidden by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) during the 2016 election under pressure from U.S. officials. “In the course of this investigation, we found that there was a situation during which influence was exerted on the NABU, so that the name of [the American] would not be mentioned,” he said.

More here.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Democrat Ayanna Pressley thinks 1.86 billion people are locked up in American prisons

Orange man bad. America bad.

Obviously the solution is to free them all and put them on Obama's transcontinental railroad back to the countries they came from.

Sunday, November 10, 2019

Trade wars started in 2018 instead of 2017 by default, the same reason immigration wars started after he lost the House

Trump never had a strategy for getting what he ran on, but the GOP had a strategy for getting what it wanted.

Trump should have leveraged this situation to his advantage. You give me my immigration checklist, my trade checklist, I'll give you corporate tax reform and defense spending. Instead, the phony Art of the Deal author caved and gave them everything without getting anything.

Trump wasted the first entire year on repealing and replacing Obamacare, the latter being the fool's errand Trump in his hubris added after securing the nomination. Did he not pay attention to the clash between Democrats in 2009 over the House healthcare plan vs. the Senate plan? It took a Herculean effort to get a compromise, all without Republican input. Like he could get Republicans united for something similar, after ripping them all to shreds in 2016.

Total doofus, surrounded by doofi.

The only thing he's getting right is that he doesn't need anybody to conduct the trade war. Doesn't really matter when he conducts it, but Republicans would have been begging him to end it much earlier if he had started it much earlier. And that is the definition of the art of the deal.

Too bad he didn't think of it.


y/y change US imports of goods from China: Sum Ting Wong long before this





Saturday, November 2, 2019