Trump's Second Term

bruto said:
Shemp, when all my kids were 5 they could read, think and play games without throwing the pieces around when they lost, and they did not ◊◊◊◊ their pants either. Do not diss our erstwhile children by comparing them to that (expletive of your choice deleted). Any one of them would have made a better president. The electorate are like insane five year olds, voting for a stuffed animal.
Click to expand...
I did NOT say that all 5 year olds are like Herr Schitler, only the ones that are criminally and murderously insane. I trust with 99% confidence that your five year olds were not criminally and murderously insane, they were just the normal level of insane.
 
JayUtah said:
It isn't. But no one with standing is likely to complain.

It's pure personal revenge. Donald Trump wants to publicly shame the lawyers who made him a felon. Thereafter it's intimidation; he wants to scare away any lawyers from coming after him no matter how many laws he breaks.
Click to expand...
I’m curious about the general chatter these days among your friends & acquaintances in the lawyerly arts. Despair? Disgust? D’lovely?
 
Trump never had that class we all took in middle school. But someone in his term should have told him: Executive orders are not laws. Congress and courts and states are free to ignore them. The people reporting to him are the only ones that have to follow them. The 2 million federal workers.
www.msnbc.com

Trump asks the Supreme Court to prohibit judges from blocking his policies

President Donald Trump has railed in recent weeks against federal judges who have ruled against his administration, painting them as threats to the country and demanding that the Supreme Court halt all nationwide injunctions.
www.msnbc.com www.msnbc.com

With more than 100 lawsuits against Trump’s policies to date, the administration has claimed that judges are improperly using nationwide injunctions to impede the president’s agenda and to override his executive powers. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused those judges of being “partisan activists.”
 
'I love King Charles': Trump makes jaw-dropping hint as he says US could become 'associate member' of the Commonwealth

Donald J. Trump
@RealDonaldTrump
I Love King Charles. Sounds good to me!

Gmkie1QaEAM_1Gh.jpg
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
thaiboxerken said:
Musk is paying people to petition against judges. Will anyone stop this guy from using his wealth to destroy the government?
Click to expand...
An excellent argument for raising taxes on obscene wealth gains back up to, say, at least 90% again. More if it's those like Musk that are actively working to interfere via underhanded means.

Extreme wealth is problematic from the start, but at least has some potential silver linings when it comes to motivation to produce more and thus increase taxes and circulation. Extreme wealth being actively used to harm the country responsible for the conditions that allowed them to make that in the first place lacks those silver linings.
 
To poke at the larger education issue again, one of the main forces behind the Republican war against public education are those who are trying to force their preferred version of Biblical indoctrination into public schooling.

Some of the current events in Oklahoma rather provide a case in point -

Sometimes, Jakob Topper teaches his Christian faith to his six-year-old daughter using children’s Bible stories illustrated with teddy bears. Other days, he might use her kid-friendly Bible featuring Precious Moments figures as characters. One thing he knows for sure: The King James version is not on the reading list, given some of its adult themes of sexual assault and incest.

As a parent and a Baptist pastor, Topper opposes Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction’s mandate to put a King James Version Bible in every grade 5–12 classroom. The father of three is also not keen on the state’s newly proposed social studies standards that would require biblical lessons starting in first grade.

“I want the Bible taught to my daughter, and I want to be the one who chooses how that’s done,” said Topper, who also has a one-year-old and a three-year-old and is pastor of NorthHaven Church in Norman, a university town. “If we’re talking about parental choice, that’s my choice. I don’t want it to be farmed out to anyone else.”


Norman, a central Oklahoman city of about 130,000, is an epicenter of resistance to the Bible mandate that the state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, announced last June. Opposition here has come from pastors, religion professors, students, parents, teachers, school board members, and the school district superintendent, among others. The prevailing philosophy among Norman residents, who are predominantly Christian, is that they do not want the state—and namely, Walters—mandating how children should be taught scriptures. They want their children to learn from holy books at home or in church.
Click to expand...

Of course, there happens to be other problematic angles to this case, like -

Many residents see Walters’s pitch as a play for national attention, given his abundance of social media posts praising Donald Trump, who campaigned on returning prayer to schools and as president has established a White House Faith Office and a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias.” In September, Walters proposed spending $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the Bible that has been endorsed by the president and for which he receives royalties.
Click to expand...

I think I'll add that I'm obviously rather sympathetic to the opposition, who have a much, much more reasonable case.

In an interview at his district’s headquarters, Migliorino emphasized that his school system already teaches how different religions affect history. Bibles, he noted, are accessible to students through the library. Migliorino added that the state superintendent had no authority to make school districts follow the mandate and that it would result in pushing Christianity on students.

“It’s a captive audience, and that is not our role to push things onto kids,” he said. “Our role is to educate them and to create thinkers.”

Oklahoma already has a 2010 measure allowing school districts to offer elective Bible classes and to give students the latitude to pick the biblical text they prefer to use. But unlike Walters’s mandate, it allows for different biblical perspectives, said Alan Levenson, chair of Judaic history at the University of Oklahoma and a biblical scholar. Even still, there has never been widespread interest in a Bible elective in Norman, said Jane Purcell, the school system’s social studies coordinator. Nor was there much interest in such a class when she taught in Florida. Since 2006, at least a dozen states have passed laws promoting elective Bible classes.
Click to expand...


Hardly the only forces in play, of course, but then, the forces in the Republican party that outright seek to sabotage public education to keep labor cheaper and more easily exploitable have long been about, too, and are much more obviously nefarious and so tend to try to hide behind less overtly nefarious propaganda, even if that propaganda has historically included much of the appealing to racism and religion that the Republican Party has done.
 
Last edited:
There has been remarkably little pushback from Republicans about the changes being made to the country in their names, but the news that dropped on March 18 that the administration is considering giving up a key role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has sparked public objection from Republicans who care about the nation’s global role. Since NATO organized, the role of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, known as the SACEUR, has been filled by an American.

Now the Trump administration is considering relinquishing that position as part of a massive restructuring plan that could save up to $270 million of the Defense Department’s $850 billion annual budget, or about 0.03% of it. The U.S. is also considering stopping its expansion and modernization of U.S. Forces Japan, which would save about $1.18 billion, according to Courtney Kube and Gordon Lubold of NBC News, but would weaken the cooperation designed to counter China.

“For the United States to give up the role of supreme allied commander of NATO would be seen in Europe as a significant signal of walking away from the alliance,” retired Admiral James Stavridis, who served as SACEUR and head of European Command from 2009 to 2013, wrote to Kube and Lubold. “It would be a political mistake of epic proportion, and once we give it up, they are not going to give it back. We would lose an enormous amount of influence within NATO, and this would be seen, correctly, as probably the first step toward leaving the Alliance altogether.”
Click to expand...
Heather Cox Richardson
Mar 21

 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom