Well... it's Trump... again. #47, here we go.

[ideologyhunter]

Are we still doing the tariffs on Canada? I find that if I don't check into nbcnews.com every couple hours, I miss the latest twist and turn. Trump's voters don't realize how deranged this is? They call this having a steady hand on the wheel??
Following Dear Leader's every impulse is like having a squirrel loose in your house. You track it from room to room, but it keeps leaping from shelf to table to tool rack, causing chaos wherever it turns up.

 

[ZiprHead]

AHIC now say he will raise tarriffs on Canada if they refuse to become our 51st state. And he said Tesla protesters will be in big trouble.

I'm really starting to think this guy is insane.

 

[ideologyhunter]

if they refuse to become our 51st state.

Is that part real or parody???? I mean, I know he's crazy, but is he CRAZY???

 

[ZiprHead]

if they refuse to become our 51st state.

Is that part real or parody???? I mean, I know he's crazy, but is he CRAZY???

Yes, it's real.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Umm...it took me a few minutes, but I read his social media post about all tariffs vanishing if they....no, it's too insane to repeat. And we have, what, about 1360 more days of this to look forward to?

 

[Shadowy Man]

if they refuse to become our 51st state.

Is that part real or parody???? I mean, I know he's crazy, but is he CRAZY???

Yes, it's real.

If all of Canada, with its many provinces, can come into the union as a single state then I think we should reorganize some of the states we already have. For example, we don’t need two Dakotas. We could also merge Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. California would be best split in two. Alabama and Mississippi seem like they should just be one state, and Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska don’t seem different to me. I’m sure there are other changes that would seem reasonable, too.

 

[ZiprHead]

A lawyer for the Pardons Commission didn't recommend Mel Gibson have his gun rights returned to him so Trump fired her.

Mel Gibson lost his gun rights after being convicted of domestic violence.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Didn't Mel Gibson produce a snuff film that involved a Jewish person being executed?

 

[ZiprHead]

Musk Melts Down as Tesla Stock Price Plunges

Tesla backlash continues as the stock nosedives and Musk pushes conspiracy theories about protests and arsons at dealerships.

www.rollingstone.com

That's all I got before the paywall slammed down.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Musk Melts Down as Tesla Stock Price Plunges

Tesla backlash continues as the stock nosedives and Musk pushes conspiracy theories about protests and arsons at dealerships.

www.rollingstone.com

That's all I got before the paywall slammed down.

Dipshit deserves every bit of it.

 

[bilby]

AHIC now say he will raise tarriffs on Canada if they refuse to become our 51st state. And he said Tesla protesters will be in big trouble.

I'm really starting to think this guy is insane.

Starting?

Slow learner.

What tipped you off? The guy has literally been painting himself orange for more than eight years to my certain knowledge.

If I painted myself orange and turned up on the doorstep of a psychiatric hospital, enthusing about the size of Arnold Palmers genitals, they wouldn't even let me go home to fetch my toothbrush.

 

[Swammerdami]

It's symptomatic of something that money is required to read webpages offering "left-wing" truth, while right-wing sites are happy to let anyone read their lies for free!

Musk Melts Down as Tesla Stock Price Plunges

Tesla backlash continues as the stock nosedives and Musk pushes conspiracy theories about protests and arsons at dealerships.

www.rollingstone.com

That's all I got before the paywall slammed down.

Especially annoying is that it first begs us to turn off our Ad Blocker. After we obey, we're still blocked from reading the page!

But I keep an Edge window open with Javascript disabled. Apparently Rolling Stone hasn't caught on to that trick: The pages load OK from that browser. Here's a brief excerpt from ZiprHead's link:

The tumble erased the last vestiges of the rally Tesla enjoyed after Trump’s election victory in November, when investors clearly felt that a company run by the president-elect’s largest Super PAC donor was a smart bet. It has lost more than 50 percent of its value — the equivalent of some $800 billion — since cresting in mid-December.

A number of factors contributed to this reversal, including declines across the market and hints of a possible recession. Yet the Tesla brand has also become uniquely toxic since Musk swept into Washington, gave what was widely recognized as a Nazi salute at an inauguration event, and moved to eliminate entire federal offices at a stroke, all while continuing to spew far-right misinformation on X. Last month, the mounting backlash cohered into a formal protest campaign, Tesla Takedown, that is organizing regular demonstrations at Tesla centers around the world while encouraging a boycott and, of course, calling for the automaker’s investors to sell their shares.

And here's an excerpt from one of several pages to which the above page links:

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is taking a chainsaw to the US government and, at first glance, no one is standing in his way. Musk and his rogue’s gallery of minions are moving fast, dead set on breaking the things that hundreds of millions of people in this country rely on for clean air, water, and food. For healthcare, retirement benefits, and much more. They hit the ground on Day One, doing their very best to remove any checks on their power.

You’d be forgiven for feeling powerless, but you’d be wrong. Believing that you can do something, that together we all can, is the flotation device that can keep you from sinking into the politics of despair, of shock and paralysis. I’m writing this to put some air in your vest and let you know you have the opportunity to fight back. Getting out into the street, protesting, and making your voice heard matters. An activated citizenry is a primary driver of getting shit done. In nearly every case, it’s the reason we have anything to protect from Elon Musk and his wrecking crew in the first place.

 

[bilby]

 

[Swammerdami]

Here is a VERY prescient opinion by Matthew Yglesias titled "American Democracy is Doomed". This article was written in 2015 and never mentions Donald Trump!

Briefly, in a Presidential system where BOTH the President AND a Congress are elected, so each can claim a popular mandate, gridlock may result. One thing that helped American democracy survive for about two centuries is that both parties were "big tent" parties.

Yglesias displays a graph (below) that appears to contradict this assessment: Congressional votes were highly polarized circa 1900. BUT

Georgetown University Professor Hans Noel ... constructs ideological space scores for writers and political pundits — people who address the same issues as elected officials but who are not serving on Capitol Hill.

What he found is that while Gilded Age members of Congress voted in a highly partisan way, their voting didn’t reflect any polarization of ideas evident in broader American society. As Charles Calhoun, a leading scholar of Gilded Age politics has written, the main concern of actual members of Congress was not policy, but “patronage power, the privilege of placing one’s political friends and supporters in in subordinate offices.” In other words, a member of Congress would get to distribute federal jobs and contracts to his supporters and in exchange the beneficiaries of his patronage would support his party’s ticket at all levels. For this reason, the obscure-sounding job of customs collector of the Port of New York was important enough in the 1870s that Chester A. Arthur leapt from it to the Vice Presidency. The first real filibuster was held over Whig efforts to assign a printing contract to friendly companies.

The VOX article links to the also-prescient "An eerie prophecy of Trump’s second term — from 1998: Philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that someone like Trump might bring back public cruelty."

 

[TV and credit cards]

AHIC now say he will raise tarriffs on Canada if they refuse to become our 51st state. And he said Tesla protesters will be in big trouble.

I'm really starting to think this guy is insane.

Starting?

Slow learner.

What tipped you off? The guy has literally been painting himself orange for more than eight years to my certain knowledge.

If I painted myself orange and turned up on the doorstep of a psychiatric hospital, enthusing about the size of Arnold Palmers genitals, they wouldn't even let me go home to fetch my toothbrush.

I envisioned the bus door swinging open and seeing my orange bus driver.
It's a nice day. I think I'll walk.
Too bad we can't say that to Trump.

Now I'm getting a flood of bus metaphors.

 

[TV and credit cards]

So Greenland.
It looks like the Lets Break it Off Slowly with Denmark Party won.
Some interesting comments from a Reuters article:

In the final debate on Greenland's state broadcaster KNR late on Monday, leaders of the five parties currently in parliament unanimously said they did not trust Trump.

"We don't want to be part of the U.S. for obvious reasons; healthcare and Trump,"

Egede has stressed the island is not for sale and advocated for a broad coalition government to resist external pressure. In an interview aired on Monday by Danish broadcaster DR, he dismissed Trump's offer as disrespectful, expressing willingness to cooperate with other countries instead.

Denmark is probably saying to Greenland, "We're not looking so bad now, huh?"
Better the devil you know.

 

[KCFlyer]

I'm really starting to think this guy is insane.

So does this guy

‘At Risk Of My Job’: CNBC Reporter Sounds Alarm On 'Insane' Donald Trump Move

"There is just no other way of describing it," said Steve Liesman.

www.yahoo.com

 

[Swammerdami]

So Greenland.
It looks like the Lets Break it Off Slowly with Denmark Party won.
Some interesting comments from a Reuters article:

In the final debate on Greenland's state broadcaster KNR late on Monday, leaders of the five parties currently in parliament unanimously said they did not trust Trump.

Denmark is probably saying to Greenland, "We're not looking so bad now, huh?"
Better the devil you know.

Yeah, what's with Greenland seeking independence?? If I were a Greenlander not eager to be conquered by Trump, I'd want to remain under Denmark's umbrella, however feeble. Am I missing something?

AHIC now say he will raise tarriffs on Canada if they refuse to become our 51st state. And he said Tesla protesters will be in big trouble.

I'm really starting to think this guy is insane.

Starting?

Slow learner.

What tipped you off? The guy has literally been painting himself orange for more than eight years to my certain knowledge.

If I painted myself orange and turned up on the doorstep of a psychiatric hospital, enthusing about the size of Arnold Palmers genitals, they wouldn't even let me go home to fetch my toothbrush.

I think that's the second time I've read "AHIC" here. Google suggests several organizations with that acronym but none fit. I ANDed it with "Trump" and discover that Ivanka attended the 2015 Arabian Hotel Investment Conference, but that can't be the right "AHIC".

Should I guess? Autocratic Huckster-In-Chief?

 

[ZiprHead]

Should I guess? Autocratic Huckster-In-Chief?

It's a little more crude and perverse but you've got the idea.

 

[Elixir]

He may dig a hole that is very difficult to get out of.

WUT?
If he croaks this afternoon (from my fingers to god's ear!) the hole he has already dug will be more than "difficult" to get out of.
We are already fucked.
Thanks, Trumpsuckers.