Sunday, November 27, 2016

Trump's Big CON: "More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs"

UPDATE:  "American workers may be struggling, but American factories are not. . .

American factories actually make more stuff than they ever have, and at a lower cost. Manufacturing accounts for more than a third of U.S. economic output — making it the largest sector of the economy. . .

U.S. factories now manufacture twice as much as they did in 1984, with one-third fewer workers, according to the Federal Reserve.

The reason, of course, is that productivity has risen so sharply. Technology, and automation specifically, allows manufacturers to make more than ever before, at a much lower cost.

The economics are unavoidable and irreversible." 

Read the Washington Post, A single chart everybody needs to look at before Trump’s big fight over bringing back American jobs.

"Donald Trump laid out his plans for his first 100 days in the White House in a brief message Monday evening. What Trump said was not all that remarkable, focusing on standard conservative issues such as energy, regulation and ethics. What Trump did not say was more revealing. The president-elect made no mention of two bold promises he had made to his base on international trade, a crucial issue in his unprecedented campaign.

During his campaign, Trump had said that he would reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement and direct the Treasury Department to declare that China is manipulating its currency on the first day of his administration. Neither item was on his to-do list in the recorded remarks he put online Monday. . .

Noting that curtailing international trade could cause economic chaos, many analysts have been skeptical about how committed the president-elect is to the populist and protectionist agenda that helped him defeat former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The omission in this week's message leaves open the question of how exactly Trump intends to shift manufacturing from overseas into the United States -- a pledge he repeated often on the stump."

Read the Washington Post, Donald Trump left two key promises to voters off his to-do list

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Trump's Big CON: You've Been Scammed

"While we’re still analyzing the election results and debating the importance of different factors to the final outcome, everyone agrees that white working class voters played a key part in Donald Trump’s victory, in some cases by switching their votes and in some cases by turning out when they had been nonvoters before.

And now that he’s about to take office, he’s ready to deliver on what he promised them, right? Well, maybe not so much . . .

[T]he Trump administration and congressional Republicans are getting ready to move on their highest priorities, cutting taxes for the wealthy, scrapping oversight on Wall Street, and lightening regulations on big corporations.

Imagine you’re one of those folks who went to Trump rallies and thrilled to his promises to take America back from the establishment, who felt your heart stir as he promised to torture prisoners, who got your 'Trump That Bitch' T-shirt, who was overjoyed to finally have a candidate who tells it like it is. What are you thinking as you watch this?

If you have any sense, you’re coming to the realization that it was all a scam. You got played. While you were chanting 'Lock her up!' he was laughing at you for being so gullible. While you were dreaming about how you’d have an advocate in the Oval Office, he was dreaming about how he could use it to make himself richer. He hasn’t even taken office yet and everything he told you is already being revealed as a lie. . .

So what are we left with? What remains is Trump’s erratic whims, his boundless greed, and the core of Republican policies Congress will pursue, which are most definitely not geared toward the interests of working class whites. He can gut environmental regulations, but that doesn’t mean millions of people are going to head back to the coal mines — it was market forces more than anything else that led to coal’s decline. He can renegotiate trade deals, but that doesn’t mean that the labor-intensive factory jobs are coming back. And by the way, the high wages, good benefits, and job security those jobs used to offer? That was thanks to labor unions, which Republicans are now going to try to destroy once and for all.

Had Hillary Clinton won the election, the white working class might have gotten some tangible benefits — a higher minimum wage, overtime pay, paid family and medical leave, more secure health insurance, and so on. Trump and the Republicans oppose all that. So what did the white working class actually get? They got the election itself. They got to give a big middle finger to the establishment, to the coastal elites, to immigrants, to feminists, to college students, to popular culture, to political correctness, to every person and impersonal force they see arrayed against them. And that was it. . .

[M]aybe Trump will find a way to actually improve the lives of working class voters. That’s theoretically possible, but absolutely nothing he has done or said so far suggests that he has any idea how to do it, or even the inclination. So he may try to keep the fires of hatred, resentment, and fear burning, in the hopes that people forget that he hasn’t given them the practical things he said he would."

Read the Washington Post, How long before the white working class realizes Trump was just scamming them?

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Trump's Big CON: Trump 'University'

"In a complete turnaround from his previous position, President-elect Donald Trump is nearing a settlement of the fraud cases brought in New York and California involving his now defunct for-profit Trump University, the Daily News has learned.

Under the emerging deal being negotiated by Trump's lawyers, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the law firm that brought a class action lawsuit regarding Trump University in California, the president-elect will agree to pay between $20 million and $25 million to settle the matter, a source with knowledge of the situation said."

Read the New York Daily News, Donald Trump nearing settlement in Trump University fraud case

Trump needs to settle before the trial exposes him as the CON man he truly is.

Trump's Make America Hate Again!

UPDATE III:  Read these Washington Post articles:

Video shows Pennsylvania teenagers celebrating, shouting ‘white power’ after Trump win

This Indiana church was defaced with ‘HEIL TRUMP’ graffiti — and is keeping it,

White Texas teens chant ‘build that wall’ at Hispanics during high school volleyball match,

‘I voted for Trump! You lost!’: White Starbucks customer accuses barista of ‘discrimination’,

A hiker wore a bandanna for sun protection. Then she found an anti-Muslim note on her car., and

Alabama officer fired over racist meme calling Michelle Obama ‘fluent in ghetto’.

UPDATE II:  "Trump has vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country and to force deportation of Mexicans. He has ridiculed the disabled. He has accepted without criticism the enthusiastic support of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups that were previously on the fringes of society. He has invoked standard anti-Semitic tropes in his political advertising. And he has made clear that he believes grabbing and groping women is appropriate behavior."

Read the Washington Post, ‘Political correctness’ has become a codeword for hate

UPDATE: Read the Washington Post, Japanese American internment is ‘precedent’ for national Muslim registry, prominent Trump backer says and A Tenn. jail official called the KKK ‘more American’ than Obama. Now he’s out of a job.

Read these Washington Post articles:


Is Trump’s new chief strategist a racist? Critics say so.,

A Baylor student was shoved and called the n-word. This is how the school responded.,

Police officer who drove with Confederate flag at ‘Love Trumps Hate’ rally resigns,

Restaurant denies free Veterans Day meal to black veteran after man in Trump shirt accuses him of lying,

A man in KKK robes waved a Trump flag at a bonfire in Connecticut, police say,

‘Ape in heels’: W.Va. mayor resigns amid controversy over racist comments about Michelle Obama,

‘Why white women shouldn’t date black men’ fliers discovered at Southern Methodist University.


Friday, November 18, 2016

Trump's Big CON: He Stops Nothing

"President-elect Donald Trump claimed credit on Thursday for keeping a Ford plant in Kentucky from moving to Mexico. But the company never planned to move the entire plant, only one of its production lines.

Ford has never announced plans to move to Mexico either its Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, which produces the Lincoln Navigator, or the Louisville Assembly Plant, which produces the Lincoln MKC and the Ford Escape."

Read the Washington Post, Trump just took credit for stopping Ford from moving a plant to Mexico. But it wasn’t planning to.

Trump's next feat of narcissistic vainglory: sunrise!

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Trump's Big CON: He Will Continue Obama's Immigration Plan

Trump plans regarding undocumented immigrants is not all that different from Obama's.

Read the Washington Post, This is pretty awkward for people who criticize Donald Trump’s immigration plans

Friday, November 11, 2016

A 2009 Told Ya So: Remortgage America

Remember in 2009 I promoted an economic stimulus program like Remortgage America.

Read the Washington Post, How President Obama might have stopped Donald Trump.

UNBELIEVABLE!!! (Was It a 'Yuge' CON Job By The Donald?)

UPDATE VIII:  "An organizational chart of Trump’s transition team shows it to be crawling with corporate lobbyists, representing such clients as Altria, Visa, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Verizon, HSBC, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and Duke Energy. And K Street is positively salivating over all the new opportunities they’ll have to deliver goodies to their clients in the Trump era. . .

The answer is, anyone who was paying attention. Look at the people Trump is considering for his Cabinet, and you won’t find any outside-the-box thinkers burning to work for the little guy. It’s a collection of Republican politicians and corporate plutocrats — not much different from who you’d find in any Republican administration.

And it isn’t just personnel. What are the priorities Trump and the Republican Congress will be pursuing right out of the gate?

[Trump will cut taxes for the wealthy, gut regulations, and destroy programs for poor and middle class Americans, and in doing so] Trump is going to be little different from any other Republican president . . .

But one thing it will not be is a threat to the establishment, or the system, or whatever you want to call it. The wealthy and powerful will have more wealth and power when he’s done, not less. There’s a lot that Trump will upend, but if you’re a little guy who thinks Trump was going to upend things on your behalf or in order to serve your interests, guess what: you got suckered."

Read the Washington Post, If you voted for Trump because he’s ‘anti-establishment,’ guess what: You got conned.

UPDATE VII:  First it was the promise to balance the budget, then the ban on Muslims, now Trump is reneging on trade.

Read the Washington Post, A Trump policy adviser is already walking back tough talk on trade.

Trump's election may be the world's biggest CON.

UPDATE VI:  Read the Washington Post, Why Donald Trump can’t govern like a traditional Republican.

Read also, the Washington Post, Is there a parallel between Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

UPDATE V:  "I retain faith in another powerful tool: democracy. By which I mean democracy as defined by H.L. Mencken: 'the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.'" (Emphasis added.)

Read the Washington Post, Americans have voted for Trumpism. Let them have it.

UPDATE IV:  That didn't take long, the election results are not even official and the Republi-CON are already changing their 8-year old tune on the evil of federal budget deficits and government debt, as well as banning Muslims.

"Over the last eight years, the Republican establishment has repeatedly excoriated President Obama for plans that don't immediately balance the budget.

Yet Trump's proposals -- which include an unprecedented $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan over 10 years and trillions more in tax cuts -- would grow the debt far more than under current law."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans look like they could change their tune on debt under a President Trump.

Read also Daily Mail, Has Trump dropped the Muslim ban already? Statement on controversial policy disappears from website shortly after election.

The Republi-CON party is a CON job!

UPDATE III:  As I said earlier, when I initially supported The Donald, I'm still open to the possibility that The Donald is Trump-Brilliant (© NoBullU.com)!!!!

The Donald didn't get & remain rich believing the $@#% he says.

It is possible that his campaign was all a CON job to get elected, that The Donald brilliantly used  Republicans' fears, anger & hatred to win their votes. 

Remember, he is no social conservative, and many of his economic ideas are  heresy to traditional Republi-CON orthodoxy.

("In a brief victory speech early Wednesday morning, Donald Trump devoted only a few words to his specific priorities for policymaking in the next administration. At the top of the agenda was a new investment in infrastructure.

'We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,' the president-elect said after making a few introductory remarks. 'We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.'

Infrastructure is a major Democratic priority," something Obama has wanted for 8 years."

Read the Washington Post, Paul Ryan might not be happy about the first item on the agenda in Trump’s victory speech.)

Trump hates failure, and doing the things he promised in the campaign would make him a big FAILURE.

And if he goes along with the Republi-CON party orthodoxy, his supporters will realize they have been conned and will turn on him, making him a big FAILURE.

So did The Donald know that it was impossible to talk reason to Republi-CONs, so he used their fantasies and delusions to control them and win their votes?

And now that he has been elected, will he return to being the brilliant negotiating pragmatic moderate he has always been, in it for nothing more than the challenge of succeeding? "Trump has no clear ideology – only a belief in his own ability to solve problems. He could surprise a lot of people by being a pragmatist who cuts deals with fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer, to the great chagrin of his base."

The Donald's fear of failure will limit his stupidity, his success will be the country's success.

The Donald may be Trump-Brilliant (© NoBullU.com)!!!!

So it is ironic isn't it, "Trump's candidacy was premised on the idea that everyone — politicians, reporters, corporations — is lying to you, and lying to you to to feather their own nests."

Yet The Donald's only way to avoid failure is to be a liar also.

UPDATE II:  Ok, climb off the ledge.  It will get better.

President Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) & his delusional supporters can't avoid reality forever. (BTW, not all Trump voters are delusional, some just wanted to shakeup DC, and Clinton wasn't the candidate to do that.)

As I have said many time before, call the Republi-CON bluff.

First, balance the budget, NOW!

This has been a Republi-CON fantasy for years. But Obama knew better, he would have taken the blame for the ensuing economic collapse. It can't be done without doing substantial harm to the economy. The people who will be hurt the worst live in red states. (FYI, 44% of Louisiana's state budget is funded by various federal government programs.)

Next, in the bill to repeal Obamacare (which was originally a Republi-CON idea), include a provision that ends all federal government funding of health care.

Currently, about half of all health care spending is paid for by the federal government, probably more in red state. Individual health care is not a federal government responsibility, but federal law requires treatment. Let the states take care of people who are not responsible enough to get health care insurance. Soon people will be dying in the streets, many in red states. (Read my many posts that try to explain Obamacare.)

These are just two ideas that might wake up the American people. Don't let Trump abandon his impossible and unwise campaign statements and lies.  There can be no excuses, Republi-CONs own government — both houses and the presidency.

Triple dog-dare Trump and his Republi-CON supporters to fulfill his many wild promises NOW: build the wall and make Mexico pay for it, abandon NATO, deport foreigners, put Muslims in internment camps, cancel trade agreements and engage in trade wars with China and others, start jailing his political rivals and cracking down on the free press, abandon our allies and encourage them to get nuclear weapons of their own, and more.

If done right, crushing Republi-CON delusions these next four years could be fun!

Remember: "the voters will have the opportunity for more 'change' elections in 2018 and 2020."

UPDATE:  Remember, Trump is a fraud.

"Donald Trump ran against himself and won. The Manhattan billionaire who for decades boasted of his playboy lifestyle, stiffed contractors and vendors, hired illegal immigrants, eschewed churchgoing, embraced liberal causes, and counted Hillary and Bill Clinton as friends and allies pulled off one of the most brazen pivots in American history, selling himself to American voters as a populist hero who understood their frustrations and guaranteed a blizzard of wins. . .

Trump called himself a 'blue-collar billionaire,' and although he had lived a fairly isolated life, working and sleeping in Trump Tower, with no close friends and few trusted advisers, he believed that he had so completely won the hearts of many Americans that, as he put it, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.' . .

Trump believed that through creative use of media, he could build an image that would inspire ordinary people to want to be like him. He believed that if he crafted that image well enough, he could become rich and powerful and ultimately rise to the highest office in the land. On Tuesday, he reached that final step in his half-century-long ascent.

What he will do with it, even he does not know. Asked earlier this year if he has spent much time preparing to actually be president, Trump admitted that his focus had been solely on the campaign. “I’m all about the hunt and the chase,” he said. 'When I get something I really wanted, I sometimes lose interest in it.'"

Read the Washington Post, How Donald Trump broke the old rules of politics — and won the White House.

So play the CON man's game against him, force people to remember who they elected.

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series & Franken-Trump/Trumpenstein (© NoBullU.com) was elected president.


Monday, November 7, 2016

Soon We Shall Know Ourselves

UPDATE: "I’m going to attempt to demonstrate this with a chart — it is below — that, I believe, objectively captures the sum total of Trump’s arguments, and why those arguments, taken on their own terms, compellingly demand a vote against him.

At the heart of Trump’s case for the presidency lies two components. The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.

But Trump’s diagnosis runs deeper than that. His argument is not simply that elites are ripping you off from above while enabling those subgroups to rip you off and threaten you from below. Rather, the truly pernicious component of Trump’s argument is that our institutions and our democracy have themselves grown so hopelessly corrupted and compromised that they are no longer even capable of arresting and turning around that decline via conventional democratic processes. The only outcome that can change this state of affairs is electing him president. Any other result would only confirm that our system has been so corrupted that it is fundamentally no longer capable of producing legitimate political outcomes.

Trump sometimes expresses this idea explicitly, and sometimes implicitly. But it is the thread that runs through everything he has been saying and promising for months . . ."

Read the Washington Post, A final plea: The case against Trump’s dangerous authoritarianism — in one chart, which includes this chart:


"Trump would be elected on the promise of fighting, rounding up, jailing or humbling any number of personal and political opponents. Take away this appeal, and there is nothing left but grasping, pathetic vanity. . .

The undercurrents of economic anxiety and cultural disorientation that Trump exploits are real, deserving both attention and sympathy. But Trump has organized these resentments with an unprecedented message: The United States is weak and broken, a hell of crime, terrorism and expanding misery, beset from within and without, and now in need of a strong hand — his strong hand — to turn things around.

The single most frightening, anti-democratic phrase of modern presidential history came in Trump’s convention speech: 'I alone can fix it.' A Trump victory would be a mandate for authoritarian politics. . . a Trump administration would be a concession to the idea that America needs a little more China, a little more Russia, a little more 'so let it be written, so let it be done' in its executive branch. . .

Every constitutional conservative should be revolted. Those who are complicit have adopted a particularly dangerous form of power-loving hypocrisy. . .

It is almost beyond belief that Americans should bless and normalize Trump’s appeal. Normalize vindictiveness and prejudice. Normalize bragging about sexual assault and the objectification of women. Normalize conspiracy theories and the abandonment of reason. Normalize contempt for the vulnerable, including disabled people and refugees fleeing oppression. Normalize a political tone that dehumanizes opponents and excuses violence. Normalize an appeal to white identity in a nation where racial discord and conflict are always close to the surface. Normalize every shouted epithet, every cruel ethnic and religious stereotype, every act of bullying in the cause of American 'greatness.'"

Read the Washington Post, One final election plea, on the behalf of U.S. ideals.

Read also 1 Corinthians 13:12.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Countdown to Birther Fools Day 2016

UPDATE III:  It is just days before the election. What better time to release those 'universe-shattering' revelations.

It would guarantee a Trump election!

But don't hold your breath, it was all a CON job!!!



I triple dog-dare the Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang to prove me wrong.

UPDATE II:  We are fast approaching 1,000 days (December 26, 2016) since the First Birther Fool's Day.  The election is fast approaching, and Arpaio is being prosecuted for criminal contempt.

And still no 'universe-shattering' revelations.

When will the so-called Pastor admit he was lying? When will 'Gallups' gullibles' realized it was a con job?

UPDATE: To Gallups' gullibles:  Happy Birther Fool's Day 2016!




Another year, another Birther Fool's Day.


On Friday, March 11, 2016, we learned that Pastor Gullible-Gallups got a cute little Special Deputy badge, then got to look at the binders, with dividers, and was told about the "international forensic analytical laboratory" report, which he can't disclose because he's now a "Special Deputy".

Really, is there anyone who still believes anything Arpaio, Zullo and Gullible-Gallups said?  Only fools!

Remember, how much time has past since the 2014 promised 'universe-shattering' revelations:


That sound you hear is the growing laughter at the Birther delusions.

Anyone who gave money to these bozos should sue!  (I think Zullo and Gullible-Gallups are stringing people along until the statute of limitations on fraud has expired.)

P.S.

Birther Fool's Day was first celebrated in 2014 on the first day after the month that the universe 'shattered', as promised by the "Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang" to 'Gallups' gullibles' on 'fellatio Friday' in mid-December 2013 (the 'universe-shattering' twist was being promoted elsewhere in late November).

It is no coincidence that Birther Fool's Day is April 1st.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Republi-CON Racism and Sexism

There’s no doubt that if she becomes president Clinton is going to get a lot of sexist vitriol spewed her way. But the comparison with how race has functioned during the Obama presidency is an important one as we consider how it will function and what the effects might be. . .

[L]et’s think about the purposes race has served during the Obama presidency and how things might be different if Clinton were president. First, birtherism was always a way of declaring Obama’s presidency inherently illegitimate. An African-American could not possibly be the president; if he got elected, the whole thing must have been a fraud because he is an alien. Conservatives will have a harder time making a similar argument about Clinton based on her identity, though they may try to say that the 2016 election was stolen, and there are ways they’ll treat her presidency as illegitimate even if they don’t call it that.

But race was also the organizing theme for much of the anger and resentment directed at Obama. If you’ve been a consumer of conservative talk radio or Fox News over the last eight years, you know how often right-wing complaints about Obama are cast in racial terms. It was only six months into his presidency that Glenn Beck proclaimed that Obama had 'a deep-seated hatred for white people.' Whatever policy initiative Obama was pursuing at a given moment was cast as 'reparations,' by which he was supposedly stealing money from hard-working white people to give it to undeserving black people in an attempt at exacting racial vengeance. It’s no accident that at the end of his term you saw the Republican Party nominate a white nationalist candidate essentially promising to restore the old order.

That’s about race, but it’s also about gender. The people who make up the core of Trump’s support are unhappy about the social changes that have displaced them from their position atop the social hierarchy. That loss of privilege, the idea that as a white man you’re no longer granted respect and deference — and even worse, people seem to be constantly telling you you’re being insufficiently respectful of those you consider your lessers — is for many people painful and disorienting.

For many of those voters, no one embodies that change and the threat it represents more than Hillary Clinton. . . If you’re wondering why conservative evangelicals are so strongly behind Trump despite his multiple divorces, adultery, generally libertine history and lack of religiosity, the answer is that Trump is promising a return to the patriarchal order of the past, where men will be restored to their place of honor and uppity women like Hillary Clinton will get the smack down they deserve.

Race and gender are both integral parts of the alienation many (especially older) conservative men feel. As Bill O’Reilly says, 'If you’re a Christian or a white man in the U.S.A., it’s open season on you.' But it’s easy to see how the relative emphasis on race during the Obama years could be turned just 45 degrees, so that the grievance industry run by people like O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh puts more of its focus on gender complaints than racial complaints.

While during the Obama years they were always on the lookout for anecdotes that could be spun into sweeping tales of the oppression of whites for which Obama was at fault, the Clinton years might feature a similar emphasis on gender, as Drudge and Limbaugh and Fox promote one story of oppressed males after another to their audiences, for whom this becomes a framework to understand whatever is going wrong in their lives. . .

[T]heir base will be fed a daily diet of misogynistic bile directed at the president, and “reaching out” will not be what that base is interested in. And that will leave them in the same quandary they’re in now.

Read the Washington Post, If Clinton wins, get ready for an outbreak of conservative male grievance.