Thanks y’all for learning me something. My googling conducted just now agrees. I’ll leave the comment so as not to making the rest of the comments here non-sequitors.
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Taxes aren’t investments, they are more like assessments. And Russia as a competitor? Competing for what?
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Man, where can I get those chilli-dogs!
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I don’t disagree with you, my only point was that the original analogy worked.
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Sorry, my tongue was firmly in-cheek. I was attempting to point out that an investor who saw the behavior of the last 2 months from a new CEO would dump that stock fast, or push for a change in leadership.
a.k.a., No, 45 is not a good businessman, either.
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I understand. 
My intent was more playful debate and I wasn’t trying to call you out or anything.
I do get frustrated at the contingent of folks that earnestly feel that 45 is somehow qualified to run the country because he does business and the country being run like a business is a good idea. The comparisons of the two break down under pretty much any scrutiny.
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I have to disagree with you there. Trump doesn’t have to lose supporters, he just has to mobilize opposition. Elections are won on the basis of who feels strongly enough to turn out to the polls. A higher disapproval rate suggests that people who were previously vacillating in the middle are now turning against him. Also, earlier (by now ancient) polling by CNN has reported that: “the share who disapprove ‘strongly’ of Trump’s work as president is nearly as large as the total block who approve, 43% feel intensely negative about Trump”.
If nothing happens to change the status quo, I think we really are looking at electoral bloodbaths for the Republicans.
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There’s nothing dishonorable about obstructing a destructive legislative agenda. If the Democrats were trying to sabotage the infrastructure bill, that would be one thing, but they have every reason to obstruct the budget and healthcare repeal.
That having been said, I agree with you about working from the bottom-up. Now is really the time for state governments (especially) to shine—to raise the minimum wage, lower (or eliminate) tuition and generally show people what progressives have to offer. Opposition to Trump may carry the next two election cycles, but people need to be excited about the alternatives in order for that to translate into long-term gains.
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It’s probably been adjusted for people kicked off the rolls due to Jim Crow anti-voter fraud legislation.
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If the infrastructure bill continues to be built around public-private partnerships that effectively privatize the operation and upkeep of huge swaths of our national infrastructure, I think Democrats have every reason to obstruct that too. Yes, we need to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure. But giving tax breaks to companies without:
- requiring them to spend that savings on new projects,
- requiring them to actually hire more people to complete them, or
- directing them to complete specific projects (some of which may not be seen as profitable by the developers and thus wouldn’t be undertaken without being told to)
is not the way to go about it. It’s a wasteful way to flush a trillion dollars down the toilet and into the pockets of construction company shareholders, and then letting them affix tolls to the roads we just paid them to build.
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I agree with you, but it may make more sense for the Democrats to try to force a compromise rather than obstruct the bill, given that the concept of improving the infrastructure enjoys broad bipartisan support. If they can clog the pipes long enough that it doesn’t come up until 2018 or later that might improve the outlook considerably.
I don’t really know—the point I was making is just that there’s a difference between partisan obstruction where Congress is trying to respond to a real problem, and principled obstruction of a legislative agenda that can only harm the country.
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True that.
I like the term “stakeholder” as it includes everyone with an interest as opposed to everyone wealthy enough for a share portfolio!
Here on the other side of the world, financial news reporters repeatedly inform us of how strong the Dow Jones and US dollar have been since Trump took office.
I guess the approval rating of the powerful is more important in the eyes of a fixed term autocrat.
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Trump’s own Monopoly piece.
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“A dead girl or a live boy”
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Opposition isn’t worth beans when it can’t vote in the district where the opposed candidate is running. If the country weren’t gerrymandered to hell then that would be a realistic viewpoint. But as it is, that ~40% approval is of the total population, when you look at likely republican voters, grump’s approval is still in the high 80s.
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The effect of mobilizing an opposition is change who is likely to vote and which districts are competitive. The Republicans have gerrymandering working in their favor (for now), but even so the backlash he’s provoking is so considerable that its made enough districts vulnerable to put the House in play. The word “unprecedented” was tossed around a lot in 2016, and there’s no reason to suppose that the surprises are over.
But looking forward to 2020, recall that his victory in November was narrow and attributable, in no small part, to apathy toward Hillary Clinton. In two short months, he’s transformed that apathy to unbridled rage, while showing no apparent interest in expanding his base. That leaves him in an untenable position. He needs to either ameliorate the opposition or expand his support, or else the apathy/rage modifier that worked to his advantage in 2016 is going to defeat him in 2020.
Which is why they’re so desperate to start a war.
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…or disenfranchise his opposition.
They don’t need to suppress every vote in order to render majority opposition meaningless. Just enough to swing the balance in a handful of states.
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True enough, but the fact that the Republicans are so desperate to game the system underscores just how vulnerable their position is. You can write checks on next week’s earnings and use one credit card to pay off another, but eventually the trend will catch up to you and you’ll be worse off than when you started.
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As with the slavers in the 1850’s [1], they know that they’re a minority but they don’t care. They’ve worked out how to establish minority control, and they fully intend on locking it down permanently.
Once Gorsuch is on the USSC, the possibility of effective legal/democratic resistance to the TrumpGOP is gone.
After that, you’re faced with the choice of turning to illegal tactics, or waiting to somehow be rescued by a civil war within the GOP (on the incredibly-unlikely hope that the winner would inexplicably surrender minority rule and restore representative democracy).
[1] Yup, I’m re-reading Battle Cry of Freedom again, and I’m still finding that the antebellum political machinations of the slave power caucus are strikingly familiar.
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I guess I’m having a hard time picturing that they will be able to lock it down. To me it seems like they’ve overextended themselves and that they’re aware of the fact which, again, is why they’re so desperate for a war or 9/11-like event that they can use to consolidate their power. Those are the possibilities that worry me the most.
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