Bravo!

Have you noticed Kasich in the news lately weighing in on the matter(s) at hand? Perhaps he's lining up a 2020 run and the Pubs will convince DT to stand down? (I know, I know, but one can ponder)

My mother was told she could be a teacher or a nurse because those were the only careers for women. That is not the world I want my daughter to grow up in.

I also think if he cannot control himself with women alone he should be forced to wear some type of chastity belt his wife can lock in the morning as she sends him off to work and unlock in the evening rather than excluding women from meeting with him 1:1. His self confessed lack of comfort should be his problem to control and not impact the efficiency of the government.

Hey! No, showing that both sides are lunatics in them.

If the fears turn out to be justified will you still consider them hysterical? And every criticism, or even most, was not without substance. It was based on what he said. Though we were told the problem was our own because we took him literally but not seriously (whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean).

Search 'Obama is the antichrist' and you return 400,000 hits. It is easy to find people being hysterical. They are funny and it makes good TV. But it doesn't mean everyone who doesn't like a particular politician is just being hysterical.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

I hate knit hats so I won't wear them.

Should I wear non hysterical Republican hats?

They will go after any Republican, Pence, Kasich, it doesn't matter. To the uber Left on ST, it is all politics all the time and unless you toe the SJW, social engineering line you will be destroyed.

Only the left?

what we see now is a drain of wealth and buying power from every class but the highest of the upper class. wealth is flowing upward


So if Trump and the Republicans are encouraging and supporting this dynamic, why do so many in the lower 1/3 of the economic spectrum support them and vote for them? It would seem these folks, vote for the party and the policies that punish them the most? Why is that?

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

why do so many russians support putin?

in my opinion, it's two things. first, you have a mountain of money flowing into a propaganda campaign to convince folks that what is not in their best interest is what they really want. second, you have republican orthodoxy, which combines disparate hot button, heartfelt issues into a kind of apostles creed of "things we believe". it has worked really well. gun owners believe in christ. christians believe in low taxes for the wealthy. the wealthy believe voter fraud is rampant. federalists believe in christ. none of them had anything much to do with each other before republicanism displaced evangelicanism as the thing we believe in more than we believe in anything else.

so, i have neighbors. they're mine and my wife's age (circa 60). they're self-employed engineers. they barely can afford their health insurance and they go for months on end with no insurance. the house health care plan will cause the $30,000 they pay right now in premiums and deductibles to shoot up to $50,000, maybe $70,000 or more (for the two of them) by the time they both hit medicare age.

But they will never, ever, ever vote for anything but a tea party, freedom caucus candidate, because they started as hard core christians and have morphed into hard core republicans. they hate their next door neighbor who has turned his 5 acre parcel into a private shooting range. they live in fear of this crazy. but of course they vote for the very policies that allow this guy to shoot whatever, whenever he wants.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Because no one is poor. They are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The Republicans have done a much better job than Democrats when talking to poor working class voters. The way they communicate resonates much better. How often do you hear the Democrats being accused of being condescending to this bloc of voters?

Those voters have become convinced that other poor people are the reason they don't have money. I grew up in a deep red rural area. My broke ass childhood friends frequently bitch about their taxes paying for all those layabouts. But if the numbers are even close to right, 45 - 50% of people aren't paying the federal income tax that would be paying for these people. They pay local and state taxes and federal payroll tax but not the source of welfare and food stamps.

It is the poor people holding them down, not the people making all the money.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.

this is a pretty good description of what I have been trying to wrap my head around for years. I also grew up in a really red (and rural and poor) area, and I hear this all the time when "back home".

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Because no one is poor. They are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The Republicans have done a much better job than Democrats when talking to poor working class voters. The way they communicate resonates much better. How often do you hear the Democrats being accused of being condescending to this bloc of voters?

Those voters have become convinced that other poor people are the reason they don't have money. I grew up in a deep red rural area. My broke ass childhood friends frequently bitch about their taxes paying for all those layabouts. But if the numbers are even close to right, 45 - 50% of people aren't paying the federal income tax that would be paying for these people. They pay local and state taxes and federal payroll tax but not the source of welfare and food stamps.

It is the poor people holding them down, not the people making all the money.

"Here in Tennessee they have started to go after our Senators and Representatives."
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I'm in Tennessee, and I don't know what you are talking about. The senators here are Corker and Alexander, and they are both pretty widely respected on both sides. If anything, Alexander is probably receives more criticism from tea partiers than progressives.

Hell, I'd vote for either of them for President over the last 2 candidates we had.

Agreeing that tribal affiliation is becoming most important in determining voting patterns. The two clearest examples of tribal division revolve around race and religion and geography at this point. Throw in a bifurcated media which pretty much exists to maintain and deepen such divisions, either by design or by accident. Add in parties that are dealing with complex internal divisions, so that ways to improve the lives of the poor is in constant debate.

Because they are mostly white and see dems as consisting of more diversity which might suggest to them more wealth redistribution and less political influence. Federal tax rate is fairly stable and my state's income tax rate the same as 1950s, so why they rail against taxes is hard to understand. Their incomes are not going up....capital taxed less than labor yet they support repubs who want to reward investors not labor. They need to cut waste in government but seems like there is constituency for every cut. Gore someone else's ox, not mine. Shame we couldn't turn some cost accountants loose and get honest cost benefit analysis that public could understand much less pols.

I agree regarding Corker. Alexander is too old. :-)

It's on the front page of today's Chattanooga Times Free Press. A subscription is needed but it cites a Politco article for locals Coker and Fleishmann:

http://www.politico.com/...nterest-rules-238033

Hahaha, ha, ha....ha! I'm one of those accountants fighting the "good fight" by trying to explain financial issues to regular people on a daily basis. I can't make my reasonably smart friends understand a car loan which is pretty apolitical. Do you think people already primed to love or hate a particular governmental program will allow financial analysis change their opinion?

Let me give you an example - the house of representatives just passed a bill, which at it's core cuts almost a TRILLION out of Medicaid and sends most of this money to the 1 percenters. The clowns even celebrated this on live TV in the Rose garden. What are we talking about today?

If we put it on a reality tv show maybe the dumb fucks would watch.....gaging by some of the town halls there is a sliver of a chance pols will have to answer why 1T will go to Paris Hilton and others.

Where have you been the past 8 years? Have you looked at who benefited from the Obama Presidency? Are you really that out of touch with reality? Holy cow man, do some reading of something, anything that doesn't come from a left wing website. Under Obama the rich were HUGE winners while the rest of the country were slaughtered. You really cannot be that daft.

Under Obama where record deportations, drone strikes and further economic disparity. The very idea that Obama behaved in any way left is a joke.

If the fears turn out to be justified will you still consider them hysterical?

Those fears aren't going to turn out to be justified. Because they're hysterical.

I'm not talking about people who opposed Trump's policy proposals, in part or in whole, and I'm not talking about people who just strongly opposed him because they thought him temperamentally unfit for the office.

I'm talking about that significant slice of the left who opposes him rabidly because of who and what they believe he stands for. It's tribal. They consider him the champion of everything that's wrong and hideous and awful about America- racist, misogynist, homophobic, rich, etc etc. They didn't oppose him for his policy, they opposed him for the sake of opposing him- which is basically all the women's march amounted to, for example. And it's also why so many people reacted out of all proportion to minor, unimportant executive actions, like the temporary travel ban.

The literally-Hitler crowd, that's who I'm talking about. They're not reasonable, their opposition isn't reasonable or reasoned or respectable, they aren't going to be proven right, and they aren't going to go away when Trump is gone.


Search 'Obama is the antichrist' and you return 400,000 hits.

Did you really just try to employ the reverse "but Obama" ploy? lol.

I'm happy to agree that anyone who thought Obama was actually the antichrist was a hysterical loon. But I'm pretty sure those people don't really compare to those on the left who think "resisting" Trump on every point, no matter how minor or inconsequential, is a moral imperative in its own right. (To include erstwhile mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post, too.)

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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."

do you really need to be such an asshole in writing? i hope you're not this way in person.

yes, you're right. the way we are right now, the way it is, and for at least the last 16 years, the wealth has aggregated to the top. i'm not blaming or crediting anyone. i'm simply stating a fact. to me. giving that very top a tax cut is going to accelerate that. i don't see why that's a good thing.

do i think we need to hike the rates to high heaven? no. i don't think that's fair. i just know what hasn't worked, which are the tax cuts for the wealthy that were enacted in the early 2000s that i'm very glad to see personally but that in the end will hamper the ability of all companies to sell their products.

i do like the idea of a corporate tax cut. i like reducing the burden of regulations that are simply onerous solutions looking for a nonexistent problem. beyond this, you tell me. i'm at a loss. i've always felt we need to protect core industries with import tarifs: steel, energy, defense, etc. maybe that would help. i don't see this as particularly partisan. just, i don't see why we should "solve" our problems with solutions that have already been demonstrated not to work.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

The literally-Hitler crowd, that's who I'm talking about. They're not reasonable, their opposition isn't reasonable or reasoned or respectable, they aren't going to be proven right, and they aren't going to go away when Trump is gone.


It also makes it really hard to come to agreement on anything. If Hitler thinks he is dealing with the anti-Christ there really is no reasonable resolution.


Did you really just try to employ the reverse "but Obama" ploy? lol.


That was not unintentional, it seemed like the theme of the day/week/month so I went with it.

But I'm pretty sure those people don't really compare to those on the left who think "resisting" Trump on every point, no matter how minor or inconsequential, is a moral imperative in its own right.


There was an entire swath of people who claimed Obama would destroy America, he didn't love America like we do, he actually wanted to be president so he could destroy America, etc. These kind of people reside on both sides of the aisle, and both sides think the other side is light years worst.

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.