American Politics

[QUOTE=MarquisdeSade1;2964096][URL]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/opinion/wolfgang-streeck-populism.html[/URL]

By Christopher Caldwell.

Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer who reports frequently on European politics, culture and society.

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Who could have seen Donald Trump's resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in The New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable the more so in its present "neoliberal" form. His latest book, "Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism," published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.

Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.

Mr. Streeck (whose name rhymes with "cake") argues that today's contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Between the end of World War II and the 1970's, he reminds us, working classes in Western countries won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, of course, but that was in the nature of what Mr. Streeck calls the "postwar settlement. " What economies lost in dynamism, they gained in social stability.

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But starting in the 1970's, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.

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That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: "the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital. " They never broke the habit.

Very quickly their policies sparked inflation. Investors balked again. It took a painful tightening of money to stabilize prices. Ronald Reagan's supply-side regime eased the pain a bit, but only by running record government deficits. Bill Clinton was able to eliminate these, but only by deregulating private banking and borrowing, Mr. Streeck shows. In other words, the dangerous debt exposure was shifted out of the Treasury and into the bank accounts of middle-class and working-class households. This led, eventually, to the financial crisis of 2008.

As Mr. Streeck sees it, a series of (mostly American) attempts to calm the economy after the '70's produced the system we now call neoliberalism. "Neoliberalism," he argues, "was, above all, a political-economic project to end the inflation state and free capital from its imprisonment in the postwar settlement. " This project has never really been reconsidered, even as one administration's fix turns into the next generation's crisis.

At each stage of neoliberalism's evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.

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Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be "free," it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people's sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world's societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.

A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That's another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.

Perhaps that is what blighted the West's relations with Russia, where the transition to global capitalism "was tightly controlled by American government agencies, foundations and and. G. O. S," Mr. Streeck says, and the oligarchs who emerged to run the government in the 1990's were "received with open arms by American corporations and, not least, the London real estate market. " To an Indian or a Chinese person, "free markets" established on these terms might carry the threat of imperial highhandedness and lost self-determination.

This insight gives us a context for understanding the persistent grievances of movements like Mr. Trump's, and their equally persistent popularity. What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.

As we no longer have an economic policy that is managed democratically, it should not be surprising that it produces unfair outcomes. Nor should it be surprising that in the wake of the mortgage crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine and so-called Bidenflation, this unfairness would give rise to what Mr. Streeck calls "tendencies toward deglobalization" such as those that emerged with a vengeance on Nov. 5.

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The "global economy" is a place where common people have no leverage. Parties of the left lost sight of such problems after the 1970's, Mr. Streeck notes. They allowed their old structure, oriented around industrial workers and primarily concerned with workers' rights and living standards, to be infiltrated and overthrown by intellectuals, who were primarily concerned with promoting systems of values, such as human rights and lately the set of principles known as wokeism.

It is in disputing the wisdom of this shift that Mr. Streeck is most likely to antagonize American Democrats and others who think of themselves (usually incorrectly) as belonging to the left. He, too, thinks that democracy is in crisis, but only because it is being thwarted by the very elites who purport to champion it. Among the people, democracy is thriving. After decades of decline in voter turnout, there has been a steep and steady rise in participation over the past 20 years at least for parties whose candidates reflect a genuine popular sentiment. As this has happened, liberal commentators who tend to back what Mr. Streeck calls "parties of the standard model" have changed their definition of democracy, he writes: They see high electoral participation as a troubling expression of discontent, "endangering rather than strengthening democracy. ".

This new, topsy-turvy idea of democracy comes with a new political strategy. The interests and agendas of standard-issue parties are increasingly reinforced by the media and other grandees of globalization. These actors have "fought against the new wave of politicization," Mr. Streeck writes, "with the full arsenal of instruments at their disposal propagandistic, cultural, legal, institutional. ".

Mr. Streeck is probably referring here to the obstacles put in the way of so-called left-wing movements in Europe Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise in France. But his observation applies just as well to so-called right-wing parties. At present, Marine LE Pen, whose party won the most votes in France's national elections last summer, is standing trial for embezzlement before a court that may ban her from politics for five years. In Germany this month, more than a hundred members of the Bundestag requested a constitutional ban on the country's fast-growing right-wing party the Alternative for Germany, ahead of national elections scheduled for February.

There are dangers, too, in the way partisan prosecutors, in the run-up to the USA Presidential election, convicted Mr. Trump of 34 felonies involving bookkeeping, on a legal theory so novel that not one American in a thousand could explain what he had been convicted of. A majority of Americans effectively voided the conviction at the ballot box.

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Mr. Streeck's new book is not about Mr. Trump's triumph. But his message (or his warning, however you choose to read it) is not unrelated: The left must embrace populism, which is merely the name given to the struggle over an alternative to globalism. With globalism collapsing under its own contradictions, all serious politics is now populist in one way or another.[/QUOTE]I just wasted 10 minutes of my life, that I'll never get back, reading the incoherent ramblings of a European Marxist Sociologist. He sounds a lot like your Good Buddy Bernie.

[QUOTE=EihTooms;2964139]A couple of popular ways to measure the size of the Federal Government is based on Federal Spending Per Capita and the number of Rules listed in the Federal Register.

For whatever strange reason, some people focus on the number of [I]pages[/I] in the Federal Register. I don't see what that has to do with anything important. It seems to me it is the number of rules added or subtracted that matter and not how many paragraphs it takes to clarify or explain the rules.

And I say that despite the fact that the number of pages grew quite a bit under Trump.

However, when it comes to increases in Federal Spending Per Capita, a few standouts are unavoidable:

Spending remained steady or declined under Dems Clinton and Obama but skyrocketed under Repubs GW Bush and Trump. Otherwise, there is no notable difference in the steady growth of that expenditure from LBJ to Nixon / Ford to Carter to Reagan to Bush1, Dem or Repub, it doesn't matter much, they all grew it, even the supposed Icon of Less Spending and Smaller Government Repub Ronald Reagan:

[B]See graph below[/B]

[URL]https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per-person-is-skyrocketing/[/URL]#text=Adjusted%20 for%20 inflation%2 see%20 federal%20 spending, Louis%20 Federal%20 Reserve.

And for the number of Rules logged in the Federal Register, there is also little difference among the first year and hand-off year of the incoming and outgoing presidents going back to GHW Bush; they all reduced them slightly except for Dem Obama, who increased them very slightly and Repub Trump who increased them dramatically:

[B]See graph below[/B]

[URL]https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2023/12/29/bidens-2023-federal-register-page-count-is-the-second-highest-ever/[/URL]

It should also be noted that so-called President-elect Repub Trump has already announced a planned unprecedented expansion of the Executive Branch in the Federal Government by the creation of a new Cabinet Office to be Chaired by two (2), not 1 Secretary, Musk and Ramaswamy. I have heard Trump plans to unabashedly name it The Department of Whatever Elonia and Vivek Can Find to Give Their Business Interests an Unfair Advantage and Impoverish Everyone Else and I will Issue an Executive Order to Make That Happen.

Or something like that. Maybe a clever anagram.

So for expanding the Expenditures and Size of the Federal Government and despite what they say about themselves and what their perennial benefactors in Mainstream Media can convince the sucker American Electorate into believing, Repubs are the Undefeated Champions over the Dems going back to at least the 1960's.[/QUOTE]It looks like the number of rules per year issued during the Trump administration were a lot less than under the other presidents. Maybe that was the result of his push for deregulation. Off the subject, deregulation and the corporate tax cut were more responsible for the improvement in real income of the workingman during 2018 and 2019 than any of that Marxist mumbo jumbo in the Marquis' NYT piece. And yes, unlike during other modern presidencies, Clinton, Gingrich et al did a good job of slowing the growth of government expenditures. Obama however did not.

Your attempts to blame the 2020 pandemic and related bipartisan government spending and recession on Trump still aren't convincing. As I understand it, the DOGE will not even be funded by government, or a cabinet office.

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2964185]It looks like the number of rules per year issued during the Trump administration were a lot less than under the other presidents. Maybe that was the result of his push for deregulation. Off the subject, deregulation and the corporate tax cut were more responsible for the improvement in real income of the workingman during 2018 and 2019 than any of that Marxist mumbo jumbo in the Marquis' NYT piece. And yes, unlike during other modern presidencies, Clinton, Gingrich et al did a good job of slowing the growth of government expenditures. Obama however did not.

Your attempts to blame the 2020 pandemic and related bipartisan government spending and recession on Trump still aren't convincing. As I understand it, the DOGE will not even be funded by government, or a cabinet office.[/QUOTE]Trump's tax cuts and supposed deregulation did nothing to create jobs or increase wages for the fewer jobs created with it than without it.

Thank the Dems' increasing the minimum wage in dozens of Blue Cities and Blue States where most of America's Working Men and Women are anyway in 2018 and 2019 for increased wages and any lower unemployment rates from what he inherited from Obama-Biden seen under Trump.

Even before it was passes the CEOs who benefitted most from his tax cuts and from whom all these business expansions and jobs creation was supposed to flow promised they weren't going to do any such thing with those tax cuts and would instead just buy back some of their losing company stock. Which is exactly what they did.

If they created any jobs at all it was because American Workers with more money in their pockets (See what the Dems did above to make that happen) created more demand for goods and services and the CEOs HAD to hire more help to fill the demand.

Then Trump's 2018 and 2019 decisions ushered in and exacerbated Trump's Pandemic and he wiped out millions upon millions of jobs on his way out and handed that mess to Biden-Harris to clean up.

Come on. I have provided every link imaginable necessary for anyone to know what I wrote here is 100% true and what you wrote is pure wishing and hoping that someday, somehow Repub-style Supply-Side / Trickle-Down will actually create more jobs than it destroys or at least matches half of what Dem-style Demand-side policies have created for decades.

Sorry. But it didn't, never did and never will.

LOL. You're just lucky I didn't have time to include a comparison of "Bang For The Buck" between what Dem Spending Per Capita and Rules in the Federal Register produced vs that of Repubs in terms of Jobs Created, Business Expansion, Safety Net Programs Funded, Retirement Funds fattened and so on over those same time periods. That is where Dems really shine and Repubs are utterly destroyed. Or would be if typically pro Repub MSM wasn't election campaiging 24/7 to spin it in favor of their beloved reliable Disaster Headlines-producing Repubs.

[QUOTE=Tiny 12;2963835]The solution is simple ...[/QUOTE] Yeah, your right, the "solution is simple" ....JUST STOP CHANGING OR ADDING WORDS TO MY POSTS!!!

Got it, good!

[QUOTE=EihTooms;2963608][B]Trump vows to raise tariffs on all goods from China, Canada and Mexico.[/B]

[URL]https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/26/trump-vows-an-additional-10percent-tariff-on-china-25percent-tariffs-on-canada-and-mexico.html?__source=androidappshare[/URL]

Of course, the beauty in Trump repeating this promise so emphatically is that, as we all know, suppliers and retailers will not wait until Trump's Tariffs Tax Increases on the American Consumer officially take effect. Oh no. Many of them will start jacking up prices sooner than that in order to "get ahead of the game" on the increases. Just as happened with food and restaurant menu prices starting in 2018 and 2019 as Trump launched into his previous failed Trade War with China.

The perennial Classic:[/QUOTE]YES...a perennial classic Repub debacle, indeed!

Although, I'm inclined to believe, the upcoming "Trump Tariffs", is nothing more than a grift. That's right folks, just like anything that happens in a MAGA administration, Trump's so called "tariffs", is probably nothing more than the next grift, in a long line of GRIFTS!

[I][LIST][b]Why Trump's new threats for Day One trade tariffs matter?[/b] Nov. 26, 2024

Throughout the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump made a series of bold claims about his love of trade tariffs and the magical results they would produce...but the GOP candidate nevertheless tried to sell voters on the idea that radical and consequential tariffs would work wonders. ...

[b]Finally, keep an eye on the corruption angle.[/b] When tariffs are imposed, administrations often [u]create loopholes and exceptions, opening the door to lobbyists eager to deal[/u]. Don't be surprised if the Trump White House starts making assessments about companies and industries that [b]"play ball"[/b] in ways the incoming president likes.

Buckle up. [url]https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trumps-new-threats-day-one-trade-tariffs-matter-rcna181793[/url][/LIST][/I]
[u][B]ROUND #2:[/B] [/u]

No doubt, Trump will once again, grift his way to shafting American taxpayers, to swallow a $28 billion dollar tax payment [I](I mean talk about socialism...kkkk!),[/I] like he did in his first term in office, to make whole and bailout US farmers, in a tariff trade war of his own making, with China, India and other countries.

Yes indeed, a perennial Trump\Repub classic debacle!

All while, posing "tariffs" on one hand, while holding out the other hand, to receive millions, from lobbyists, companies and businesses, wanting to [b]"play ball"[/b] and "DEAL" their way pass, so called "tariffs".

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2963835]The solution is simple. Don't use the "P" word and I won't replace it with ****. I'm not going to intentionally use or quote the word in my posts. It's not a good look for this site. Regrettably, I see I failed to remove the offending word the last time I quoted you.

And if you don't like having "(sic)" inserted, don't make spelling, grammatical or typographical errors.

Sic - adverb - used in brackets or parentheses after a copied or quoted word that appears odd or erroneous to show that the word is quoted exactly as it stands in the original.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Spidy;2964231]Yeah, your right, the "solution is simple" ....JUST STOP CHANGING OR ADDING WORDS TO MY POSTS!!!

Got it, good![/QUOTE]What's more misleading Spidy? Me replacing a word I find objectionable with **** and inserting "(sic)" after your odd or erroneous wording? Or you shortening my quote so that someone reading your post won't understand you're upset about nothing?

[QUOTE=Tiny12;2964181]I just wasted 10 minutes of my life, that I'll never get back, reading the incoherent ramblings of a European Marxist Sociologist. He sounds a lot like your Good Buddy Bernie.[/QUOTE]I'm only here to share the truth.

[QUOTE=EihTooms;2964019]I don't recall Clinton, Obama or Biden claiming their election wins gave them a "Mandate" to do anything.

At likely a 1. 6 point lead over Harris, meaning less than a single percentage point swap, 0. 8 point, plus 1 more vote and Trump would have lost the popular vote for a third time, Trump's vote count win was narrower than any of those other presidents yet he is claiming he was given an "unprecedented Mandate" by the voters. And his supporters appear to agree with him.

I would welcome a Repub Party that merely cherry-picked details that suit them. It's when they add making shit up to the cherry-picking that makes them so special.

And I find it hard to classify as "cherry-picking" the fact that Repub presidents, their policies and stewardship have produced and presided over every Great Depression, Great Recession and Massive Jobs Destruction of the past 100 years and none of the Historic Economic Recoveries, Expansions and Jobs Creation while Dem policies and stewardship have produced and presided over every Great Economic Recovery, Expansion and Historic Jobs Creation and none of the Depressions, Great Recessions and Jobs Destruction.

Trump was given a less than 130,000 Netanyahu-hating Muslim vote spread over three states "mandate". He can honestly take pride in that and tout it at every public appearance. If they had voted for Harris instead he would have lost the election but still could claim a Plurality of the vote "win" by about 1. 6 point or, again, a swap of less than 1 percentage point would have reversed it.

I am not claiming those Netanyahu-hating Muslims who "gave Trump the presidency" cheated or ought to be deported. As far as I know they put Trump in the White House fair and square despite the fact that they are now realizing it was a pretty dumb thing to do.

You and the other MAGAs can relax in the knowledge that Repubs' remarkable run of getting fewer votes than their Dem opponent went from 1992 until today with 2 extremely narrow exceptions and only when the Repub is running for a second term after having "won" the first with fewer votes than their Dem opponent.

Be proud and loud about it![/QUOTE]Urban Suburban and Rural.

[URL]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/28/us/elections/precinct-city-maps.html[/URL]

Chump hasn't even taken office yet and already there has been scandal! Hang on for an even worse bumpy, hellish, incompetent ride than the first one!

[QUOTE=MarquisdeSade1;2964355]Urban Suburban and Rural.

[URL]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/28/us/elections/precinct-city-maps.html[/URL][/QUOTE][B]Trump set to take office with razor-thin House GOP majority.
Republicans could end up having just a one-seat margin.
Nov.27, 2024[/B]

[URL]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-set-office-razor-thin-house-gop-majority/story?id=116274023[/URL]

[QUOTE]President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office in January with a razor-thin GOP majority in the House of Representatives that offers Republicans barely any margin of error.
.........
If these results hold, the House will start with a 220-215 GOP majority, even thinner than the current Congress' margin.
..........
Republican ranks, however, drop to 219 with former Rep. Matt Gaetz's resignation. It could fall further to 217 depending on the timing of the resignations of Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who are set to join the Trump administration as U.S. ambassador to United Nations and national security adviser, respectively.

That would send the chamber to a 217-215 margin -- giving Republicans no room for error, since any tied votes at 216-216 would fail.[/QUOTE]Well, at least the Repubs did squeeze out the 3 Senate seat advantage practically everyone predicted was bound to happen anyway in this particularly Repub-advantaged Senate election year.

Oh, and I see Trump has issued his usual lunatic Thanksgiving Day wish, see the screenshot below, further confirming such an America-hating numbskull has never and could never propose, guide, agree with or pass economic legislation that would be anything but a colossal failure.

LOL. I see he is still hanging on to the lie about his razor-thin win being a "landslide" when it was due solely to less than 130,000 Netanyahu-hating Muslims spread across just three states voting for him instead of Harris in order to demonstrate their hatred for Netanyahu. LOL. And he didn't even thank them for being the sole reason he won in that Turkey Day message.

He probably doesn't want to bring them up now that even they have admitted "giving Trump the presidency" was a dumb decision they already deeply regret.

This time around, other world leaders will probably have to drop all the niceities and euphemisms pro Repub Mainstream Media has been using to call Trump's lies something other than the lies they are and that Trump is a liar. You know, that "he says things not necessarily in line with the facts" crap. Trump only lies. Trump is a consumate liar. There is no better or more accurate way to say it and I hope they just start saying it early and often.

Mexico's President comes pretty close to it already. Good for her.

LOL. She publicly refuted his lie and "explained" to Trump that she is ALREADY doing what is necessary to achieve the desired goal UNDER THE BIDEN Administration.

[B]Mexicos president denies Trumps claim that she agreed to shut down the US-Mexico border.
Nov. 29, 2024[/B]

[URL]https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-mexican-president-had-good-102347079.html[/URL]

[QUOTE]Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum denied proposing to US President-elect Donald Trump that Mexico will close its border with the United States as he claimed in a post on Truth Social.

"Everyone has their own way of communicating, but I can assure you, I give you the certainty that we would never and we would be incapable of it propose that we would close the border, Sheinbaum said during her regular morning news conference Thursday. It has never been our approach and of course we dont agree with that.
..............
In her own statement about the conversation, Sheinbaum said she shared Mexicos immigration strategy with the president-elect and stressed that her countrys position is not to close borders.

In our conversation with President Trump, I explained to him the comprehensive strategy that Mexico [b]has followed[/b] to address the migration phenomenon, respecting human rights, Sheinbaum said Wednesday on X. Thanks to this, migrants and caravans are assisted before they arrive at the border. We reiterate that Mexicos position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.[/QUOTE]Trump is already taking thoroughly unearned and undeserved credit for the remarkable and historic positive results Biden-Harris and the Dems accomplished. That observation will be a common, totally justified and provable refrain for any truth-tellers in the media and elsewhere. Until Trump totally fucks up the Envy of the World conditions he was handed again and fucks everything up to historic levels again, that is.

[QUOTE=TheCane;2964360]Chump hasn't even taken office yet and already there has been scandal! Hang on for an even worse bumpy, hellish, incompetent ride than the first one![/QUOTE]Nothing like good objective journalism to put that in place. It is too bad you Democratic douches have nowhere to go not that all the good journalists have cut and run from the Democrats. Here is Lee Fang conversing with Gleen Greenwald on Gaetz:

And you're right, we don't know all the facts here, but the facts that are available in the Matt Gaetz issue do not justify the rhetoric that you see in the political and media sphere. I mean, if you log in to Twitter or X or, you know, Blue Sky or any of these platforms and you see any mention of Matt Gaetz, people claim that he is a rapist, a pedophile, that he paid for child sex, you know, that he's a sex criminal. From the facts we know, none of that is justified whatsoever. There's this kind of trial by media, you're guilty until proven innocent dynamic that I find very unbecoming and kind of disgusting.

It's actually even worse than a lot of the other cases because here the Justice Department aggressively and actively investigated Matt Gaetz to determine whether or not there was any evidence that he committed crimes. It wasn't the Trump DOJ that did, it was the Biden DOJ. Obviously, they were eager to get Matt Gaetz, they leaked constantly to try to destroy his reputation, but at the end of the day, they closed the case on the grounds that there was no evidence available to prove that he was guilty of any crime and yet this doesn't matter at all.

I would say in the case of Matt Gaetz and I've defended Matt Gaetz, I've just done due process, if nothing, you know what happens to you when you stick your head up and defend any of these people, which is you then get kind of smeared by the same tactic, like, he must be defending Matt Gaetz because he's a pedophile and Alex Morris and Julian Assange because he's a sex partner. And it's a huge incentive for people to just kind of run away and not have anybody defending them so that just the accusations themselves are enough to destroy the person without any due process or evidence required.

Lee Fang: Yeah, that's right. You know, I haven't written anything publicly about the Matt Gaetz sexual allegations and yet when I post a tweet or my story narrowly about Matt Gaetz, his policy positions, his political positions, his beliefs around privacy or political power or business, I get swarmed with people claiming that I'm in support of sex crimes or I support pedophilia, you know, it's a chilling dynamic.

End of link. The most vile and hypocritical people of all are mongers like Cane and Spidy who do not believe in the law and innocent until proven guilty. They actually think they are law abiding citizens while paying for sex.

[QUOTE=EihTooms;2964418][B]Trump set to take office with razor-thin House GOP majority.
Republicans could end up having just a one-seat margin.
Nov.27, 2024[/B]

[URL]https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-set-office-razor-thin-house-gop-majority/story?id=116274023[/URL][/QUOTE] Republicans should have a 20+ seat advantage in the House. There are two reasons why they don't:

1. Democratic Party gerrymandering in California, New York, Maryland, New Mexico and other states. Republicans won the House popular vote by 3%. Based on that they should have a 13 seat advantage. That's pretty typical of the the period since after World War II. Democrats have been better a rigging the system than Republicans, and so have had an average of 3. 9% more House seats than justified by the popular vote since 1946.

2. Republican House members looked like a bunch of buffoons in 2023/2024. Led by the Matt Gaetz contingent, they ousted Kevin McCarthy and then couldn't agree on a speaker. Now I happen to agree with Gaetz et al on slowing the rate of growth of government spending and lowering deficits. But McCarthy managed to claw back $1. 5 trillion in unfunded, unneeded spending legislated by Democrats in 2021/2022, even though Democrats controlled the presidency and the Senate. When you try to shut down government and fire your speaker when you don't get everything you want, you look irresponsible.

[QUOTE=EihTooms;2964418]LOL. I see he is still hanging on to the lie about his razor-thin win being a "landslide" when it was due solely to less than 130,000 Netanyahu-hating Muslims spread across just three states voting for him instead of Harris in order to demonstrate their hatred for Netanyahu. LOL. And he didn't even thank them for being the sole reason he won in that Turkey Day message.

He probably doesn't want to bring them up now that even they have admitted "giving Trump the presidency" was a dumb decision they already deeply regret.[/QUOTE]That sounds a lot like the MAGA argument that Trump would have won with around 50,000 more votes in a few states in 2020. You're stretching even more than people who support that narrative.

[QUOTE=Elvis2008;2964591]I would say in the case of Matt Gaetz and I've defended Matt Gaetz, I've just done due process, if nothing, you know what happens to you when you stick your head up and defend any of these people, which is you then get kind of smeared by the same tactic, like, he must be defending Matt Gaetz....and Julian Assange because he's a sex partner. And it's a huge incentive for people to just kind of run away and not have anybody defending them so that just the accusations themselves are enough to destroy the person without any due process or evidence required.

Lee Fang: Yeah, that's right. You know, I haven't written anything publicly about the Matt Gaetz sexual allegations and yet when I post a tweet or my story narrowly about Matt Gaetz, his policy positions, his political positions, his beliefs around privacy or political power or business, I get swarmed with people claiming that I'm in support of sex crimes or I support *********, you know, it's a chilling dynamic.[/QUOTE]I agree 100%. As you know, I had other reasons for being disappointed with the Gaetz nomination, including what I said in the reply to Tooms just below.

[QUOTE=EihTooms;2964485]

Trump is already taking thoroughly unearned and undeserved credit for the remarkable and historic positive results Biden-Harris and the Dems accomplished. That observation will be a common, totally justified and provable refrain for any truth-tellers in the media and elsewhere. Until Trump totally fucks up the Envy of the World conditions he was handed again and fucks everything up to historic levels again, that is.[/QUOTE]Wouldn't be the first time for Trump to take credit for the great economy he inherits from his predecessors. There is no reason for him not to appropriate any other Biden's achievements. Just wait a couple of months or less for the first bursts of his self-aggrandizing bullshit.