The more things change, the more they stay the same

 

Ah, so Trump is The Decider now lol, becomes more like George W. Bush every day

 

Trump Says He Decides What ‘America First’ Means

Michael Scherer, The Atlantic

 

... “America First” means whatever he says it does.

 

“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump told me. ...

 

Still an ignoramus after all these years, but he's still right about Iran, contra Tucker Carlson:

 

“For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon—that’s not peace.” ... 

“Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, very simple. Regardless—Israel or not Israel—Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb,” Trump told me. ...            

And that makes him exactly like old Georgie:

“Permitting the world’s leading sponsor of terror to possess the world’s deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable betrayal of future generations,” the president said. “For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

 

 

 

House Republican Chip Roy (TX-21) says the current policy baseline tax assumption of Republican Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho is a load of crap

Chip Roy is right.

The expiring temporary tax cuts of Donald Trump had a cost in 2017, and if renewed they'll still have a cost, which is obvious to everyone with a brain except Mike Crapo and his supporters.

All the focus for Chip Roy is on reducing the spending side, instead of on increasing the revenue side, as is usual with the GOP budget hawks. They never really reduce spending, however, and the deficits get bigger as a result.

Meanwhile it's amusing to watch how today's Republicans are turning themselves into pretzels just to keep the temporary Trump tax code from expiring and reverting back to the Bush tax cuts, most of which were made permanent by John Boehner and Barack Obama.

Reverting would actually be smarter than what we are going to get, which will be more unaffordable tax cuts and bigger deficits and $50 trillion in debt by 2034.

Even Trump knows this, coming out as he did just a few days ago for . . . the Bush tax cuts.

He specifically recommended adding the old 39.6% additional compromise bracket for the rich agreed to by Boehner and Obama on January 2, 2013.

Trump is a redistributionist, after all. He said so just recently.

He knows he has to pay for what he wants to give away to people. And his idea is to soak the rich to pay for it, just like any good Democrat would do.

I say go ahead. Make my day.

 

The 2014 tax brackets, showing the added 39.6% bracket on high incomes

Trump's GOP is Bush's GOP: We have to pass a bill continuing Joe Biden's deficit spending full of waste, fraud, and abuse through September so that Elon Musk can cut it

 

Not even ass-kisser Mark Levin can take the Ukraine BS from Trump

 Levin almost never disagrees with Trump. It's very revealing of Mark's priorities, which include the absolute rectitude of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

 

Mark Levin Defies Trump By Backing Zelensky and Trashing Putin — Bashes ‘Sick’ and ‘Un-American’ Foreign Policy

... I’m waiting for the first free election for Vladimir Putin. I mean, this is almost comical in a sick way that Putin is demanding an election. Why is he demanding an election in Ukraine when he doesn’t have free and real elections in his own country? ... I don’t know why there are people that not only oppose Zelensky, but seem to support Putin,” said Levin, attributing said position to a handful of pseudo-intellectuals” pushing “policies that in many ways are un-American in my view, and policies that if they had espoused these policies not that long ago, people would have wondered if they were on the take, or who they’re working for, something like that. Not that they are, but they would wonder.” ...

Levin sounds like Democrats at the end there, getting uncomfortably close to their charge that Trump has always been on the take from Putin, working for Putin, "something like that" lol.

Somebody should check the audio though, because, holy smokes, this whopper was in there:

There is no peace without slavery.

 

 

The Trump administration is no different than the Bush 43 administration: You're either with us or against us

The oh so precious little commie Alex Soros fears the Trump bullies when it's the GOP Senate which Trump still can't completely intimidate.

Alex is worried that Marx was wrong about the tragedy coming first lol. 

Don't worry, Alex. It's only Farce, part deux.

 

David Brooks is not a serious person

 

David Brooks: Donald Trump Is The Most Consequential American Politician Since Ronald Reagan:

 

And the fact that he's reelected and now about to take office and use executive orders to wipe out a lot of things, including the civil service potentially, or parts of it, that's just a gigantic pivot in American history. 

A president who must resort to executive orders is not consequential. The next president can wipe those out, by executive orders.

 

More importantly, there is nothing consequential about presidents who must pass major legislation through reconciliation rules, as Trump had to in 2017, which means the legislation is temporary by definition. Trump must now spend precious second term months on this same issue. He aims to extend his tax cuts for another period under reconciliation rules, which is fine, but that will also be temporary, not consequential.

 

Boehner and Obama made the Bush tax cuts, originally passed through reconciliation, permanent after Obama was re-elected in 2012. That was consequential.

The Bush tax regime is consequential. It makes Trump step and fetch it, just like Obama.

Neither of these guys won a tectonic election: I can't believe we're still talking about this

 

49.71%

50.73%

Oh, we'll have to wait . . . for pigs to fly

Looks like Chuck Grassley's efforts paid off: FBI director Wray to resign

Thank you, Chuck.

Kash Patel incoming?

Before you get your hopes up about Kash Patel's capacity to do a good job, remember Wray was also a Trump appointee to replace the fired James Comey, and he turned out arguably worse than Comey.

Robert Mueller III was appointed by George W. Bush and assumed office exactly one week before 9/11/01. Neither of them kept us safe. And then they pursued the wrong guy in the anthrax attacks.

We have more than two decades of ugly feeling about the FBI to overcome.

 

 FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign before Trump takes office

 Grassley rips Wray's 'failed' leadership at FBI with 11 pages of examples in blistering 'no confidence' letter

 CNN data guru reports that Americans' trust in the FBI is at its lowest point 'this century'

2024 Joe Biden aiding the new terror regime in Syria is Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry defying Bush 43 by legitimizing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad

Democrats don't discriminate. They'll work with anyone.

 

Donald Trump and George W. Bush are the exact same person

 

Trump's European-style coalition cabinet is full of liberals and conservatism is dead LOL, says tormented son of a member of the John Birch Society

 

 A pro-abortion RFK Jr. at HHS. A pro-union Chavez-DeRemer at Labor. Lefty Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. And gay George Soros adviser Scott Bessent at Treasury. 

The team represents the Trump worldview: Traditional conservatism is dead — and its biggest, lifelong advocates neutered to the point of irrelevance.          

Mike Allen of AXIOS reminds me of no one so much as George W. Bush: "There is no conservative movement. I redefined the Republican Party".

I think Mike is in a perpetual state of PTSD because his father was a John Bircher.

Donald Trump's problem is that no real conservative wants to be associated with his lame duck brand, so he's got to find people SOMEWHERE to serve in his hapless administration. Might as well be lefties and liberals and Jeb Bush retreads like Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice after the Gaetz flameout.

Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump and George W. Bush are exactly the same person, except Georgie actually got more than 49.83% of the vote.

 

Meanwhile for the annals of dead American conservatism, meathead Mark Levin laughably eulogizes Ted Olson as the "late, great"

 

 Mostly because of Olson's role in Bush v Gore in 2000.

Levin never mentions that Olson himself, a thorough-going amoral libertarian who worshiped freedom above all other things, thought his greatest legacy was overturning California's same-sex marriage ban, glowingly covered by WaPo:

Mr. Olson said he considered his greatest legal legacy to be his role in invalidating California’s Proposition 8, a measure banning same-sex marriage that had passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote after the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

He had come to the case in a most unlikely way, through Rob Reiner, the film director and liberal activist who was among those intent on reversing the recently approved proposition.

Reiner had a decidedly low opinion of Mr. Olson, stemming from what he regarded as Bush’s ill-gotten 2000 election win. But Mr. Olson told Reiner that he found Prop 8 “wrong, morally and legally,” and Reiner was convinced that the lawyer could appeal to conservatives.

“It is a conservative value to respect the relationship that people seek to have with one another, a stable, committed relationship that provides a backbone for our community, for our economy,” Mr. Olson later told the Los Angeles Times. “I think conservatives should value that.”

Mr. Olson endured taunts from former supporters on the hard right, some of whom unleashed homophobic vitriol. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh denounced him on the radio. Others declined invitations to dine at his home near the Potomac River.

Mr. Olson also said he wasn’t trusted by gay rights advocates who feared that Americans were not ready for same-sex marriage and that challenging the ban in court might backfire and set back the cause for years. Some marriage-equality supporters said they feared that Mr. Olson took the case intending to throw it, a notion he dismissed. “I don’t take cases to lose,” he declared.

In part to allay those suspicions, Mr. Olson asked David Boies — an impeccably credentialed trial lawyer and a registered Democrat who had argued Gore’s case in 2000 — to take the marriage case with him. To the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Olson explained that the case was not a partisan matter but rather one about “human rights and human decency and constitutional law.”

Mr. Olson delivered the opening statement on Jan. 11, 2010, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“In California,” he said, “convicted murderers and child molesters enjoyed the freedom to marry,” he said. “What Prop 8 does is label gay and lesbian persons as different, inferior, unequal and disfavored. It says to gays and lesbians, ‘Your relationship is not the same.’ … It stigmatizes them. It classifies them as outcasts. It causes needless and unrelenting pain and isolation and humiliation.”

Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who heard the case without a jury, ultimately found Prop 8 violated the guarantee of equal protection under the law. Although the decision had an immediate effect only in California, it was a major rallying point nationally for gay rights proponents.

In 2013, the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the merits of same-sex marriage, although it affirmed Walker’s decision, finding that opponents of same-sex marriage lacked standing to defend Prop 8 in court.

Still, the win was credited with paving the way for the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which extended marriage equality nationally. 

      

In the 2020 United States census, same-sex married couples accounted for 0.5% of all U.S. households and unmarried same-sex couples accounted for 0.4% of all U.S. households.

George W. Bush hasn't endorsed Kamala Harris because he is too busy painting all the new people she let into the country

 

Longtime Democrats Doug Schoen and Andrew Stein speechless after rudderless Biden-Harris administration fails Hurricane Helene victims

The failure of the Biden-Harris administration to take charge of urgently needed rescue and recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene underscores a key question: Who is really running this White House?

Right now, we have no clear answer.

President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’ cavalier indifference to the Americans fighting to survive in the disaster zone has left us — both longtime Democrats — speechless. ...

It took six days for the White House to activate a paltry 1,000 military members to help deliver assistance — even though three of America’s premier military divisions with critical search and rescue experience are based within just a few hours of the hardest-hit areas in the Carolinas and Georgia.

Compare that to President George W. Bush, who ordered nearly 10,000 troops to the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone in 2005.

More.

Imagine if this enemy of The Bill of Rights had beaten George W. Bush in 2004

 

One of history's most famous examples of winning enough votes to get the power to hammer speech out of existence:

 

 

Nobelist Paul Krugman flips on Biden in a New York minute

Paul Krugman used to say illegal immigration hurt poor Americans, but not anymore.

Cocaine was found in the Biden White House, but rag specializing in drugs, sex, and rock and roll smears Trump and hopes no one reads to paragraph thirty-two

 The Don's White House Was 'Awash in Speed' -- and XANAX...

Thirty-two paragraphs in LOL:

NEARLY EVERY SOURCE INTERVIEWED for this story traced the problems with the White House Medical Unit back to Jackson, who joined the team during the George W. Bush administration and became physician to President Barack Obama in 2013. Before then, he was known as an eccentric. Afterward, he became a menace, as several Defense Department investigations detail.

Back when illegal immigration was a club for Paul Krugman to use against George W. Bush he made arguments he's now trying to hide

Many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration, especially from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. ...

It’s intellectually dishonest to say, as Bush does, that immigrants do ‘jobs that Americans will not do.’ The willingness to do a job depends on how much that job pays, and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

More in Krugman vs. Krugman: New York Times columnist tries to memory-hole his prior views on immigration by Michael Lind

Trump's greatest economy ever is simply part of the worst economy ever, now in its sixteenth year and third year of Biden

Something about some guy abandoning free market principles in order to save the free market system.