Credit Where Credit is Due: a shout out thread for Things Trump Did Right

[Elixir]

What's the simplest test to see if the bars are plated tungsten?

I’m not sure but it probably involves an Olympic size swimming pool and some gigantic submersible scales.

 

[Swammerdami]

Tungsten weighs about 99.7% as much as a equivalent volume of gold. (A tiny amount of osmium would push this up to 100% but there are simpler tests (e.g. ultrasound) for gold other than weighing or measuring density.

 

[Elixir]

there are simpler tests (e.g. ultrasound) for gold other than weighing or measuring density.

You should apply for the job of assessing Ft Knox, Swami. At least I’m certain you won’t steal any more than you can carry (or maybe load on a truck). Not so for the dirtbags in the Trump junta.

 

[blastula]

How is this thread over 200 2 posts?

 

[KCFlyer]

B) Trump and Musk plan to give $5000 to every American household.

The right likes to bitch about public schools....but my education has come from public schools. So when I look at this I must believe that when the smartest man in the world takes on getting rid of our debt, he would know simple math. Our national debt is $40 trillion. Elon and DOGE claim that they have found $26 billion in fraud. And to celebrate, they are going to give every household in America $5,000.

So using my feeble little public school educate brain, combined with my skills with google, I learned that there are 131.5 million households. If every household gets $5,000, it would look like this:

131,500,000 x 5,000 = 657,500,000,000

So we take the 26,000,000,000 that Elon and the boy wonders located from that leaves us with a shortfall of $631,500,000,000, or a little over half a trillion dollars. Added to the debt. MAGA

 

[Shadowy Man]

How is this thread over 200 2 posts?

How about this:

I have heard no reports of Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio since Trump took office. Give him credit for that at least!!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I reported this thread because the post count might give the impression we think Trump has done a whole lotta stuff right.

 

[Swammerdami]

I just posted in what seemed like the Vance thread ... but discover it's in "Political Humor." And Vance's remarks are certainly not funny.

But this is the thread to credit Trump with GOOD decisions and his selection of Vance may have been a smart move, so I'll repost the article about Vance here.

Remember that Tricky Dickie Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as V.P. Nixon's thinking was "They won't impeach ME for being a crook, if I put an even bigger crook in the on-deck circle!" Trump has imitated Nixon: Nobody wants to see J.D. "I didn't fuck that couch" Vance get the big job.

Vice President JD Vance, in a rare public appearance, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that America’s “cultural message” tells young men they should “suppress every masculine urge” and become “androgynous idiots.” His comments on Thursday were well-received at the far-right conference, but more widely, were quickly denounced, as critics urged him to revisit his own remarks and his own societal and religious beliefs.

“I think that our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge,” the Ohio Republican said, to cheers (video below). “You should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place.”

“And I think that my, my message to young men is, don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”

READ MORE: ‘Cowardice’: GOP Faces Backlash After Report Suggests Death Threat May Have Swayed Vote

Vance went on to claim that “our cultural message is, I think, that it wants to turn everybody into whether male or female into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.”

“We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women, and we’re gonna help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.”

Fred Wellman is a graduate of West Point and the Harvard Kennedy School, an Army veteran of 22 years who served four combat tours, and is now a political consultant and the host of the podcast “On Democracy.”

“Nobody thinks that,” Wellman wrote, responding to Vance’s remarks. “We just don’t want our young men to rape women. This isn’t hard. This guy is such a f— incel.”

“This guy is too much of a chicken to stand up publicly to a guy who he privately described as a ‘moral disaster’ or to defend his own wife’s honor from a punk kid who said we should ‘normalize Indian hate.’ Obsequious, snivelling, Vancely cowardice ain’t masculinity,” decried U.S. Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL).

Appearing to mock the vice president, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill asked, “Who told men they can’t have beer with their friends? What I miss?”

Self-described former “Republican flack” and conservative Christian, Kristy Campbell, appearing to denigrate President Trump’s attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week, noted, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to lecture on masculinity at CPAC – which was launched in 1974 with an incredible speech by future president Ronald Reagan about freedom and America’s role in the world – when you just capitulated to Russia.”

Award-winning author Jennifer Erin Valent blasted Vance, saying, “What he’s really aiming at isn’t the ability to exercise true masculine strength but rather the ability to be a jerk without accountability. And since he brought God into it, I advise him to take a walk through the gospels and see how his brand of manhood measures up to Christ’s.”

“These guys aren’t reviving masculinity, they’re reviving being a dick. There’s a difference,” wrote Justin Kanew, a writer, producer, and political activist who appeared on the 15th and 18th seasons of “The Amazing Race.” Kanew runs the progressive platform The Tennessee Holler.

“For somebody who supposedly is so smart, JD Vance really says some stupid things,” blasted CNN political commentator Maria Cardona. “No, our culture does not tell young men that they cannot be masculine. But hopefully they are getting the message that that masculinity has to come with decency, compassion, generosity, and confidence that you can be all these things and that actually define real confident manhood. Real men don’t have to go around proving that they are real men.”

Emmy-nominated writer and comedian Mike Drucker asked, “is masculinity when you never stop fucking whining about everything? that seems to be the vance demo.”

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, remarked, “Is the message young American men need to hear: ‘keep drinking beer with your friends and telling jokes that might offend people’? That doesn’t make you a ‘bad person,’ but there’s something broken in a culture that thinks that’s the most important message to give kids.”

 

[Tigers!]

I just posted in what seemed like the Vance thread ... but discover it's in "Political Humor." And Vance's remarks are certainly not funny.

But this is the thread to credit Trump with GOOD decisions and his selection of Vance may have been a smart move, so I'll repost the article about Vance here.

Remember that Tricky Dickie Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as V.P. Nixon's thinking was "They won't impeach ME for being a crook, if I put an even bigger crook in the on-deck circle!" Trump has imitated Nixon: Nobody wants to see J.D. "I didn't fuck that couch" Vance get the big job.

Very often the Yanks seem to choose VPs that nobody wants to become president.
Strange behaivour.

 

[KCFlyer]

I just posted in what seemed like the Vance thread ... but discover it's in "Political Humor." And Vance's remarks are certainly not funny.

But this is the thread to credit Trump with GOOD decisions and his selection of Vance may have been a smart move, so I'll repost the article about Vance here.

Remember that Tricky Dickie Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as V.P. Nixon's thinking was "They won't impeach ME for being a crook, if I put an even bigger crook in the on-deck circle!" Trump has imitated Nixon: Nobody wants to see J.D. "I didn't fuck that couch" Vance get the big job.

Very often the Yanks seem to choose VPs that nobody wants to become president.
Strange behaivour.

They do that for security reasons...potential assassins look at who would take his place and decide against the hit.

 

[Tigers!]

I just posted in what seemed like the Vance thread ... but discover it's in "Political Humor." And Vance's remarks are certainly not funny.

But this is the thread to credit Trump with GOOD decisions and his selection of Vance may have been a smart move, so I'll repost the article about Vance here.

Remember that Tricky Dickie Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as V.P. Nixon's thinking was "They won't impeach ME for being a crook, if I put an even bigger crook in the on-deck circle!" Trump has imitated Nixon: Nobody wants to see J.D. "I didn't fuck that couch" Vance get the big job.

Very often the Yanks seem to choose VPs that nobody wants to become president.
Strange behaivour.

They do that for security reasons...potential assassins look at who would take his place and decide against the hit.

That's the only plausible reason I can think of. Don't work for natural (?) death of a president or accident.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I just posted in what seemed like the Vance thread ... but discover it's in "Political Humor." And Vance's remarks are certainly not funny.

But this is the thread to credit Trump with GOOD decisions and his selection of Vance may have been a smart move, so I'll repost the article about Vance here.

Remember that Tricky Dickie Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as V.P. Nixon's thinking was "They won't impeach ME for being a crook, if I put an even bigger crook in the on-deck circle!" Trump has imitated Nixon: Nobody wants to see J.D. "I didn't fuck that couch" Vance get the big job.

Very often the Yanks seem to choose VPs that nobody wants to become president.
Strange behaivour.

They do that for security reasons...potential assassins look at who would take his place and decide against the hit.

That's the only plausible reason I can think of. Don't work for natural (?) death of a president or accident.

Luckiest man on Earth will never die.

 

[Patooka]

Credit where it is due; Trump has made me nostalgic for George W Bush jnr.

Something 2004 Patooka would never had thought possible.

 

[Politesse]

Oh, not me. It was under GW that open collusion between the Christian Right and the "centrist" Democrats really began, and shit like the Patriot Act and NCLB paved the way for the kinds of authoritarian federal overreach we are now seeing...

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I’m pretty sure they have no intention of returning the “wasted” tax money to us.

Not directly. But if and when the government becomes more solvent, fed monetary easing may become a thing of the past. Just NOT printing any more money means the middle class will no longer have to pay an inflation tax on top of all our other taxes that have caused normal people to be in debt up to their eye balls.

Are you aware your guy wants to do away with the debt ceiling? And in doing away with the IRS he's in effect proposing a runaway inflation.

Also, the average person doesn't pay an inflation tax in the first place. People are up to their eyeballs in debt because they choose to be--they want the lifestyle now, don't wait! Other than outlawing borrowing there's not much the government can do about it.

 

[Elixir]

B) Trump and Musk plan to give $5000 to every American household.

The right likes to bitch about public schools....but my education has come from public schools. So when I look at this I must believe that when the smartest man in the world takes on getting rid of our debt, he would know simple math. Our national debt is $40 trillion. Elon and DOGE claim that they have found $26 billion in fraud. And to celebrate, they are going to give every household in America $5,000.

So using my feeble little public school educate brain, combined with my skills with google, I learned that there are 131.5 million households. If every household gets $5,000, it would look like this:

131,500,000 x 5,000 = 657,500,000,000

So we take the 26,000,000,000 that Elon and the boy wonders located from that leaves us with a shortfall of $631,500,000,000, or a little over half a trillion dollars. Added to the debt. MAGA

Nononono. Trump is gonna cut $2T from the budget AND raise the debt limit by $4T.
That leaves $5 trillion 343 billion, for billionaire tax cuts! Waddadeal!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Anyone would voted for Trump enjoys living in tyranny until they realize it is adversely affecting them.

That completely fails to answer your tyranny though. Sooner or later the guy you hate will get elected by the mob democracy. And when that happens what will prevent your fear of that government?

We talk about tyranny because it's exactly what we are seeing. They have said they don't care about whether what they are doing is legal. And they're ignoring what the courts are telling them. Things like you can't just retroactively decide you don't like something and you're not going to pay the bills for stuff already delivered. And you can't just terminate someone's employment overseas and not repatriate them.

So the frame of your government must be structured protect you in some fashion or you will be living in tyranny. Even our Constitution got corrupted over time especially with Citizens United.

And that protection just got thrown in the toilet.

So what else other than a smaller federal government with limited powers will protect you from suffering from Hitler Trump?

Some connection to reality.

Smaller federal government? He's never been for a smaller federal government, just a government that doesn't tell business how to behave. He wants a big government when it comes to telling the little people how to behave. Just look at what's happening with abortion--last I knew the Republicans had managed to kill three women by denying medically necessary abortions. The right might chant that there's no medical reason for an abortion but an ectopic pregnancy is near 100% fatal without either a chemical abortion (if caught early enough) or surgical removal of the damage (which will likely cost her half of her fertility.) And there's no medical answer to infection in the first or second trimester. Abort or die. Texas quit counting such cases so people wouldn't see the truth.

(Throws RVonse from an airplane): The survival benefits of parachutes had never been established. The BMJ conducted a controlled study showing no benefit. Thus you don't get a parachute.

(And, yes, the study is real and properly done. It was a point about studying the wrong thing--the people in the study were jumping from a low-wing small plane sitting on the ground.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In 1825 the USA was an agrarian backwater that nobody outside America really cared about, or had much reason to care about, other than as a source of cotton and tobacco, and as a market for African slaves.

We were a tertiary slave market at best, direct importation having been outlawed nearly twenty years before and little guarantee of profit to counterbalance the legal risk and longer transport. The real money was always in Brasil, Cuba, and St Domingue, but by then the entire industry was beginning to falter for lack of buyers; St Domingue had become Haiti and similarly outlawed the practice, industrialization was taking the place of warm bodies across many industries, and household slaves usually produced their own replacements before becoming aging out of utlility, via reproduction, or if not, they could be got for cheap or free by trafficking through trade or bequests between the old guard families.

Figure 4.10 (citing 'capital21c' at his website) in Thomas Piketty's Capital shows the value of slaves compared with income and other capital in the U.S. in 1770, 1810 and 1850. Whatever Piketty's faults he does devote considerable effort to data gathering.

His graph shows that slaves were 32% (147/460) of ALL U.S. capital in 1770! His associated webpage shows an even higher number in the South -- 263/580. Or 147/460 for ALL the states, declining to 108/448 by 1850.

Yeah. He put a lot of work into gathering data and utterly failed to comprehend what it was actually telling him.

 

[Politesse]

Piketty... well, Jesus. I'm not sure this thread is the place for a discussion of what does or does not constitute capital.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

He made a mistake and will probably make a few more. Overall Musk and his team have been finding significant fraud and waste though. The video you posted makes a big deal out of finding layed off to rehire again. Big deal, it would be very easy to find them again with just an employee ad or media attention. Or maybe someone else on the street who is better qualified. People who just lost their job are always interested in working again, they would be delighted to do so. Yes laying people off and closing plants always cost money. That's why most companies show a loss statement when they shut down a plant. But CEO's still do it because labor is the biggest expense and they have to or they will go bankrupt. Just as our government must do this too despite all of Rachals crow squawking.

Pretty much all he's doing is making mistakes. He's calling anything he doesn't understand to be fraud and waste. The reality is that the actual "savings" are no more than a few percent at most and there's no indication that anything was either fraud or waste, just things he either doesn't like or doesn't understand. Much of it either can't be cancelled (it's already been delivered) or has nothing to do with reality (saving ~100x the total money being spent on something.)

Yes those future pennies also add up to a lot. If you think saving a small amount of money is no big deal than give that money to me. The interest on our debt is now higher than the military budget. Our government can not sustain this level of debt and Musk is a necessary remedy even if there is temporary pain.

You mean like the IRS cuts that have long been demonstrated to have a negative value?

The country should be celebrating Musk and giving him an award for giving his superior expertise and time to help our government become sustainable again!

Let's make Stupidity Day in his honor.

The utter blunders aren't edge cases, they're basically the whole thing. And where there are "savings" they're often at the expense of costs elsewhere--cutting public health means more spending on disease. Never mind that worm brain wants to ignore infectious disease and treat chronic disease with organic food. Nope, for me that's a death sentence.

If you want to complain about the real dumb asses you should direct your attention to our congress who are trying to pass another budget of ridiculous spending that will ensure our country will fail. That is what seems unreal to me. They are trying to do what they know hasn't been working.

Who controls Congress?

And do you realize we simply can't balance the budget without either raising taxes or putting grandma on the ice flow? What's going to happen to all those people in long term care homes? Are they supposed to go out and get a job when they're not even able to care for themselves, let alone do anything productive?