Because I try to keep up with the ongoing RussiaGate ruse, I follow on Twitter many of the major peddlers of this nonsense. Many of them casually toss around accusations of disloyalty by Trump and his supporters and, as I noted in my last article, even treason. They frequently invoke country, the flag, the Constitution, etc. and suggest that Trump cares nothing about any of these and is instead a pawn of Vladimir Putin. Of course this is all absurd on its face.
The Twitterverse and the rest of social media are abuzz with hysteria about Russia in light of the recent revelations regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian national who claimed to be in possession of some incriminating information about Hillary Clinton. Words frequently used by the anti-Trump Russian conspiracy mongers to describe Russia include “enemy,” “hostile,” “adversary,” etc. There is just one problem with this. It is not an accurate characterization of Russia or our relationship with her.
Ms. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, first assistant press secretary, said she thinks there is a “very real potential” that Mr. Trump’s allegation about Obama administration wiretaps correspond ds to facts.
Well, you never know what the “deep state” is going to do next, do you?
Actually, this sort of misbelief is something right and left conspiracy theorists have in common. But if both sides of the political spectrum are using the same words to refer to the same thing, that thing’s purposes and principles must be very obscure indeed …
In its first executive action last Friday, within the hour after Trump took the oath of office, his administration suspended the implementation of a rule that would have reduced the cost of mortgage insurance for FHA-backed loans. The backing helps first-time buyers, people with poor credit, and those who lack funds for a 20% down payment obtain private loans.
About 16% of new mortgages are FHA insured. The premium rate would have been reduced from 0.85% to 0.60%, saving borrowers about $29 monthly on a $200,000 mortgage.
History is nuanced. The connections between what happened historically and the way things are now, are nuanced. Will anyone claim that President-Elect Trump has a nuanced understanding of the ways things are and the history of how they came to be that way?
Tweets are not nuanced. You can express a provocation in 140 characters or fewer, but you can’t express a concept, much less a nuanced concept. That’s why some people are tweeting in chains. But that too is a poor substitute for rational discourse.
Forgetful of the support of working class voters in the election, Mr. Trump will nominate an opponent of the Obama Administration’s new overtime rule, Mr. Andy Pudzer, for Secretary of Labor. The rule more than doubles, to $47,000, the salary threshold at which a worker can be considered overtime exempt based on job duties. It was set to go into effect later this year, subject to a challenge in the federal courts.
Reuters published an item on a PIMCO report predicting a 2 - 2.5% increase in gross domestic product during 2017. I didn’t read the report (the item doesn’t have a link), as I was put off by the following excerpt:
Pimco, a unit of Allianz SE (ALVG.DE), characterized the world as "stable but not secure."
What Speaker Ryan said on 60 Minutes last weekend about letting “bygones be bygones” with President-Elect Trump may only be partly true. There are certainly contradictions within the Republican party as a whole. But as between these two individuals, both ready to wield powers granted by the Constitution, the proper word would be “confrontation,” not dialectical “contradiction.”
Recent comments