Sure you can, within the context of a presenting actions of two Presidents and how they do or do not honor process.


The example of recess appointments wasn't made to indicate that Pres Trump's actions are ok, but to point out that you seemed not to take issue with the arguably more severe process issues there and are overblowing the process issues now.


Yeah, I noticed that you've taken to childishly calling him "pence." Way to go on raising the level of debate in your forum.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

thanks. Here's my for comparison:

1) the only "live: TV I watch (beyond occasional sports) is 20 minutes of CNBC each morning in the background. I find if anything significant has occurred while I slept I can be informed here, along with a snapshot of how the markets will begin the day
2) my wife still gets daily dead tree version of local (Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel). A 5 min flip through local/business news informs me locally before leaving for work
3) drive to and from work (30 minutes each way) is filled usually with morning local talk/sports goofs and PM local conservative talk radio
4) daily/morning review of NYT, Chicago Trib and WSJ at work . Only opinion pieces read are in WSJ. Daily reading of "The Daily Reckoning" blog from Bill Bonner. Weekly reading of The Economist.
5) during each day I am informed of news and views by going regularly to msn.com for the "news" and this forum for various views on it. I find looking here also helps me separate the real news stories from those that aren't

There are 8-12 people I follow here regularly for both sides of the opinion. There are another 8-12 I have learned to tune out as left or right wing crackpottery. The rest (including my own "contributions") are filler.

Yesterday on this thread you said you don't expect to change my mind etc etc. I write the above to simply inform you that you, along with a very small group of others (ie. Fleck etc) have the ability to do just that. In fact I think you might be surprised what this site/your role is in that.

No where did I say you have a responsibility; but you do play a role. And the more often you stray into troll country the less often you have the ability to inform and stimulate opposite viewpoint thought.

just my 2 cents

It's the current state of affairs - liberals are emotionally apoplectic because Hillary lost so no more flying along the liberal route in smooth air with occasional light chop. And she lost to Trump which is exacerbating the emotional fit of pique. For them, the earth has shifted and the very existence of our universe it risk. All life as we know it is in imminent danger and you're just not willing to see it. What they fail to realize is this dynamic is no different than what non-liberals have been feeling, experiencing, managing, tolerating, complaining about for the past 8 yrs. We are now flying in the opposite direction from the 'right path' in severe to extreme turbulence and we are all going to die.

Intellectuals like Dan are capable of expressing their emotional state with articulate arguments while others are lying on freeway on ramps, burning buildings and calling everyone names. But it's all the same emotional fit of pique just under the surface which cannot be logically and rationally explained because it's neither logical nor rational.

If you disagreed with Obama you're an ignorant racist because even his errors were reasonable. If you don't disagree 'de facto' with Trump you're an ignorant fascist.

They may never realize the ridiculousness of their emotional tirade, no expect these irrational, illogical arguments delivered in a warm, meat bowl of word soup, then just smile and wave.

"liberals are emotionally apoplectic because Hillary lost"

i hope you aren't including me in this cohort. hillary was my 4th or 5th choice. she was (really) a centrist in left wing clothing and that appealed to me. but there was no mourning on my part.

"If you disagreed with Obama you're an ignorant racist because even his errors were reasonable."

obama's errors are forgivable as are those of any president who tries hard, has a love of his country and a respect for its processes (that includes the great majority of all presidents).

"If you don't disagree 'de facto' with Trump you're an ignorant fascist."

we should revamp our corporate tax code. that we should repatriate hordes of overseas corporate money. that we should halt corporate inversions. take a look at regulations that are burdensome. rebuild infrastructure. does that make me an ignorant fascist?

i violently disagree with bernie sanders that we should make college free. i violently agree with ben carson that every adult citizen should pay income taxes. as a thought experiment, back when we had 19 candidates, i formed my own personal political platform that included at least 1 idea from each of the 19. what animates me is not party, or clan, but an attachment to the tools and behaviors that always lead to good decisions.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"I noticed that you've taken to childishly calling him "pence." Way to go on raising the level of debate in your forum."

you're right. not only is it not particularly civil, the reference was to my inability to find a single case on this forum where a trump policy, after his becoming the nominee, was criticized; rather that in every case between then and now it was defended.

the fact that i couldn't remember it doesn't mean it doesn't exist and i'm sure you can name the instances i missed. it was wrong of me. thanks for calling me out.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

In case anyone had any doubts about what a small, petty, imprudent, unwise, unfit, cretin of a human being our President is:


I'm ashamed for him. And for us.

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The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W

And would anyone put it past Bannon to orchestrate just such a "something"?

I wouldn't. Feeds right into his narrative

"I'm ashamed for him. And for us. "

i like joe scarborough's take on this, in WAPO. on the one hand he is in line with what a lot of people write here:

"I have been, and remain, skeptical of Trump critics who spend their waking hours lathering in outrage porn. Their insistence that the former reality-TV host is an autocratic tyrant capable of unraveling America’s elaborate system of checks and balances is laughable."

however, this is what he writes about the attack on the judge:

"when the president tries to undermine the legitimacy of the federal judiciary, he must be told in short order that the White House is picking a fight it will not win. For the sake of the country, let us hope the attacks on “so-called” Judge James Robart were merely reckless and not politically calculated. Because speeding further down that path would end in an ugly constitutional crash."

i come down in between. i do think the checks and balances are enough to maintain the republic. what scarborough omits is the corrosive effect on the citizenry. it's not enough that our political systems withstands an autocracy, but that we don't create an atmosphere where a third or half the country is okay with an autocracy.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

The people won't accept his Twitter behavior for very long, IMO. I'm happy with most of his cabinet and some of his initial EOs and none of his Tweets. In fact, I no longer watch news at all as I cannot stand to listen to him speak. Like Forge, I hope he breaks a lot of the status quo DC bullshit, most of which will result in positive change and some of which will set us back to be repaired by the next POTUS in 4 yrs. I am very comfortable he will be better for the US than the Clintons v2.0 but I sure wish he'd STFU and STOP FUCKING USING TWITTER.

I've recently read a few good articles about change agents , similar to CEOs effecting a corporate turnaround - once they break everything and start down a positive path their job is done and experienced business operators can take it forward from that point. They are commonly mean, ego drive SOBs but they fill a necessary niche in the world for a moment in time. I have direct experience with this scenario in the tech space - and it is somewhat analogous to the Trump-effect and those more comfortable with status quo will suffer the most" particularly those who value style and optics.

But, please, stop the Twitter attacks and just get on with it...

http://media.townhall.com/...loads/2017/2/3/2.png

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“Read the transcript.”

Twitter is allegedly filing a brief tonight (Sunday) opposing the immigration order for this week's arguments in the Ninth Circuit.

Maybe this would turn him off the platform

Hey. We can dream. But it would be trumpish to slam twitter on twitter

Dan hit on an important point. There is a real danger, and I think it's inevitable, of people becoming indifferent to or sympathetic to his belligerence toward the process. We saw it to some extent with the last administration, when the left ceased to care how President Obama executed his agenda, largely because of the intransigence of the Republican caucus.

I'm sitting near 50/50 on his EOs and Memoranda, but the devil is buried in the details on many (deregulation in particular), and like you, would be far less annoyed if he'd just put down the goddam twitter machine. It's a double edge sword, in that it gives us direct access to his thought process. It's revealing, and what's revealed is more often than not highly disappointing of an American President, to put it mildly.

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The devil made me do it the first time, second time I done it on my own - W

There is a real danger, and I think it's inevitable, of people becoming indifferent to or sympathetic to his belligerence toward the process.

People are sympathetic to his belligerence toward the process. I'm sympathetic to his belligerence toward the process. You know why? Because I'm goddamned sick and tired of judges legislating from the bench, flatly ignoring the law, and just inserting their own personal and political opinions into the process instead. I have close to zero confidence that any politically charged legal issue will be decided according to the merits of the legal case before a judge these days. I don't trust the courts to make impartial decisions about those kinds of issues- because they so often don't.

And so far, this is looking like another one of those cases. I don't really have a problem with a temporary restraining order, even if it's merely intended as a backdoor method of giving a grace period. Fine. But I wouldn't bet a single dollar that the court ultimately rules correctly on the matter. It might, it might not.

It isn't Trump's twitter feed that killed my faith in the judicial system. It was the judicial system.

And I'll point out again that while Trump called the judge "so-called," he's actually obeying him as a real, lawful judge, which puts him out in front of several recent presidents. There seems little risk at this point of actual damage to the legitimacy of the courts. Does anyone think Trump was laying the groundwork for ignoring the court's final decision on this? If they court rules against him, is he going to say, "See, like I said, that guy's not a real judge, so I don't have to comply with his ruling, so put the ban back in effect"?

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"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."