Trump's Big CON: Eventually Truth Trumps the Lies

"It could not be more fitting that only 24 hours after scrapping protections for 800,000 young immigrants brought here illegally as children, President Trump is set to deliver a big speech extolling the need to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. The juxtaposition captures the massive lie at the very heart of Trumpism as perfectly as anyone could ask for.

Two of Trump’s new tweets neatly bracket this big lie. In one tweet, Trump announced he will give a speech today in North Dakota calling for “tax reform and tax cuts,” arguing that “we are the highest taxed nation in the world.” This is itself a repeatedly debunked falsehood that Trump employs to push an agenda in tune with the trickle-down GOP economic orthodoxy he used as a foil during a campaign in which he portrayed himself as an economic populist.

In the other tweet, Trump asserted that Congress has six months to act to protect the “dreamers” via legislation and hinted that if Congress fails, he might renew the executive protections he just rescinded. But Trump has not told us what legislation along these lines he’d be willing to sign. There’s a reason for all this vagueness: Trump cannot come out squarely for protecting the dreamers, because that would reveal another side of his alleged economic populism — the demagoguing about immigrants threatening U.S. workers — to be hollow. . .

[L]et’s be clear on what this conflict is really about. Trump isn’t wrestling with a dilemma made difficult by two valid competing moral imperatives. He’s torn between (on one side) the reality of what it actually means to scrap protections for hundreds of thousands of people who know no other country, are thoroughly American, and just want to contribute positively to American life, and (on the other) the need to continue propping up his campaign lies about how deporting these people will boost American workers. The conflict is between the inescapably awful truth about the real life consequences of ending DACA, and the imagined need to continue making empty gestures to his core supporters."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is exposing the big lie at the core of Trumpism.

Trump's Big CON: (Said With Surprise -->) OMG! He's a CON Man After All!

UPDATE V:  "Chuck and Nancy and Donald and Ivanka seemed to thoroughly enjoy their meeting at the White House the other day. Mitch and Paul, not so much. . .

One thing that should be blindingly obvious by now is that political loyalty, for the president, is a one-way street. Yes, McConnell and Ryan embarrassed themselves and squandered precious political capital in a long, fruitless attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Yes, the Republican leaders have held their tongues time and again when Trump has manifested his unfitness for office. Yes, they have pretended not to notice the glaring conflicts of interest between Trump’s private business affairs and his public responsibilities.

Still, there was something brazen about the way events unfolded Wednesday. First, Ryan tells reporters that a short-term, three-month extension on the debt ceiling, tied to relief funds for Hurricane Harvey — an idea supported by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — was “ridiculous and disgraceful.” Then, in the Oval Office meeting, Trump stuns everyone by endorsing the Schumer-Pelosi plan — and agrees to work with the Democrats on repealing the debt ceiling altogether, according to The Post. Later, on Air Force One, Trump goes on about what a productive meeting he had with “Chuck and Nancy,” not bothering to mention the GOP congressional leaders by name. Ouch. . .

Ryan and McConnell have no one to blame but themselves.

Trump is many things, but he is not, nor has he ever been, a committed Republican. He seized control of the party in a hostile takeover. His campaign positions on trade, health care, entitlements and other issues bore no resemblance to GOP orthodoxy. He has instincts — some of them odious, from what we can intuit about his views on race and culture — but his worldview is transactional and situational, not ideological. . .

[After Congressional failures on Obamacare and DACA, w]hat Trump clearly has already revisited is his belief in the ability of the conservative GOP congressional majorities to get anything meaningful done. He seems to be at least flirting with the idea of working instead with Democrats and GOP moderates — working not with but around the House and Senate leadership.

I just hope Schumer and Pelosi know not to trust him the way Ryan and McConnell did."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s betrayal of the Republican leaders should surprise no one.

UPDATE IV:  "One of the most cynical quotations in history is also one of the most widely attributed. Let’s ponder the version associated with Groucho Marx: 'Sincerity is the key to success. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.'

From the moment Donald Trump opened his quest for the presidency, this idea has defined him and served as an organizing principle of his politics.

He presented himself as the guy who said whatever was on his mind, who didn’t talk like a politician, who didn’t care what others thought and who railed against “political correctness.”

In fact, just about everything that comes out of his mouth or appears on his Twitter feed is calculated for its political and dramatic effect. Trump is the exact opposite of what he tries to project: The thing he cares about is what others think of him. So he’ll adjust his views again and again to serve his ends as circumstances change. He’s not Mr.?Fearless. He’s Mr. Insecure.

Putting aside the catastrophe of his presidency, this approach has worked remarkably well for Trump. But when the input on which he bases his calculations is garbled or contradictory, he doesn’t know which way to go. Lacking any deep instincts or convictions, he tries to move in several directions at once, an awkward maneuver even for an especially gifted politician. In these situations, Trump offers us a glimpse behind the curtain, and we see there is nothing there.

This is the most straightforward explanation for the fiasco created by the president’s mean-spirited decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. . .

There is no strategic vision of what a Trump administration should look like because he doesn’t have any clear objectives of his own. On some days, he buys into the Sessions-Steve Bannon-Stephen Miller nationalist worldview. On others, he goes with his practical generals or his business-friendly Wall Street advisers. He doesn’t resolve the philosophical tensions because they don’t matter to him.

All this underscores what a waste this presidency is.

Read the Washington Post, Trump offers us a glimpse behind the curtain. There’s nothing there.

UPDATE III: "Donald Trump’s total lack of ideological moorings, combined with his nonexistent sense of responsibility to others (which, disconcertingly, comes packaged with an insatiable demand for loyalty to him), has long led Republicans and conservatives to fear he would eventually sell them out when the moment seemed opportune.

Judging by the noise out there this morning, they now apparently believe that the moment is upon them. . .

[But] a number of big issues that really matter right now, there are no indications of any meaningful change coming on Trump’s part.

It is true, as many have pointed out, that Trump may have handed Democrats more leverage to play with in the next round of talks. . .

But what does this signal about the long-term direction of Trump’s actual governing policies and priorities, such as they are? The New York Times speculates that this might foreshadow 'a more sustained shift in strategy' in which Trump might “seek common cause” with Democrats 'on areas of mutual interest.'

Okay. But let’s go through the actual issues", including Obamacare, DACA, infrastructure spending and taxes.

 Read the Washington Post, Trump just sided with Pelosi and Schumer. Will he systematically sell out the GOP?

UPDATE II:  Remember when I asked "what might have been"? And asked again?

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s triangulation shows what might have been.

And now remember, deal with a man with no guiding principles at your own risk.

UPDATE:  "House Speaker Paul Ryan could not have been more clear.

After meeting with his Republican caucus Wednesday morning on the first day back from their long summer break, he declared at a news conference that Democrats’ call for a three-month extension of the government’s borrowing limit was “ridiculous.”

“That’s ridiculous and disgraceful, that they want to play politics with the debt ceiling at this moment,” he repeated. He called it “unworkable,” said it would jeopardize hurricane response and called out Democratic leaders by name for promoting what “I don’t think is a good idea.”

About an hour later, Ryan and other GOP leaders sat in the White House with President Trump, who told them he wants .?.?. a three-month increase of the debt ceiling, just as Democrats proposed.

Such chaos and confusion at the highest level of American government hadn’t been seen since, well, the day before."

Read the Washington Post, Nobody knows what Trump is doing. Not even Trump., which noted in the context of The Donald's flip-flops on DACA (but it could be almost any issue:

"But what does Trump support? . .

What does the president want? Nobody knows — not his advisers, not his fellow Republicans in Congress, and probably not Trump himself."

Not long after the election, I suggested people 'climb off the ledge, it will get better, Trump is a fraud, call the Republi-CON bluff, his delusional supporters can't avoid reality forever, he can't keep the con up forever'.

Many times I've noted that The Donald was a psycho-narcissistic con man.

And his weakness is his narcissism.

So is this really any surprise?

Read the Washington Post:

Trump sides with Democrats on fiscal issues, throwing Republican plans into chaos,

Trump didn’t solve the debt ceiling crisis. He just delayed it,

Trump’s deal with Democrats bewilders his biggest fans — House conservatives, and

Freedom Caucus leaders vent to Paul Ryan after talks with Steve Bannon.

And the icing on the CON job cake, and a reminder that no one should trust The Donald: "on Thursday morning, in an odd case of some pretty unfortunate timing, Trump's campaign launched an ad deriding Chuck and Nancy as 'career politicians' standing in Trump's way."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s new campaign ad features some truly unfortunate timing, which noted:

"By several accounts, he took the first deal Democrats put on the table for a short-term extension of the debt ceiling. . .

[And] apparently Trump's unpredictability is giving even his own ad-makers a tough time. With Trump, every alliance and adversarial relationship is subject to change at a moment's notice."

So how can he be so unpredictable, The Donald has no guiding principles, except flattery.

Trump's Big CON: Lacking Honesty, Empathy, and Ability, He Is Simply Not Presidential Material, CONt.

UPDATE II:  "[B]roadcast and cable producers know — and Trump knows deeply — that most Americans don’t really care that much about what they insist they care about. A few headlines will get most through the morning. Twitter and Facebook keep the curious plied with updates, and by day’s end, who really wants to plunge into tax reform?

It is true, nonetheless, that when Trump needs time to fidget with something that actually matters, he tosses a dead fish into the Dasani tank and waits for the media herdlings to begin their march toward the trough.

Temporarily spared the spotlight, Trump fluffs the thatched nest atop his head and invites his brain to hatch some very bad ideas. Thus, we seem to be on the brink of a nuclear confrontation with North Korea. Remember when we used to worry about Trump having his finger on the nuclear launch button? Square that. When the other antagonist is North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, the nightmare can’t be dismissed as the twisted hankie of the persistently worried.

Never have two less qualified 'leaders' been so endowed with such devastating power without the requisite impulse control upon which living civilizations depend. Not to mention that these two nuke hecklers are unmercifully coifed to resemble cartoon characters so that we, the soberly sane, are left to ponder our face-melting demise as a clown showdown between two renegade circus performers. . .

In July, Trump was typically eloquent in describing his approach to thwarting disaster:

“We’ll handle North Korea. We’ll be able to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything.”

Whew, that.

As further insult to reason, this isn’t even a conflict over something at least historically rational, such as the now nearly charming contest between communism and Americanism. No battle of wits, the U.S.-North Korea stare-down is more accurately a battle of nitwits who seem to think threatening nuclear holocaust and mutual destruction is a contest to see who has bigger hands.

No one would suggest that Trump is responsible for all the nail biting these past few months or that Kim’s missile and nuclear tests aren’t deadly serious. But Trump surely has exacerbated matters with his “fire and fury” rhetoric. The goading language of ultimatum, more than a bluffing tactic, is an inflammatory agent such that the possible moves inexorably toward the inevitable. U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the president’s toughest-talking Cabinet member, recently said: 'We have kicked the can down the road long enough. There is no more road left.'

Perhaps Kim might argue the same. Meanwhile, a can-kicking strategy (i.e., containment and diplomacy) seems a not-irrational substitute for mutual annihilation. Have we reached a point of no return? Will the president of the United States fire Kim, or will he invent some new distraction (staffers: Watch your backs) while he becomes a stealth, wartime leader?"

Read the Washington Post, Have we reached a point of no return?

UPDATE:  "Trump kicked off September by threatening a trade war with China and South Korea and pushing to deport young people at a time when businesses are struggling to find enough workers to fill all the available jobs. . .

So far in Trump's presidency, his threats on trade just turned out to be hot air. He said he would pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Instead, his administration is renegotiating it. He talked repeatedly of putting tariffs on steel and aluminum imports this summer, but it was repeatedly put off and Trump now says it's behind several other major items on his agenda. The China rhetoric may turn out to be more of the same, but businesses are on edge amid news this weekend that Trump had instructed his senior staff to draft the documents that would end the U.S.-South Korean trade deal. . .

The U.S.-Korea trade deal was negotiated under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. It has bipartisan support because it's not just about economics, it's about containing North Korea and China's influence in Asia. If Trump cancels the deal now, it sends a message to South Korea to deepen its relationship with China. It also plays into North Korea's hands by causing a rift between South Korea and the United States. . .

Trump has been touting how well the economy is doing lately. Unemployment is at a 16-year low, the stock market is soaring, and growth hit 3 percent in period between April and June. In a very encouraging sign, even business investment was finally picking up a bit. But Trump is putting that momentum in jeopardy by angering business leaders yet again.

Read the Washington Post, What Trump is doing with DACA and trade could backfire badly.

"President Trump in three very different settings over the past few days reminded us how unsuited he is for the job. Increasingly, his presidency is defined by blatant lies, an empathy deficit and a frightful lack of ability to navigate through dire international crises. Each has been on display. . .

One is left, still, agog at Trump’s dishonesty, narcissism and inability to project the calmness and discipline we expect from a president. Those who thought he’d grow in office or who perpetually think he’s “pivoting” or “becoming presidential” have engaged in dangerous delusion. One wonders how long we can muddle on with a president this unsuitable without provoking a constitutional or international calamity."

Read the Washington Post, Something is seriously off about this president.

Trump's Big CON: The Son-in-Law's Ruinous Business Experience Will Make Him a Disastrous Government Leader

The Trump family "story" is that son-in-law Jared Kushner will be a  'great government leader because of his successful business experience'.

So , Kushner is “President Trump’s point man with the Chinese . . brokering a durable truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians. 'If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,' Trump said to the 36-year-old real estate scion, who has absolutely no background in diplomacy, from the stage of an inaugural party. . . [and] supervising the brand new Office of American Innovation, whose modest ambition is a full-scale reorganization of the federal government that makes it more efficient.”

(Did I miss anything?)

Turns out, Jared is a failure, just masquerading as a successful businessman.

Read Business Insider, Jared Kushner's real estate empire is reportedly in a difficult financial position.

How did such a stupid group get elected.

Trump's Big CON: Red State Hypocrisy, Courtesy of Harvey

UPDATE X:  "The bulk of the federal money to help Texas residents rebuild their lives and communities should come in the form of a loan — perhaps a long-term loan at a favorable interest rate, but definitely a loan.

Here is why: Texas is avowedly a low-tax state. There is no personal income tax. There is no corporate income tax (although there is a surrogate tax on corporate receipts). There is no state-level tax on estates or inheritances. Texas ranks No. 46 out of the 50 states in state and local tax burden per capita, according to recent data from the Tax Foundation. It ranks 43rd in state tax revenue per capita.

Texas wants and needs federal help to rebuild from Harvey, and the federal government should provide significant financial aid. But it is grossly unfair for Texas to accept funds from all of America’s taxpayers to allow it to continue its exceptionally low-taxed ways. Unless Texas is willing to bear a reasonable share of the Harvey costs through increased state and local taxes, then the rest of the United States would just be giving Texas a handout. Better for the federal government to offer Texas a 'hand-up' in the form of immediate cash support with the requirement that Texas generate tax revenue to repay that help."

Read the Washington Post, Low-tax Texas should pay its fair share of Harvey costs.

UPDATE IX:  Read the Washington Post, When a red state gets the blues, which reads in substantial part:

"The Republic of Texas believes in self-reliance and is suspicious of Washington sticking its big nose in your business. 'Government is not the answer. You are not doing anyone a favor by creating dependency, destroying individual responsibility.' So said Sen. Ted Cruz (R), though not last week. Sunday on Fox News, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Texas would need upward of $150 billion in federal aid for damage inflicted by Harvey. The stories out of Houston have all been about neighborliness and helping hands and people donating to relief funds, but you don’t raise $150?billion by holding bake sales. This is almost as much as the annual budget of the U.S. Army. I’m just saying.

I’m all in favor of pouring money into Texas, but I am a bleeding-heart liberal who favors single-payer health care. How is being struck by a hurricane so different from being hit by cancer? I’m only asking.

In Cruz’s run for president last year, he called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. He did not mention this last week. It would be hard to raise an extra $150?billion without the progressive income tax unless you could persuade Mexico to foot the bill.

Similarly, if a desert state such as Arizona expects the feds to solve its water shortage, as Sen. Jeff Flake (R) suggested recently, by guaranteeing Arizona first dibs on Lake Mead, this strikes me as a departure from conservative principles. Lake Mead, and Boulder Dam, which created it, were not built by Lake Mead Inc., but by the federal government. The residents of Phoenix decided freely to settle in an arid valley, and they have used federal water supplies to keep their lawns green. Why should we Minnesotans, who chose to live near water, subsidize golf courses on the desert? You like sunshine? Fine. Take responsibility for your decision and work out a deal with Perrier to keep yourselves hydrated. . .

Conservatives blanch at spending additional billions to subsidize health care for the needy, but a truckload of cash for Texas? No problem. It makes me think we Minnesotans should get a few billion in federal aid for recovery from the upcoming winter. It is going to be cold. This will cause damage to homes. Drive-in movie theaters and golf courses and marinas will suffer loss of revenue. We must salt the highways to prevent accidents, and the salt corrodes our cars. And then there is the mental anguish.

If Minnesota gets billions of dollars for winter recovery, then I am going to seriously consider becoming a conservative. As a philosophy of governing, conservatism is rather sketchy, but if it helps Minnesota, I am all in favor. I have my principles, but I can be bought, same as the rest of you."

UPDATE VIII:  Read also CBS News, Why is Houston so prone to major flooding?, which notes:

Houston is "relatively flat and is barely above sea level. Downtown is only about 50 feet above sea level, and there's only about a four-foot change between the highest and lowest parts of downtown. That means when rain falls, it has nowhere to go, and takes a long time to drain out. . .

Some experts also point to Houston's big building boom as a potential factor, in exacerbating the problem  Development decreased the amount of wetlands in the city by almost 50 percent over the last 25 years.

All that hard, impermeable pavement means there's less land to soak up rainfall after a major storm.

Combine all that with the fact Houston is only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. That puts it right in the path of slow-moving storms that can generate massive amounts of rainfall.

In fact, the number of downpours measuring at least 10 inches have doubled over the last 30 years."

UPDATE VII:  "In 1994, after the the Great Flood of 1993 in the upper Midwest, a study was issued.

“At the time, Houston ranked third (and surrounding Harris County fourth) in the nation in the number of repetitive-loss buildings, behind only Jefferson Parish, La., and New Orleans. It was too late to change policies in a way that would help New Orleans, which was already mostly built out — and mostly at or below sea level. But Houston and its adjacent areas, even with explosive growth and development underway, still had clear options to prevent future floods. They could conduct watershed planning and management. Officials could buy out or relocate the most endangered buildings, or put them on stilts, and could adopt higher building-elevation standards and stronger building codes. They could regulate the expansion of impervious areas in a way that would limit paving over pastures and wetlands to construct parking lots and endless subdivisions, and they could establish shoreline protections to reduce flood risks and costs going forward. This was the array of approaches needed to stay and hopefully reverse the growing costs of flooding. The nation’s floodplain organizations, at the same time, pleaded with city leaders to heed these warnings and act.

They didn’t. Houston did some buyouts, but repetitive losses continued to mount as development pushed along mostly unfettered. Over the past week, many news reports have highlighted long-ignored studies chronicling the steady encroachment on Houston-area bayou floodplains, and the paving and building over of pastures and wetlands that used to act as sponges absorbing and slowing runoff. At least 4,000 residential and commercial structures have been built within the identified 100-year floodplain since 2010, and, according to one Texas A&M University study, 30 percent of Harris County’s coastal prairie wetlands were paved over from 1992 to 2010. . . 

After the most damaging flood in U.S. history, we also need to fund accurate flood mapping for the entire nation. We need better maps out ahead of development, so people know how to build and won’t get caught with costly flood insurance premiums if maps are drawn after an area is developed. It would take an estimated $7.5 billion to map all the floodplains in the nation.

Congress should also reinstate the federal flood risk management standard President Trump recently revoked in an infrastructure executive order to assure a reasonable building standard for states and municipalities that use federal money to rebuild after disasters. This could be as simple as constructing most buildings one or two feet above the 100-year flood level (and two or three feet higher for critical facilities such as hospitals and police and fire stations). That way, taxpayers won’t have to pay to rebuild these facilities as often. Houston already required putting new buildings one foot above the 100-year flood level. Studies of Harvey’s rain may soon show that to be too low for the city’, which may instead want to consider the three-foot standard Dallas has in place might be worth considering. . .

[The government] should immediately focus on improving and streamlining voluntary buyouts and other mitigation options to help residents move out of harm’s way within reasonable time frames, especially after disasters, allowing communities to reform their land use in response to nature’s realities.

The nation has not been particularly good at learning from past floods, which have occurred with discouraging frequency. This time, we need to actually fix some of the problems. If we don’t, Americans facing some new devastation in the future will be looking back at Harvey and wondering why we didn’t act now."

Read the Washington Post, We already knew how to reduce damage from floods. We just didn’t do it.

UPDATE VI:  "Few places need the federal government right now more than Texas does, as it begins to recover from Hurricane Harvey. Yet there are few states where the federal government is viewed with more resentment, suspicion and scorn.

For Republicans, who dominate Texas government, anti-Washington sentiment is more than just a red-meat rhetorical flourish — it is a guiding principle.

Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican former state attorney general, once described a typical day in his old job as, 'I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.' His predecessor as governor, Rick Perry, wrote a book titled 'Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington.'

The sentiment is not limited to politicians. In June, the legislature of Texas Boys State — the mock-government exercise for high schoolers, run by the American Legion — voted overwhelmingly to secede from the union.

Now, though, it is Texas Republicans who will be crucial in securing, and helping to administer, what is likely to be one of the most ambitious and costly federal disaster-relief packages in American history, one that will almost certainly run to tens of billions of dollars.

There are few doubts that a Republican-dominated Congress will end up delivering aid to a battered state and key base of Republican power. But along with an outpouring of support, the process is raising eyebrows and drawing charges of hypocrisy.

What this means for Texas politics is difficult to say, at a time when rescue crews and volunteers are still plucking flood victims from their homes. But the new reality is already making itself felt.

Most notably, Senator Ted Cruz, one of Washington’s most ardent proponents of fiscal restraint, has suddenly taken on a new role, promising to lead the effort to secure a generous federal aid package.

In 2013, in a move his critics consider infamous, Mr. Cruz joined more than 20 of his Texas colleagues in Congress in voting against a $50.5 billion relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy, saying that the bill was larded with pork projects unrelated to rebuilding the battered Northeast coast. (The bill passed regardless.)

Last week, Mr. Cruz was all over the Texas flood zone, promising that Congress would provide 'very significant resources for the people who have been damaged by this terrible storm.'"

Read The New York Times, In Texas, Distrust of Washington Collides With Need for Federal Aid.

UPDATE V: Oh woe is me, the chemical plant exploded.  How did that happen?

"The French company that says its Houston-area chemical plant is spewing 'noxious' smoke — and may explode — successfully pressed federal regulators to delay new regulations designed to improve safety procedures at chemical plants, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times. The rules, which were set to go into effect this year, were halted by the Trump administration after a furious lobbying campaign by plant owner Arkema and its affiliated trade association, the American Chemistry Council, which represents a chemical industry that has poured tens of millions of dollars into federal elections.

The effort to stop the chemical plant safety rules was backed by top Texas Republican lawmakers, who have received big campaign donations from chemical industry donors."

Read the IBTimes, Texas Republicans Helped Chemical Plant That Exploded Lobby Against Safety Rules.

UPDATE IV:  "[W]e are reminded that some politicians think government is great when it helps their own constituents and wasteful if it helps anyone else.

We also regularly assert that government is better when it prevents problems than when it focuses primarily on cleaning up after the fact. But when environmentalists suggest that development can be carried out in more sustainable ways or that climate change is worth dealing with, they are mocked as 'anti-business' or 'crisis-mongers.' Then a crisis comes, and we wonder why the politicians were so shortsighted. . .

[I]t is entirely appropriate to call out the hypocrisy of Texas conservatives who voted against assistance for the victims of Superstorm Sandy in New York and New Jersey but are now asking for federal help on behalf of their folks. They broke this basic rule of solidarity in the name of an ideology that, when the chips are down, they don’t really believe in. Of course we should help all the areas devastated by Harvey. I’d just appreciate hearing our Texas conservative friends, beginning with Sen. Ted Cruz, admit they were wrong.

Call me a liberal (I won’t mind), but I do believe in using government’s taxing powers reasonably to direct help toward people who really need it, and in regulations to protect the environment and prevent catastrophe. . .

We can certainly debate where government compassion becomes overreach. Unfortunately, we’re not anywhere close to such a measured and civilized dialogue."

Read the Washington Post, A hurricane of conservative hypocrisy.

UPDATE III:  When Repebli-CONs demand less government, less taxes, more personal freedom, they claim that charities and churches can help people in need.

Ask Houston how that worked out for them.

Read Market Watch, Joel Osteen, criticized for closing his Houston megachurch to Harvey victims, relents.

UPDATE II:  "As he toured rising floodwater in Texas on Tuesday, President Trump effusively praised his administration’s Hurricane Harvey response, an effort he began touting on Twitter last weekend even before the storm made landfall.

But not too long ago, the president proposed a budget calling for cuts to some of the federal government’s most consequential efforts to prepare states and local communities and help them recover from catastrophic events such as Harvey. . .

The proposed cuts would include programs run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose new administrator was praised by Trump in a tweet last weekend for “doing a great job”; the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which helps rebuild homes, parks, hospitals and community centers; the National Weather Service, which forecasts extreme storms; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research and community engagement help coastal residents prepare for disaster."

Read the Washington Post, Trump would slash disaster funding to the very agencies he’s praising for Harvey response.

UPDATE:  "Whenever an extraordinary event such as Hurricane Harvey occurs, there will be those who implore us not to “politicize” it. But this impulse is exactly wrong, because politics is the process we use to decide how we will collectively approach challenges and problems.

So there’s never been a better time to ask how our government responds to natural disasters, and how the two parties react when confronted with immediate public demands for help.

Today, many people — both Democrats and Republicans from the Northeast — have noticed that Republican politicians in Texas are asking for immediate federal help for their constituents in the Houston area, yet five years ago when Hurricane Sandy battered the Northeast, those very same Republicans were unwilling to help. . .

There are some kinds of hypocrisy both Democrats and Republicans engage in, but this isn’t one of them. When there’s a natural or human-made disaster and people are crying out for aid, virtually all Democrats say, 'The government should help.' Lots of Republicans, on the other hand, say, 'Is this happening to our people? If so, then yes, the government should help. If not, screw ’em.' . .

[W]when the final vote comes, nearly all Democrats will be in favor of it, because they think that the government should help its citizens, even if most of those particular citizens in this case live in a red state. “Republicans must be ready to join Democrats in passing a timely relief bill that makes all necessary resources available through emergency spending,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) yesterday.

Of course, the two parties have different ideas about the proper scope of government. But only one party is being consistent in how it applies its philosophy. Whatever else you might say about Democrats, they don’t play into the juvenile belief so many Americans have that government should be as small and light as possible, stepping gingerly aside as we go about our lives, and yet it should also solve all our significant problems. Republicans appear to believe that disaster relief is one of the important things government should do — but it depends on where the disaster hits and which Americans are affected.

That’s more than just hypocrisy. And it’s not something both sides are guilty of."

Read the Washington Post, On disaster relief, Republicans go beyond hypocrisy.

Repebli-CONs are always demanding less government, less taxes, more personal freedom, except when they are not.

Read the Washington Post, Cost of cleaning up Harvey will bring new test of governance for Trump and GOP, which noted:

"After Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy “some prominent Republicans resisting emergency aid packages because of concerns about what it would mean for the federal budget. . .

Directing emergency funds to areas hit by natural disasters had traditionally been quick bipartisan exercises, but that changed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

That evolution has tracked alongside growing attention to federal spending and budget deficits by conservative Republicans, who have increasingly demanded that emergency aid spending be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget.

That push had its genesis in 'Operation Offset' — a 2005 proposal from the Republican Study Committee, a group of House conservatives, to identify spending cuts that would compensate for the approximately $200 billion expected for Hurricane Katrina relief — including cutting farm subsidies, Amtrak funding and postponing the Medicare prescription-drug bill Republicans had approved two years earlier.

The RSC’s chairman at the time was Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, who is now the vice president. 'We simply can’t allow a catastrophe of nature to become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren,' Pence said at the time. . .

Republican opposition to approving emergency disaster funds without other cuts to offset the new money has persisted.

By the time Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey and New York in 2012, offsetting any new spending had become a key tenet for most Republicans, so when President Barack Obama pushed for a $60 billion package of federal aid, it sparked more than three months of partisan sparring — a delay that left Democrats and northeastern Republicans fuming while the remainder of the GOP fulminated against the threat of a growing national debt and the inclusion of spending they deemed extraneous in the aid package. . .

An amendment offered by Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) that would have offset some of the relief funding by instituting an across-the-board cut in other federal spending failed but won support of 157 of 233 House Republicans. The final package passed the House despite the opposition of 179 Republicans in the House and 36 in the Senate.

Texas’s Republican senators opposed the Sandy relief bill, arguing that it still included extraneous spending.

Mulvaney is now the White House budget director.

Raw emotions from that episode persist. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), who fought hard to secure funds after Sandy, said over the weekend that he would support Harvey relief funds even though Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tried to block the same type of emergency money for his state in recent years.

'Ted Cruz & Texas cohorts voted vs NY/N.J. aid after Sandy but I’ll vote 4 Harvey aid. NY wont abandon Texas,' King tweeted. '1 bad turn doesn't deserve another.'"

Trump's Big CON: "We’ll Have So Much Winning, You’ll Get Bored With Winning”

UPDATE:  "President Trump has made the economy so much better that it has added 186,000 fewer jobs in his first seven months than it did in President Barack Obama’s last seven months. . .

It shouldn’t be surprising that the economy isn’t doing any better under Trump, since Trump really hasn’t done anything to make it better. . .

The economy, then, is still just chugging along as it has been for the last six years now. Nothing has changed. . .

But in any case, it is fitting that Trump has tried to take credit for the same economy he said was a disaster as recently as nine months ago. That’s just him running the government like a business — at least his own. After his casinos went bankrupt in the early 1990s, you see, Trump figured out that it was a lot easier to let other people put his name on things they’d built rather than do so himself. (Well, that and a lot of Wall Street banks wouldn’t lend to him anymore). This is no different. Trump is just putting his name on a recovery that Obama put in place with his stimulus and his Federal Reserve picks.

I guess making America great again means keeping things like they were under Obama."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s economy is doing (slightly) worse than Obama’s.

From Axios, The incredible shrinking president:

"The 'most powerful man in the world' is suddenly looking mighty powerless:

Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are going their own way on tax reform. Hill sources believe his original targets, including a 15% corporate rate, are dead.

SecDef Mattis didn't immediately embrace his full ban on transgender troops.

His Justice Department won't drop the Russia probe.

Courts won't allow his full Muslim ban.

Mexico won't pay for his wall.

Congress won't pay for his wall.

The Senate won't pass his promised health-care reform.

Gary Cohn and Sec State Tillerson won't tolerate his Charlottesville response.

North Korea won't heed his warnings.

China doesn't fear his trade threats.

CEOs won't sit on his councils.

Mexico and Canada won't bend to his will on NAFTA. . .

[And] crises sprouting all around:

An epic flood that will cost taxpayers billions in damages and consume Congress when it returns.

North Korea crossing new lines, rattling markets.

Racial tensions boiling.

Rising fear of a government shutdown, at the end of September or December.

Increasing pessimism in a once-buoyant business community.

Daily clues emerging of an expansive, ominous Mueller investigation."

Trump's Big CON: 'I'll End DACA, Kick Out Undocumented Immigrants, and Build a Wall (And Make Mexico Pay For It)'

UPDATE III:  The cavalier way that The Donald has handled the issue of immigration reform shows what an evil person he is.

Read the Washington Post, Seven ways of looking at Trump’s DACA decision, which notes that:

It is beyond cruel that the government made a promise to 'dreamers,' who had to provide information in order to qualify, and now DHS will be able to use that information against them,

Ending DACA is deeply unpopular with the American people,

The business community was pretty firmly opposed to the announcement, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce demanding a solution and tech companies threatening legal action,

Before the announcement Trump himself was not exactly sure what he is doing, and "realized that he had gotten himself into a politically untenable position",

Even some immigrant hardliners seem to be uncomfortable with this change in policy.

Then he flip-flopped, tweeting "Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can't, I will revisit this issue!",

The "DACA repeal echoed Trump’s health-care fail".

"DACA, like Obamacare, has some issues. Trump’s attempted 'fix' of these problems, however, is catastrophic. Politically, Trump has managed to alienate the business community and the American people.

All in all, just another day in the beclowning of the executive branch of the federal government."

By now it should be clear, The Donald is just incapable of being a real leader.

UPDATE II:  I agree it's Congresses responsibility, which they abdicated to avoid blame.

But a real leader would have made the announcement and explained what s/he would do.

Not The Donald.

Read the Washington Post:

And Trump didn’t have the nerve to make the announcement himself, and

Trump just handed the fate of ‘dreamers’ over to an extraordinarily dysfunctional Congress.

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post:

President Trump said he’d ‘deal with DACA with heart.’ It was a lie., and 

Don’t be fooled by the scam that Trump will pull today on DACA , which noted that "Trump tweeted this today . . .'Congress, get ready to do your job - DACA!'"

He might have a good idea.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Read the Washington Post:

Paul Ryan, other GOP congressional leaders urge Trump not to terminate DACA, and

Trump pulls back threat to shut down government over border wall — for now.

Trump's Big CON: He Has No Plan, But Could He Tweet Us Into Nuclear War?, CONt.

"North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile over Japan on Monday night marked a significant escalation in its recent spate of missile and nuclear tests. Over the last year, Kim Jong Un has conducted a continued march of these tests. Unlike his father and grandfather, who used such tests both to advance the country’s program and as provocations aimed at an external audience, Kim has largely eschewed the provocation-cycle pattern and focused instead on an unrelenting march to secure nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them.

But this launch was different.

Launching a ballistic missile over Japan is a serious provocation, and while the test would have helped North Korea gather important technical data about the missile and its reentry vehicle, it also was clearly intended to send a signal. Kim’s move was aimed at shaking the confidence of our allies. The test comes as the United States and South Korea are in the middle of annual joint exercises, and while the United States and Japan were conducting missile defense drills. Warnings of a potential inbound missile sounded across parts of northern Japan and were replayed by Japanese media across the country. By taking such a provocative step, Kim knew he would rattle nerves in Japan and South Korea, possibly prompting questions about whether the United States would be able to defend its allies should they come under attack.

Kim’s move was also intended to send a signal to Washington. It comes after President Trump had proudly crowed that Kim was 'starting to respect us' following their hot war of words this month. Kim was surely listening — and he decided to take Trump up on the challenge. Late Tuesday, North Korean media reported that Kim was at the launch and that it was 'a meaningful prelude to containing Guam.'

The situation with North Korea, in other words, got worse just after Trump declared it was getting better. That’s not an accident. So far, the Trump administration has been unable to execute a clear strategy for dealing with Kim — which is why the messaging and actions from the White House, State Department and Pentagon have been so uncoordinated and ineffective."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump is making the North Korea crisis worse.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: He Has No Plan, But Could He Tweet Us Into Nuclear War?, and

Trump's Big CON: Is Trump Crazy, North Korea Edition, CONt.

Trump's Big CON: Happy Labor Day Suckers!

"[A]s a candidate, Trump correctly identified the anger and disappointment so many people feel about the contemporary U.S. economy, where the vast bulk of the benefits goes to those who are already wealthy and millions struggle to get by. The system, he told them, was “rigged” by those who already have wealth and power, and they believed him because of what they saw in their own lives and communities.

As Trump went around the country in 2016, he promised to turn back the clock to the days when factories were humming and factory towns were growing — and said he’d bring back all the coal jobs to boot. It was a cynical hoax, because the economy of the 1950s and 1960s for which he had such praise was made possible not only by a technological era that is far behind us, but by U.S. labor unions — unions that are under relentless assault from Trump’s party. Those old-fashioned factory jobs, where you could start without much in the way of education or experience and earn good wages and strong benefits, negotiated for you by the union, are largely gone. If you can find a manufacturing job today, chances are you won’t be represented by a union, and your employer will say, 'This is what you’ll get. Take it or leave it.' . .

You can see it in this extraordinary New York Times article by Neil Irwin profiling two women who started as janitors at companies that defined innovation in their respective heydays. Gail Evans began working at Eastman Kodak in the early 1980s, in a janitorial position with vacation benefits and support for workers wanting more education to improve their skills. She got her college degree and eventually rose to become chief technology officer of the entire company. Marta Ramos cleans floors at Apple today, but she’s employed by a contractor and has virtually no chance of getting any permanent position at Apple, let alone rising up in the company.

That difference is the result of enormous and complex changes that range across the entire economy, changes that one president can’t reverse. But what has Trump done to help ease the burden on workers and expand opportunity? Here are a few things:

Tried to take health coverage away from millions of low-income workers

Revoked an order by Obama requiring large federal contracts to go only to companies that weren’t guilty of violating labor laws

Nominated to be labor secretary the head of a fast-food company notorious for its abuse and exploitation of low-wage workers (the nominee later withdrew)

Appointed anti-labor nominees to the National Labor Relations Board

Moved to undo the Obama administration’s regulation expanding overtime pay for millions of workers

Proposed to cut the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health by 40 percent

Pushed back regulations forcing companies to protect worker safety and inform workers of hazards

Argued in court that employers should be able to force workers to give up their right to file class-action lawsuits

Reversed the Obama administration’s crackdown on for-profit education scams that saddle people with worthless degrees and huge debt

Promoted “right to work” laws that hamper unions’ ability to organize

And now we get to the centerpiece of the Trump administration economic plan: A gigantic tax cut for the wealthy and corporations! Of course." [Link in original.]

Read the Washington Post, Trump told workers that the system is rigged. Now he’s showing them just how much.

Trump's Big CON: Too Undisciplined, He Is Simply Not Presidential Material

UPDATE II:  Two reasons The Donald is simply not capable of being an effective president:

He is "poorly informed and . . . impulsive" says Senator John McCain.

That's putting it mildly.  

UPDATE:  Read the Washington Post, Trump fatigue comes early, in which Joe Scarborough argues that:

“Americans eventually tire of the presidents they elect. . .

President Trump is, of course, the most radical example of this negative political phenomenon. Seven months into his maniacal presidency, Trump is driving his approval ratings to record lows and causing friends and foes alike to experience premature presidential fatigue."

I don't agree.

I think people are realizing that The Donald is simply not capable of being an effective president.

The reasons are many.

"President Trump spent the final days of August dutifully performing his job. He tended to the massive recovery from Hurricane Harvey. He hit the road to sell his tax-cut plan. And he convened policy meetings on the federal budget and the North Korean nuclear threat.

Behind the scenes during a summer of crisis, however, Trump appears to pine for the days when the Oval Office was a bustling hub of visitors and gossip, over which he presided as impresario. He fumes that he does not get the credit he thinks he deserves from the media or the allegiance from fellow Republican leaders he says he is owed. He boasts about his presidency in superlatives, but confidants privately fret about his suddenly dark moods.

And some of Trump’s friends fear that the short-tempered president is on an inevitable collision course with White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.

Trump chafes at some of the retired Marine Corps general’s moves to restrict access to him since he took the job almost a month ago, said several people close to the president. They run counter to Trump’s love of spontaneity and brashness, prompting some Trump loyalists to derisively dub Kelly “the church lady” because they consider him strict and morally superior."

Read the Washington Post, During a summer of crisis, Trump chafes against criticism and new controls.

Trump's Big CON: The Same Old Trickle-Down Economics

UPDATE II:  "Having failed in their attempt to strip millions of health insurance by repealing Obamacare, President Trump and the Republican Congress are moving to their biggest priority: tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The plan is still being written, but Trump has already begun his push for it. And every part of the administration’s tax pitch is divorced from reality (a gentle way of saying it is a lie and a fraud). . .

There are sensible tax reforms that could be passed. Raise rates on the rich and use the money to fund a massive rebuilding of America’s infrastructure, starting with accelerating the move to renewable energy. That would create jobs, reduce inequality, invest in research and new technology, help capture a lead in growing global markets and begin to address climate change. Tax income from investments at the same rate as income from work. Require global corporations to pay taxes at the same rates as domestic companies by ending deferral. Tax financial speculation to raise revenue and at least slow the destabilizing financial casino.

These and other common-sense ideas would raise revenue and support badly needed public investments that would create real jobs and growth while not fueling greater inequality. It won’t surprise you that none of them are on the table in the back room where Republicans are struggling to come up with a tax plan.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there may be no words in the English language more scary than 'a Republican president and Congress announce it is time for tax reform.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s tax-reform pitch is entirely divorced from reality.

UPDATE:  "Republicans have one idea and one idea only: That we should cut taxes for the rich. The only thing that changes is the sales pitch.

And the latest pitch, offered by President Trump on Wednesday, is a bit of a doozy."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans have only one idea. And Trump’s pitch for it is a doozy.

Trump yet unreleased tax reform plan will be sold as a 'made in America tax to 'un-rig the economy' by ending special interest loopholes and benefit workers, leveling the playing field with the rest of the world.

It will include few details, but "we already know that the most recent version of his plan would shower most of their benefits on the wealthy and corporations. . .

[And] it is expected to slash the top rate and corporate rate and repeal the estate tax. . .

But the broad strokes of that formulation, despite its packaging in the rhetoric of economic nationalism, actually constitute trickle-down economics. . .

The Tax Policy Center analyzed his final plan during the campaign, by estimating the combined distributive impacts of both the individual and business tax cuts on households. The results were summed up by TPC’s Howard Gleckman in an email to me:

'The Tax Policy Center estimates that half the benefit of Trump’s final campaign tax plan, including both the business and individual tax cuts, would go to the top 1 percent, who make $700,000 or more. Middle-income households would get about 6 percent of the benefits. To put it another way, the average tax cut for the top 1 percent would be $214,000 or 13 percent of their after-tax income while the average tax cut for a middle-income household would be about $1,000 or 2 percent of their after-tax income.'

An analysis of the most recent White House plan yielded similar findings. . .

Now, if Trump wants to make the case that huge high-end tax cuts will actually help workers, fine — let’s have that debate. But the point is that Trump is revealing once again that his populist economic nationalism — as he himself defined it — was largely a scam all along."

Read the Washington Post, Today you will hear the death rattle of Trump’s economic populism.

Happy Labor Day Suckers!

Trump's Big CON: I Witnessed the Hurricane Horror & Devastation "First Hand"

Actually he didn't have time, he was too busy promoting and selling "campaign swag".


Read the Washington Post, Trump claimed he witnessed Harvey’s devastation ‘first hand.’ The White House basically admits he didn’t., which states:

"Maybe he doesn't know what the word 'firsthand' means?

But Trump's tweet leaves an incorrect assessment of his initial trip to Texas after Hurricane Harvey and his level of direct engagement with the storm's effects. And rather than correct the record and admit the mistake, the White House decided to double down — and try to rewrite the English language.

Update: It turns out Trump's Instagram promoted the 'first hand' claim by showing Trump looking at a picture of a radar -- which, again, is not firsthand observation."

Of course, we know that The Donald likes to exaggerate about his hands.

Trump's Big CON: "He's So Pretty", Crowd Size Edition (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 13))

My Mr. President, what big crowds you have!

"President Trump isn't happy about insubordinate public comments by chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, yet he isn't planning to do anything about them, Politico reports.

But the underwhelming crowd at last week's rally in Phoenix, organized by longtime aide George Gigicos? That's another story.

Bloomberg News reports that Trump, miffed about the optics of empty seats in the Phoenix Convention Center, 'later had his top security aide, Keith Schiller, inform Gigicos that he'd never manage a Trump rally again, according to three people familiar with the matter.'

The president's contrasting responses reveal, once again, the structure of his unorthodox political value system. This is your regular reminder that he cares about crowd size more than almost anything else."

Read the Washington Post, Your regular reminder that Trump cares more about crowd size than almost anything else.

Trump's Big CON: "He's So Pretty", Hurricane Harvey Edition (AKA Trump is a Psycho-Narcissistic Con Man (CONt., Part 12))

UPDATE III: "Late Tuesday night, the White House press office sent out photos of President Trump visiting Texas to see the floods unleashed by Hurricane Harvey. In each photo, the president was wearing a white hat that read “USA” in blue letters. On Sunday, the White House put out photos of Trump monitoring the storm and the floods from Camp David, wearing a similar hat — this one in red, with white letters.

You, too, can wear one of these hats. They are, apparently, the “official USA 45th presidential hat.” They’re sold exclusively online by Trump’s reelection campaign, and they cost $40 each.

The president, in other words, was decked out in campaign gear while representing the people of the United States during a massive natural disaster. And the U.S. government made sure everyone saw him wearing it.

Trump may not have violated a regulation in doing so, but there is a difference between what is technically legal and what is ethically right. . .

Unfortunately, financial conflicts of interest dominate this White House. As many of his businesses started to falter along with his approval ratings, Trump has spent 75 days at Trump-branded properties he still owns and earns profits from, properties that have advertised potential access to him in their brochures. . .

This is an administration that has placed an emphasis on Trump family businesses all along. . .

Given how often the presidency overlaps with Trump’s personal interests, it should come as no surprise that the president and the White House are showcasing apparel sold exclusively on his campaign website. This administration is in the business of Trump, and it’s business as usual."

Read the Washington Post, How President Trump turned hurricane relief into product placement for campaign swag.

UPDATE  II:  "Little of [the] high-minded rhetoric [that past presidents showed when visiting places after disasters] was on display when President Trump visited Texas on Tuesday to discuss the devastation from Hurricane Harvey. Trump, who ran on a promise of being a different kind of president, once again kept that promise.

He made virtually no mention of the storm’s victims, and there was no indication he met with any. He didn’t call for donations or volunteers. He didn’t mourn the dead.

Instead, Trump marveled at the size of Harvey ('it’s epic, what happened'), gushed about the crowd that had gathered to see him ('what a turnout'), offered hyperbole about the recovery effort (it will be 'something very special'), and thanked his FEMA administrator ('a man who has really become very famous on television over the last couple of days').

At one point he told a crowd in Corpus Christi — some carrying Trump regalia and chanting 'U.S.A., U.S.A.' — that 'we are here to take care of you, it’s going well.' And he added later that 'Texas can handle anything.'

But that was about as empathetic as he got. There was no call to action, no sweeping reassurance that his administration — and indeed, the nation — had adopted the storm victims’ struggle as its own. All told, it felt a bit like a political rally, as The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson reported.

An array of political observers and others said Trump’s message was weak and tone deaf considering the immense scale of Harvey’s destruction."

Read the Washington Post, Trump and Harvey: ‘There was something missing’ from what the president said.

UPDATE: After tragedy, "Trump's default is not to wait and see how a situation shakes out or to be excessively cautious; it's to try to take credit and to politicize it."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s default response to tragedy: Politicize, promote and provoke.

My Mr. President, what a big hurricane you had!

The hurricane was 'epic' & 'historic', so 'his' rebuilding effort could be heroic "something very special."

And while you are waiting, no need to donate to relief efforts, his white "USA" caps "are being sold on his campaign website for $40."

Read the Washington Post, Even in visiting hurricane-ravaged Texas, Trump keeps the focus on himself.

And pay no attention to The Donald's proposed "budget calling for cuts to some of the federal government’s most consequential efforts to prepare states and local communities and help them recover from catastrophic events such as Harvey."

Trump's Big CON: No Balanced Budget, CONt'

UPDATE IV:  "President Trump on Wednesday delivered an address on his 'principles' for a tax plan in Springfield, Mo., though he provided few details. He also shifted from extolling how well the economy is doing to language that suggested the United States was suffering terribly. As usual, some of the president’s  facts and figures were a bit fishy, so here’s a roundup of 10 of his claims."

Read the Washington Post, Fact-checking President Trump’s speech on his tax plan, which shows that his claims were grossly mislead and/or false.

UPDATE III:  "Hurricane Harvey has devastated Texas. Now board your windows, evacuate the low ground and watch the damage it is poised to unleash on the nation’s finances.

Harvey makes landfall in Washington as soon as next week, when President Trump is expected to ask for what could be tens of billions of dollars in storm relief. And paying for storm recovery — probably with few offsetting spending cuts — will be but the first blow to fiscal discipline in what looks to be a particularly active, and calamitous, spending season.

After Harvey comes the debt ceiling, and there are rumblings that the vote to raise the limit could actually be used to increase spending. (In the past, such votes were used by fiscal hawks to cut spending.) At the same time come negotiations to fund the government for fiscal year 2018, and indications are that lawmakers will try to avoid a shutdown with a short-term spending deal that will include a Pentagon slush fund worth tens of billions of dollars.

Then, still forming over the Treasury Department is a fiscal Category 4: Trump and Republicans have given clear signs they are moving away from tax reform (a simplification of the tax code that doesn’t necessarily reduce revenue) toward all-out tax cuts, financed by deficit spending.

Trump, who came to power promising to eliminate the $20 trillion debt, or at least to cut it in half, is poised to oversee an exponential increase in that debt. Republicans, who came to power with demands that Washington tackle the debt problem, could wind up doing at least as much damage to the nation’s finances as the Democrats did.

Rising are the floodwaters of hypocrisy. Surging is the tide of amnesia. Blowing are the gales of profligacy. . .

[Past storms have already saturated the ground and weakened the roots of fiscal responsibility.]

First, a Harvey recovery bill without the spending 'offsets' so many Republicans demanded of previous bills. Then, a debt-limit increase, possibly secured with promises to spend more money on defense (which would buy GOP votes) and domestic priorities (for Democratic votes). Next, a spending deal that busts previously agreed budget caps by allowing an extra $70 billion or so for an 'Overseas Contingency Operations' slush fund. Eventually, a reckless tax cut doesn’t seem so crazy — particularly with midterm elections looming and no accomplishments to show.

When it rains, it pours."
 Read the Washington Post, Republicans slip into a ‘predictable spiral’.

UPDATE II: There are many ways to call the Republi-CON bluffs.

Certainly in the short term it will hurt.

But it's the only way to prove to reasonable voters that they are being CON'ed. (It's a waste of time to try to reason with diehard Republi-CONs.)

Read the Washington Post, Trump has over-promised to his base. That makes a terrible outcome more likely.

UPDATE:  "It’s finally time to stop believing Republicans when they say they’re the party of balanced budgets.

For eight years, Republicans warned the American public that we were hurtling toward certain fiscal doom. President Barack Obama’s oversight of the deficit was leaving 'America’s future in the balance,' the Republican National Committee said in 2011. A year later, Senator Mitch McConnell said the federal debt was 'the nation’s most serious long-term problem.' The debt was 'killing our economy,' according to John Boehner in 2013, when he was the House speaker.

President Trump, ostensibly the party’s standard-bearer, made it clear Thursday that he’s not very concerned about the national debt. In a series of tweets, he blamed Mr. McConnell and Speaker Paul D. Ryan for their handling of legislation to raise the debt ceiling, something Republicans argued for years had to be paired with spending cuts. 'Could have been so easy — now a mess!' the president said.

He’s right. It is a mess. But it’s not a mess Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan created this summer. It’s a mess Republicans laid the groundwork for over eight years of impeding a presidency and an economy because of their professed desire for fiscal restraint.

In early 2016, the R.N.C. was still warning about 'an unsustainable path toward crippling debt' after President Obama released his final budget. Mr. Trump got in on the game during the campaign, blaming Mr. Obama for leaving the country buried under a “mountain of debt.”

But once in office, Mr. Trump put forward some broad outlines for a tax reform package, signaling that he wants a variety of large cuts, regardless of whether they increase the deficit.

The Trump administration claimed that the proposed tax cuts would pay for themselves through faster economic growth. But past experience hasn’t borne that out, and it seems nearly impossible to find an economist who thinks it’s a viable theory.

None of this takes into account Mr. Trump’s plans for spending. In his first budget, he increased funding for the military and his border wall while still promising to eliminate the deficit in 10 years. Once again, economic growth was offered as the magic elixir, though the Congressional Budget Office thinks otherwise.

On cue, Mr. Ryan said President Trump’s budget was 'right on target' even as he released a statement about it that criticized Mr. Obama’s “bloated budgets that never balance.”

This about-face is not new for the party of financial responsibility. President Ronald Reagan promised to balance the federal budget and then, while in office, pushed through tax cuts and military spending that more than doubled the national debt. President George W. Bush promised to pay down the debt only to sign tax cuts and defense increases that doubled it. Republicans have a pattern of caring deeply about government finances while out of power and then forgetting those concerns when they’re in control. . .

[T]he Democrats should call the Republicans’ bluff and demand the limit be abolished altogether. Republicans have shown their hand: They don’t care about the deficit or the debt. Democrats should point that out and push for an end to brinkmanship over the country’s finances." [Emphasis added.]

Read The New York Times, Republicans Learn to Love Debt.

Bravo, bravo!!  I've been suggesting Democrats should call the Republi-CON bluffs on many issues, for many years.

It's not just The Donald, the Republi-CON Budget CON has been going on for years and years.

"President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are courting an economic catastrophe with a standoff over how to raise the debt limit.

Unless Trump and Congress pass a law raising the U.S. debt limit — a legal cap on how much the U.S. government is allowed to borrow — the Treasury Department will soon run out of money to pay its bills, triggering a first-in-modern-U.S.-history default that threatens to turn the world economy on its head. A default would crack the world’s faith in the United States’ ability to pay its bills and repay its loans, and that faith serves as the underpinning of the entire global financial system. . .

The overriding belief in Washington and on Wall Street is that a default is highly unlikely. But there's still a chance it could happen. Greg Valliere of Horizon Investments puts the odds at 5 percent. Given what's at stake, that's not comforting.

Read the Washington Post, With the debt ceiling, President Trump is playing with fire.

Trump's Big CON: Who Will He Be: Teleprompter Trump or Unplugged Donald

UPDATE:  The "overwhelming majority of Americans thinks [Trump] is a lying, divisive hothead who is making race relations much worse. Trump barely has majority support (52 percent) among his most loyal segment of the electorate (whites with no college education). He has managed to turn off just about everyone else. He knows how to feed his base red meat but not how to earn the respect and confidence of everyone else. Several thousand people in an auditorium in Phoenix, it turns out, bear little resemblance to the country as a whole.

Trump can read off a teleprompter as he did in announcing his Afghanistan policy on Monday, behave like a madman on Tuesday and revert to a perfectly adequate (though wooden) speech to veterans on Wednesday. While some Americans might suffer from whiplash, most, we suspect, have figured out which is the real Trump is and which is the Trump who is playing the dummy to ventriloquists trying desperately to protect the country (e.g., Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster).

Trump cannot operate off script without losing his cool and revealing his ignorance; his moments of restraint never last long. When he reads other people’s words and expresses sentiments not his own his delivery is flat and stilted. Only when he is in full rage-mode does he become animated. He must distract and attack lest the focus fall on him and his lack of accomplishments.

This is a man plainly driven by hate, resentment and maybe a little fear — yes, fear that the presidency is beyond his abilities and severely taxing his meager intellectual and emotional resources. Don’t expect him to improve. Failure begets more rage, which begets greater rejection by the public. It would be pathetic if it were not petrifying."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is losing.

A "recurring motif of his presidency: Mr. Trump has toggled between Teleprompter Trump and Unplugged Trump every day since the deadly clashes in Virginia, leaving Washington and the rest of the nation with a chronic case of rhetorical whiplash.

The split speaking personality is not new. Mr. Trump spent years mocking President Barack Obama for using a teleprompter.

But ever since Mr. Trump won his first round of primaries and his path toward the Republican presidential nomination became likelier, his family members and some supporters have urged him — not with a lot of success — to professionalize his performances, and to try to avoid the dangers of the kind of spontaneous remarks he made in Arizona.

There were obvious differences between the venue and audience for the Phoenix speech and those here on Wednesday [in Reno at the national convention of the American Legion]. The first was a campaign-style rally for his most boisterous supporters, against a thumping soundtrack of the Rolling Stones; the second was an official presidential event for an audience of veterans, complete with a bill-signing ceremony.

There were many reasons to believe that the president’s angry performance in Phoenix was the real Donald J. Trump. It was consistent with the way he has reacted to all sorts of setbacks since he took office, including the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the multiple investigations of his links to Russia. . .

Many presidents, of course, have complained bitterly behind closed doors about their treatment at the hands of the news media or their political opponents. . . .

The difference with Mr. Trump, he said, is that the president not only vents those feelings publicly, but also makes that venting a central part of his message."

Read The New York Times, Different Day, Different Audience, and a Completely Different Trump.

Trump's Big CON: Another Big Shout Out to Birthers & Other Racist

UPDATE V:  "President Trump said after pardoning Arpaio that the former sheriff had been treated 'unbelievably unfairly,' too."

That's not true, the judge who ordered Arpaio to stop racial profiling is "fair, honest, conservative."

Read the Washington Post, Joe Arpaio and President Trump say Arpaio was treated unfairly. That’s not true.

UPDATE IV:  "Repetition is the enemy of maintaining proper distinctions. It is a short road from being serially outraged to being slightly bored to being completely inured.

Thus many are likely to find the pardon of former Arizona county sheriff Joe Arpaio to be just another . . . something. Just another public feeding of President Trump’s base; or just an additional shiny distraction from real issues; or just one more cause for head-shaking and shoulder-shrugging; or just further evidence of the tawdry political company kept by the president of the United States.

This would be a mistake. This presidential action is not 'just' anything. Following his expression of sympathy for the 'very fine people' attending a white- supremacist rally in Charlottesville — who were, he said, defending 'our history and heritage' — Trump must have known his next move would be highly symbolic, either as a retreat from prejudice or as its affirmation. What followed with the Arpaio pardon constitutes the most forthright racist incitement of the Trump era.

Trump has called Arpaio a 'great American patriot,' employing a definition of patriotism that includes extreme ethnic profiling, terror raids, and cruel and unusual punishment. A definition of patriotism that covers using internment camps in extreme heat, parading women and juvenile offenders for the cameras in chain gangs, and degrading inmates in creative acts of bullying. This is not patriotism; it is the abuse of power in the cause of bigotry.

Others have commented on the legal precedent of effectively pardoning someone for abusing the constitutional rights of an ethnic minority. Done in a manner that employs the pardon power as a reward for political loyalty. Resulting from a process that evidently did not involve the normal review and recommendation of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney."

Read the Washington Post, Trump abuses his power to help the cause of bigotry.

UPDATE III:  "Trump sees himself — or what he sometimes aspires to accomplish, anyway — in this local tin-pot dictator.

Think about it. Trump has not exactly proved himself to be the forward-looking, calculating mastermind implied by those alternative explanations. And he makes everything — including the Charlottesville violence, the Houston catastrophe, even the eclipse — about himself.

Trump and Arpaio both built their political careers by demonizing immigrants. They also both raised their national profiles by claiming that Barack Obama was secretly a Kenyan-born Muslim, a racist conspiracy theory that Arpaio even sent a taxpayer-funded deputy to Hawaii to investigate.

And more broadly they both seem to use 'law and order' as code for encouraging law enforcement to harass people of color.

Those are the best-known parallels between the two politicians, but they’re hardly the only ones. There are many other ways in which Arpaio has proved to be Trump’s mini-me."

Read the Washington Post, Why did Trump pardon Arpaio? Because he sees himself in the former sheriff.

UPDATE II:  "[O]f all the people with criminal records in this country, Trump chose to make Arpaio his first pardonee.

As sheriff, Arpaio was known for a hostility toward undocumented immigrants that was functionally indistinguishable from hostility toward Latinos. He conducted sweeps of Latino neighborhoods and stops of Latino drivers in attempts to find undocumented immigrants. He held inmates in brutal and degrading conditions. He installed publicly accessible webcams so that the public could gawk at inmates, and one of those cameras showed female prisoners using the toilet. And he was a leading proponent of the racist lie that President Barack Obama was not a natural-born American citizen.

Arpaio’s entire claim to national recognition was based on his being a xenophobe, a racist and an officer of the machinery of government who relished wielding that machinery to degrade some of the most powerless members of our society. . .

Trump pardoned Arpaio because of his actions as sheriff, actions that are consistent with the platform on which Trump campaigned and has attempted to govern. Those actions were appalling — and not only is Arpaio unremorseful, but Trump has actually held him up as a model to be emulated."

Read the Washington Post, The problem with Joe Arpaio’s pardon isn’t the process. The problem is Joe Arpaio.

UPDATE:  "As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.

Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a 'concentration camp,' where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was 'convicted for doing his job,' pardoned him.

By the way, about 'doing his job,' it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

So how did we get to this point?

Trump’s motives are easy to understand. For one thing, Arpaio, with his racism and authoritarianism, really is his kind of guy. For another, the pardon is a signal to those who might be tempted to make deals with the special investigator as the Russia probe closes in on the White House: Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. . .

What makes it possible for someone like Trump to attain power and hold it is the acquiescence of people, both voters and politicians, who aren’t white supremacists, who sort-of kind-of believe in the rule of law, but are willing to go along with racists and lawbreakers if it seems to serve their interests.

There have been endless reports about the low-education white voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump last November. But he wouldn’t have made it over the top without millions of votes from well-educated Republicans who — despite the media’s orgy of false equivalence or worse (emails!) — had no excuse for not realizing what kind of man he was. For whatever reason, be it political tribalism or the desire for lower taxes, they voted for him anyway.

Given the powers we grant to the president, who in some ways is almost like an elected dictator, giving the office to someone likely to abuse that power invites catastrophe. The only real check comes from Congress, which retains the power to impeach; even the potential for impeachment can constrain a bad president. But Republicans control Congress; how many of them besides John McCain have offered full-throated denunciations of the Arpaio pardon?

The answer is, very few. . .

This bodes ill if, as seems all too likely, the Arpaio pardon is only the beginning: We may well be in the early stages of a constitutional crisis. Does anyone consider it unthinkable that Trump will fire Robert Mueller, and try to shut down investigations into his personal and political links to Russia? Does anyone have confidence that Republicans in Congress will do anything more than express mild disagreement with his actions if he does?

As I said, there’s a word for people who round up members of ethnic minorities and send them to concentration camps, or praise such actions. There’s also a word for people who, out of cowardice or self-interest, go along with such abuses: collaborators. How many such collaborators will there be? I’m afraid we’ll soon find out.

Read The New York Times, Fascism, American Style.

Sheriff Joe 'Scooby-Doo' Arpaio was convicted of contempt of court for defying the Obama administration.

The Donald is under siege as an investigation started under the Obama administration shows The Donald is Putin's Puppet.

What better time to release those 'universe-shattering' revelations that Obama is a "Indo-Kenyan radical Muslim sleeper agent".

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

Instead, Trump had to pardon Arpaio.

Read the Washington Post, Trump asked Sessions about closing case against Arpaio, an ally since ‘birtherism’.

Birthers, hear me now, can you say sucker?