Politics; the election is overexcesses

[bigsky]

No one needs to "support our president" if we dont want to. I didnt like the Presidents last 24 years and it's likely I wont much like Trump.

Our liberty is eroding. He will erode it in different ways than Obama, but Trump is a populist not a constitutional conservative. Nor is his AG.

Congress is ineffective and unlikely to function in its role as a check and balance on the imperial presidency.

It will be a tossup as to who has the worse Supreme court justce appts, O or T.

I am old and curmudgeonly and live in Montana far from the excesses of the coastal states. It's a privilege. I will enjoy it, but people will come to take that away from my children. We cant owe 20-30 trillion and have a sustainable society. We cant have a government dependent population and business model, all depedent on political power to keep the baksheesh flowing. Climate change would depress me if it werent for the impending government crisis.

Like I learned in elementary school: duck and cover.

[bigsky]

PS the title is supposed to be the election isn't the only thing that's over

[bigsky]

Pajama boy in a vagina hat won't make this country better.

[Darrell KSR]

No one needs to "support our president" if we dont want to. I didnt like the Presidents last 24 years and it's likely I wont much like Trump.

Our liberty is eroding. He will erode it in different ways than Obama, but Trump is a populist not a constitutional conservative. Nor is his AG.

Congress is ineffective and unlikely to function in its role as a check and balance on the imperial presidency.

It will be a tossup as to who has the worse Supreme court justce appts, O or T.

I am old and curmudgeonly and live in Montana far from the excesses of the coastal states. It's a privilege. I will enjoy it, but people will come to take that away from my children. We cant owe 20-30 trillion and have a sustainable society. We cant have a government dependent population and business model, all depedent on political power to keep the baksheesh flowing. Climate change would depress me if it werent for the impending government crisis.

Like I learned in elementary school: duck and cover.

I"m old and curmudgeonly with you.

I will say this. Just as I said with the UK football team this year, although I'm not optimistic, I am hopeful. Turns out, there was a little reason for optimism. So maybe there will be with President Trump. I'll be hopeful; doesn't hurt to do that, I guess.

But push comes to shove--I'm the opposite of optimistic. But I'll be hopeful, nonetheless. Maybe it'll work.

[CitizenBBN]

If anyone is waiting on him to become "Presidential" and fill that role of patient leader that we got with Reagan's talks or FDR's fireside chats, you're going to be very disappointed. After 4 years he may lose some of the sharp edges, but it won't be by design or intent and it won't come quickly. he's going to be brash and brazen and spout off about minor offenses. Going to happen, going to keep happening.

But he may also put in people who can get some real positive change effected, and put in some good judges, and rebuild our military, etc. He can be a boorish guy who chooses a lot of the wrong fights and still end up a good President in terms of results.

Right now I like the direction of his cabinet. If that is where he heads we'll be a whole lot happier than we were with Obama or Hillary, and that's about the best we can hope for in this system.

[CitizenBBN]

BTW, my personal approach is to just ignore the fray. Don't worry about it. It's going to go on and on, and it will all be much ado about nothing, the very definition of the phrase 'tempest in a teapot'.

What matters are the orders, the laws, the regulatory impact of his cabinet picks. That stuff is all I hear, the rest is just white noise.

I will say though that I do have a certain devilish delight in how Trump can get the media so riled up and so control the agenda. Often to no positive end, but he can do it with little more than a glance, and it is funny to watch them all lose their minds.

They simply can't get that this guy is the first true out of the box PResident, maybe ever, certainly since Teddy Roosevelt. He is not going to follow Washington conventions for much of anything, and doesn't care a bit when he doesn't. It's going to lead to them losing their minds, but that's exactly why he was elected, to put a big wrench in the works.

It's a more boorish, ill-chosen wrench than I'd like, but it is certainly a wrench, and we need one desperately. I just hope the nonsense doesn't impact the ability to get policy results and win the mid-term elections. that's all that really matters.

[Darrell KSR]

I take it you don't agree with this article, then .

Donald Trump has assembled the worst Cabinet in American history

[KeithKSR]

I take it you don't agree with this article, then .

Donald Trump has assembled the worst Cabinet in American history

Obama had the worst Cabinet ever assembled, and it isn't close. I like many of Trump's appointees, as they have real world experiences. Academia gives you people with no ability to apply what they know to the real world, like Obama.

[CitizenBBN]

from the Washington Propagandist? color me not worried.

I'd be happy to respond to that piece though (and not responding to you of course Darrell, just in general to the position taken by the Post and the opposition generally) :

Rick Perry - Dept. of Energy:

Reason he's bad: he once said he wanted to abolish it, he doesn't know about it managing the nuclear stockpile, implication that he's just a fool, implication he can't manage a big entity

Response: First, Rick Perry is a former governor of Texas. I'd say the government of Texas is a decent sized entity for management experience. It also cuts against the idea that he is a simpleton or clueless. He may or may not know about every aspect of the DoE or any other agency, but the current head of DoE is a nuclear physicist who probably doesn't know much about oil either.

Second, Reagan elected multiple Cabinet members who very much were there to reduce the size of the department and even to eliminate them (Bill Bennett at HEW). that's not wrong or a failure, it's simply a different political direction. That in and of itself isn't an indictment.

Third and most important, DoE is a mixed up agency with MULTIPLE roles. One is the nuclear aspect, which MANY conservatives want to have completely removed from Energy and put under Defense. That would be things like the nuclear stockpile and the production facilities.

But even if you don't, a huge part of DoE right now is in fact oil and gas policy and specifically the push to drive them out and replace with "green" energy. DoE's budget is mostly the nuclear programs, which in fact is mostly the National Laboratories programs, but it has been used since 2005 to loan guarantee things like Solyndra.

It would actually make a LOT of sense for the DoE to be completely reorganized, with parts either spun off to a dedicated agency (for example doing JUST the nuclear programs and National Labs work), and parts like the green energy loan stuff should probably be shut down or put under Commerce or a wholly separate agency that has nothing to do with nuclear stockpiles.

They ended up there b/c of the nuclear energy programs of the 70s, and clearly if we build those facilities we need oversight of them, but that role is very different from building nuclear warheads and testing (which they also do), and that's very different from funding wind farms. Really DoE is one of the most odd agencies we have.

Lastly, it's not like Perry is the first guy who isn't a physicist to run it. The last 2 under Obama were, but Bill Clinton had Bill Richardson there for many years, and he was nothing more than a Democratic Congressman and DNC Chair. His level of nuclear weapons experience was the same as mine. Did Clinton have the worst pick ever with that one?


Perry is a Governor, he has very clear ideas on oil and gas and energy policy and that is part of DoE. The nuclear side, which is the biggest part of things, honestly isn't all that influenced by the political appointees who come and go, nor should they be. They did fine under lots of guys who weren't nuclear experts and I assume will do so now.

I'll work on others later, but Perry was the first one they hammered in the story.

[CitizenBBN]

Lest anyone think I'm being unfair, remember the Solyndra mess, a $500 million loss, was a DoE loan guarantee.

here's a story by the same exact newspaper highlighting how that entire program is a scandal, corporate pork for "green" companies most of whom were BIG donors to the DNC and Obama and before it to Bush II and the GOP:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.5a243841cf25

As the article points out, it has been a bi-partisan pork program, and those Solyndra loans were made under the fabulous picks of Mr. Obama.

So while it's probably good to have physicists making some decisions at DoE it's probably NOT good to have them making decisions on everything. So Mr. Perry may not be the guy to review specs for the latest nuclear warhead design, but I assume we can put those people on staff. but I trust him a LOT more to make decisions about whether the US government should be the venture capitalists of the energy research sector. Even the Post thought that was a bad idea, at least when it suited them.

[CitizenBBN]

Here's a classic hit piece on DeVoss:

• Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education: DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor, has spent much of her adult life attempting to destroy public education in America. Despite that work, at her confirmation hearing she displayed a shocking ignorance of basic issues in education policy, though she did opine that schools should be able to have guns in them to ward off grizzly bear attacks.

What? A DONOR holding public office? Oh God, say it's not so???!!!!!

Jeez, what a one sided story.

Yes, she's married to the Amway fortune heir, so they have money. No doubt. With that she's spent the last 30 years dedicated to privatizing education. The Post calls this "destroying public education", I and those of us who support vouchers call it "saving American's kids".

Again, it's not wrong, it's just politically DIFFERENT. Her view, and mine, is that the best way to improve education is to break the government monopoly and allow free competition for parent's dollars by giving every parent the money necessary and then letting them choose where to send their kids.

In any other area this would be considered a fundamentally American way of doing things. Would we tell parents which doctor they MUST see, or where they MUST vacation? But by golly we sure can force anyone who doesn't have enough money to go to School X.

Of course what has happened is a classic wasteful monopoly, where we have the highest spending per child in the world and some of the worst results of Western nations.

So she wants to change that, and yes that is very bad news for the NEA. But she's been tackling these issues for 30 years and has worked at a VERY local level in places like Louisiana to get change. She doesn't need to know Calculus or even teaching theory to know that what we need is for the government to not have a stranglehold on every child in this country whose parents don't have enough money for private school. that doesn't take any teaching experience at all in fact.

DeVoss is an AMAZINGLY good pick for education, my favorite in his cabinet. Sure she's the direct enemy of the nation's political education establishment, so you bet they hate her.

B/c if we can break up the monopoly, two things are going to happen. First, kids will start to go to different and better schools, and as those schools get established a LOT Of them will NOT be havens of liberal indoctrination. They'll break not just the monopoly on education but the indoctrination that goes with it. One of the very pillars of liberal invasiveness in the US will be weakened, and they know it.

[CitizenBBN]

In short ( I know, unlikely huh?), Trumps' cabinet isn't the worst ever, it's simply the Left's worst nightmare come true.

I can live with that, revel in in actually.

[CitizenBBN]

How's this for racism:

• Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: The former presidential candidate, who has precisely zero experience in housing policy, was apparently appointed to lead this department because he’s one of the few African-Americans Donald Trump has met.

They just said he was picked b/c he was a black man. I'm trying to figure out how you can be more racist in a major national newspaper and get away with it, but I'm not sure how short of having your bi-line picture being done in black face.

They just said an accomplished physician was picked purely b/c he was black. If not racist (and it is by their definition of the term), it's certainly an interesting indictment of Affirmative Action, and I bet they don't think that either, which brings us back to the former problem.

Ben Carson will probably be the first HuD Secretary who is REALLY qualified. Not b/c he has years of experience as a bureaucrat, but b/c he actually was POOR and had to experience public housing.

How the hell is a man who grew up in exactly the community HUD serves, and who succeeded in getting out of that cycle of poverty, not incredibly qualified for the job of trying to get others out of poverty?

that is the job, btw. The goal of HUD isn't to warehouse the poor, but to help them become NOT POOR someday.


This is the media bias that got Trump elected and his supporters all see it. that comment on Dr. Carson was overtly racist and completely slanted to avoid mentioning his unique insight on the very people HUD serves. Don't need to look very hard to see the bias and the underlying fear and loathing.

[CitizenBBN]

Obama had the worst Cabinet ever assembled, and it isn't close. I like many of Trump's appointees, as they have real world experiences. Academia gives you people with no ability to apply what they know to the real world, like Obama.

Their indictment of the Treasury pick is that he hasn't actually set macroeconomic policy. NO, he's just made a fortune dealing with the policies others have set. Oh no, he doesn't know a thing about macroeconomics. lol.

Personally I'd rather have the guy who worked in the markets deciding how to manage markets rather than some ivory tower intellectual who has theorized about it but never actually had to make a business or investment decision. I had classes with some of those guys who are or were on Fed boards. I'll take the billionaire investor ANY DAY.

[CitizenBBN]

Last one, I promise:

• Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State: Tillerson has no government or diplomatic experience, though he has been to many countries that have oil.

Really? the man who has had to negotiate and make billion dollar decisions with probably well over 100 nations on a near daily basis, understanding and managing trillions in assets in every kind of political, economic and social environment possible, is just a guy who's been to a lot of countries?

Please. It's fine to debate how that experience may translate, or how he feels on given issues, but it's hard to imagine a man with more real world experience dealing with foreign governments or having to understand the changing political tides within those nations and keep ahead of them. Exxon has to deal with heads of state, rebels and local tribes on a daily basis, somehow trying to keep them all happy enough to keep oil flowing in and out.

[Darrell KSR]

I was a little worried when you attacked the source, rather than the content, but did an admirable job with the rebuttal, as I expected. I don't buy all of it--I think there's merit in some of the concern--but it's not what the article portrayed it to be, to be sure.

By the way, I don't think anyone is concerned with the number of posts made to discuss the criticism lodged, and provide a rebuttal for it. Some of us will read every word. May take us a few weeks, but....

[Darrell KSR]

Really enjoyed this article.

Donald Trump's Cabinet is Awesome

[CitizenBBN]

lol.

My attack on the WP was before reading it, and was really just me saying that I wasn't worried about being able to respond to their argument.

here's the crux of it: every President has good and bad cabinet picks. The best football coaches hire and fire guys regularly too, it's not really a surprise. It's a given.

So some of Trump's picks will prove to be great, some will come up short. Some will find ways to get things done in the job, others will struggle.

My problem is the absurd hyperbole that is now beyond rampant in the media. It's beyond bias or slant now, they are now largely hysterical and the nature of Trump's win has proven many of us to be 100% right when we talked of media bias for years. Now they have lifted back any pretense.

So in this piece they could make some legit arguments against someone like Perry. OK he isn't a nuclear expert (though most of them in US history weren't either), but that's a valid complaint. But don't act like that's all the DoE does, or that the guys who WERE nuclear experts (under Obama) didn't have some whopping mistakes like Solyndra.

But then they go totally off the rails with someone like DeVoss. Attacking a Cabinet pick b/c they donated money? Are you freakin' serious? Obama's Commerce Secretary was a bundler for his campaign, and lots and lots of these guys are long time political helpers whether they be Bill Richardson who I referenced earlier who was DNC Chair, or a Congressman or a Governor, etc. They're all picked in part for what they may bring to the department and in part for what they bring politically.

So to argue that someone like DeVoss has a strike against her b/c she's actively campaigned for school vouchers by giving money to campaigns is just silliness. they act like that's a conflict, that SHE was a donor. not that she took money, but that she's rich and gave money.

What kind of logic is that? Hillary and her husband took TENS OF MILLIONS directly from foreign governments and major corporations, but it was OK for her to be President, but if a person GIVES money they can't be a Cabinet member without a conflict? Huh?

then there's the shots at deputy picks, one for plagiarism. The last Vice President was caught doing it at least twice in his career, once in school and once when running for President. But it's a disqualifying event for a deputy secretary of some department?

They only attacks they have on most of these are just pure nonsense, driving them to utter hypocrisy and ignoring the fact that it describes many if not most Cabinet appointments. The vast majority are politically connected people who have taken or given money and have ties to all kinds of entities, foreign and domestic.

None had more questionable ties than the Clintons, and every one of these media people voted for her for President, and her staff was also chocked full of such questionable ties. Yet now that it's Trump that's all a huge problem. Uh huh.

[CitizenBBN]

QUick google found this article from Politico no less on how many political donor appointments Obama made:

http://www.politico.com/story/2011/0...nt-jobs-056993

From the article:

More than two years after Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.

Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.

Public Citizen found in 2008 that President George W. Bush had appointed about 200 bundlers to administration posts over his eight years in office. That is roughly the same number Obama has appointed in a little more than two years, the iWatch News analysis showed.



Does anyone think Trump will be anywhere NEAR as bad as that? He can't be b/c frankly he didn't raise that much money and didn't raise it from such large donors. They walked away from him, so he owes guys like the Koch brothers ZERO. It's part of why he can so freely go after the DC establishment, he didn't have to cut deals with them to get elected.

They should be talking about how this will be the LEAST political cabinet and appointment process maybe in US history, but that will never happen. Seriously, I bet it ends up having the lowest percentage of large donors in the 1,500 or so Senate approved appointments ever.

Esp. those cushy Ambassador jobs that are always big perks to pay back donors. Not a lot of key trade and military worries in the Bahamas, but the weather is great.