Donald is here to stay, now what? Cursing and swearing OK

[Tero]

Managed to hide hush money in Dekaware LLC. Also dated playmate:

On January 18, the Journal followed up with a story about how the Trump team hid the payments, setting up Essential Consultants, LLC in Delaware on October 17, 2016, to make the payments.

Since the Journal first ran with the story about the $130,000 payment, multiple other outlets, including Slate, Fox News and the Daily Beast have revealed that they had started reporting on the story before the 2016 election.
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/19/57919558 ... my-daniels

[Tero]

Some personal accomplishments:
A real man: ‘I’ll give her a week’ to lose the baby weight, Trump said of Melania, months before alleged tryst with porn star (washingtonpost.com)

[L'Emmerdeur]

Aren't his approval ratings lower than any other president ever?

He's still doing rather well on that score if you ask Republicans. Also, voters that describe themselves as independent who voted for Trump continue to mostly approve. There are still moderate Republicans, despite losses in that area during more or less the last decade. If you consider Democrats 'leftist' and independents who didn't vote for Trump to be of the same ilk, then it's possible say that 'moderates' are 'happy with the results.'

[I]t should be noted that Independents who voted for Trump still like him (78 percent), think the press treats him unfairly, and overwhelmingly think that he should not be impeached (90 percent).

source

[Tero]

DAKA kaka. Trump does not give a kaka about immigrants. Current situation came about by ignoring dysfunctional congress for a year.

No wall for Trump! No budget! No nothing, you will do zero bills in 2018.

[JimC]

He couldn't stop your government being shut down...

What's with that crap? Yet again, America makes the rest of the world look relatively sane...

[L'Emmerdeur]

He couldn't stop your government being shut down...

What's with that crap? Yet again, America makes the rest of the world look relatively sane...

Trump isn't to blame; the fault lies entirely with the Democrats. Just ask Fox News.

[JimC]

Doesn't matter who did it, you have a fucked-up system over there if political squabbles can stuff up the normal functioning of government...

[pErvinalia]

Yep.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Doesn't matter who did it, you have a fucked-up system over there if political squabbles can stuff up the normal functioning of government...

There's a fine article in The Atlantic about how the current chaos came about. It's rather long and most likely boring except to somebody who's actually interested in American politics, but I'll quote some of it anyway. The thesis is that various well-intentioned reforms over the past 40+ years have destabilized the political system.

'How American Politics Went Insane'

Party-dominated nominating processes, soft money, congressional seniority, closed-door negotiations, pork-barrel spending—put each practice under a microscope in isolation, and it seems an unsavory way of doing political business. But sweep them all away, and one finds that business is not getting done at all. The political reforms of the past 40 or so years have pushed toward disintermediation—by favoring amateurs and outsiders over professionals and insiders; by privileging populism and self-expression over mediation and mutual restraint; by stripping middlemen of tools they need to organize the political system. All of the reforms promote an individualistic, atomized model of politics in which there are candidates and there are voters, but there is nothing in between.

...

In 2009, on the heels of President Obama’s election and the economic-bailout packages, angry fiscal conservatives launched the Tea Party insurgency and watched, somewhat to their own astonishment, as it swept the country. Tea Partiers shared some of the policy predilections of loyal Republican partisans, but their mind-set was angrily anti-establishment. In a 2013 Pew Research poll, more than 70 percent of them disapproved of Republican leaders in Congress. In a 2010 Pew poll, they had rejected compromise by similar margins. They thought nothing of mounting primary challenges against Republican incumbents, and they made a special point of targeting Republicans who compromised with Democrats or even with Republican leaders. In Congress, the Republican House leadership soon found itself facing a GOP caucus whose members were too worried about “getting primaried” to vote for the compromises necessary to govern—or even to keep the government open. Threats from the Tea Party and other purist factions often outweigh any blandishments or protection that leaders can offer.

So far the Democrats have been mostly spared the anti-compromise insurrection, but their defenses are not much stronger. Molly Ball recently reported for The Atlantic’s Web site on the Working Families Party, whose purpose is “to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans.” Because African Americans and union members still mostly behave like party loyalists, and because the Democratic base does not want to see President Obama fail, the Tea Party trick hasn’t yet worked on the left. But the Democrats are vulnerable structurally, and the anti-compromise virus is out there.

A second virus was initially identified in 2002, by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. It’s a shocking book, one whose implications other scholars were understandably reluctant to engage with. The rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, however, makes confronting its thesis unavoidable.

Using polls and focus groups, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that between 25 and 40 percent of Americans (depending on how one measures) have a severely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to work. I think of these people as “politiphobes,” because they see the contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful. Specifically, they believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. But the more important point is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy disagreement even exists. From that premise, they conclude that all the arguing and partisanship and horse-trading that go on in American politics are entirely unnecessary. Politicians could easily solve all our problems if they would only set aside their craven personal agendas.

[Trump is mentioned as a manifestation of this.]

Democrats have not been immune, either. Like Trump, Bernie Sanders appealed to the antipolitical idea that the mere act of voting for him would prompt a “revolution” that would somehow clear up such knotty problems as health-care coverage, financial reform, and money in politics. Like Trump, he was a self-sufficient outsider without customary political debts or party loyalty. Like Trump, he neither acknowledged nor cared—because his supporters neither acknowledged nor cared—that his plans for governing were delusional.

Trump, Sanders, and Ted Cruz have in common that they are political sociopaths—meaning not that they are crazy, but that they don’t care what other politicians think about their behavior and they don’t need to care. That three of the four final presidential contenders in 2016 were political sociopaths is a sign of how far chaos syndrome has gone. The old, mediated system selected such people out. The new, disintermediated system seems to be selecting them in.

[A description of how the compromise budget deal that Boehner and Obama worked out was torpedoed by Senator Cruz and the Tea Party element in the House of Representatives. This was viewed by many as an example of incompetence on the part of the Washington establishment.]

Of course, Congress’s incompetence makes the electorate even more disgusted, which leads to even greater political volatility. In a Republican presidential debate in March, Ohio Governor John Kasich described the cycle this way: The people, he said, “want change, and they keep putting outsiders in to bring about the change. Then the change doesn’t come … because we’re putting people in that don’t understand compromise.” Disruption in politics and dysfunction in government reinforce each other. Chaos becomes the new normal.

Being a disorder of the immune system, chaos syndrome magnifies other problems, turning political head colds into pneumonia. Take polarization. Over the past few decades, the public has become sharply divided across partisan and ideological lines. Chaos syndrome compounds the problem, because even when Republicans and Democrats do find something to work together on, the threat of an extremist primary challenge funded by a flood of outside money makes them think twice—or not at all. Opportunities to make bipartisan legislative advances slip away.

...

Nearly everyone panned party regulars for not stopping Trump much earlier, but no one explained just how the party regulars were supposed to have done that. Stopping an insurgency requires organizing a coalition against it, but an incapacity to organize is the whole problem. The reality is that the levers and buttons parties and political professionals might once have pulled and pushed had long since been disconnected. 


[Possible solutions are offered--essentially rebuilding some of the strength of parties to rein in extremism.]

The biggest obstacle, I think, is the general public’s reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of politics. Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry. Because that problem is mental, not mechanical, it really is hard to remedy.

In March, a Trump supporter told The New York Times, “I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican Party.” Another said, “We know who Donald Trump is, and we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.” That kind of anti-establishment nihilism deserves no respect or accommodation in American public life. Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.

[Animavore]

One Year in Trump's Fuckwitted Environmental Policies Are Taking Their Toll.

[pErvinalia]

In my opinion the media is largely to blame for the shallow and sorry state of politics. The problem is that the same incentives that apply to neoliberal politicians apply to media organisations as well. So their interests are largely aligned, and holding most politicians and a broken corrupted system to account aren't in the interests of media elite.

[pErvinalia]

Regarding the article posted by Lemmy, its a transparent piece of apologetics for the status quo and a corrupted system. To imagine that the answer to all the problems the world faces today is essentially business as usual is, frankly, insane.

[Hermit]

He couldn't stop your government being shut down...

What's with that crap? Yet again, America makes the rest of the world look relatively sane...

Trump isn't to blame; the fault lies entirely with the Democrats. Just ask Fox News.

What else could you possibly expect when the President is a Republican and the Republicans have the majority of seats in the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. For those who think there's something odd about blaming the Dems, Coito will be around presently to explain how it makes sense to blame them anyway.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Regarding the article posted by Lemmy, its a transparent piece of apologetics for the status quo and a corrupted system. To imagine that the answer to all the problems the world faces today is essentially business as usual is, frankly, insane.

The status quo ante isn't the status quo, and the author of that piece isn't suggesting a return to the previous way of doing things. He is pointing out that the reforms which brought about the status quo have had unintended results. Their cumulative effect is dysfunction.

So, to get government in the US back into functioning order some of the elements of its machinery that were scrapped entirely could be put back in place either partially or in improved form. I think in the current atmosphere, and given the leaders the US is currently suffering under, a cunning plan like a constitutional convention to try to build a completely new model would be disastrous.

[pErvinalia]

How are those elements going to be put back in place? It's simply not going to happen with the way politics and media work these days.

I don't know a lot about Bernie Sanders, so can't authoritatively comment on whether he's an ideological numpty or not, but it seems to me that he wants to reinstate a lot of systems from 40 years ago that worked. I'd expect you'd have a far greater chance of getting the change you want under him than with the current crop of neoliberal elites.