Posts Made By: James Lacey

Jim Brown said:

It bugs me that many lefty commentators are pointing to Hillary's popular vote victory as some sort of salve. Do these fools really think that the popular vote would be exactly as it was on Tuesday if the campaigns had been focused on winning the popular vote?

Think about it, if the popular vote mattered, the campaigns would have focused on all 50 states, but really focused on CA, NY, TX FL and other states where big popular vote totals might be run up. The complexion of the game would change entirely! Would Trump still have won if the campaigns had been focused on the popular vote? Maybe, maybe not - we don't know because that is not the game that was played.

Popular vote whiners would be like a football fan who thinks it matters that his team got 450 yards to the opponents 325 yards, even though his team was outscored 35-10. Then this loser says, well, the other teams victory is diminished because we got more yards than them! How foolish would that be since the goal and two teams' game plans were designed to score, not to run up yardage!

Hillary and Donald competed to win the EC. Everyone knows that the EC is all that matters legally. How come certain pundits don't also recognize that the popular vote is doubly irrelevant because the parties did not campaign to run up the popular vote?

Jim

Just more nonsense you hear every election cycle. Without the electoral college, candidates would only campaign in densely populated urban areas which would clearly favor the Democratic party of today.

Rod Kaufman said:

First, before we get to the PICKS, Trump wants the highest level of top level secrecy clearance provided to his children, The same ones who will be running his companies. Defend THAT!
Next, onto Donald's amazing pick for his top adviser, Steve Bannon, described in the media and by his former wife as an antisemite. The head of the American Nazi Party is thrilled!
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/14/politics/white-nationalists-on-bannon/index.html
Trump's call to unite certainly resonates, don't you think?

It is incredulous to defend Bannon as an excellent choice for any position in the White House under any circumstances. If even 1% of the reporting on him is correct, it is clear that he is at best a xenophobic white nationalist.

It seems so evident that Bannon is going to cause a lot of consternation and criticism, I wonder why the Trump administration is considering his appointment? For example, Bridge Gate was enough to make them drop Chris Christie immediately.

Rod Kaufman said:

That bogus 2 million illegal voter claim that Trump keeps tweeting...

The Commander in Conspiracy theories is clearly either batty or a Machiavellian genius who is using his Twitter account to distract us all from his real agenda. The flag burning tweet was especially troublesome. If you ask me, any president who calls for stripping dissenters of their citizenship is dangerous. Never mind the first amendment, what about the eighth and the fourteenth as well? The ironic thing, of course, is that Trump is calling for the unfair treatment of dissenters while he is participating in the same if not worse behavior than those he is unfairly critiquing.

Jim,

You know as well as I do that these addresses to Congress are just political speeches full of political promises. Trump managed to follow a script and stay on message for once. Kudos to him and his handlers.

However, are you still feeling the same way today, given Trump's unhinged tweets accusing Obama of wire-tapping him without offering any proof? Trump's emotional Waterloo is coming. I don't know when, and I don't know where, but it's going to happen. I only hope he doesn't get a Reichstag fire, or a Gulf of Tonkin or a WMD in Iraq before then and drag us into yet another unnecessary foreign war.

Personally, I'm enjoying the current Trump rally. My portfolio has never been better. I want Trump to be successful, because if he is, then we are all successful. Remember, though, the market buys on the rumor and sells on the news. I have zero confidence that this Trump rally is sustainable. So far, it's all irrational exuberance from what I can tell and almost no real substance.

This article is just another argument for originalism or in other words that we moderns should not try to change or expand the intent or meaning of the constitution as it was supposedly originally authored. One of the problems as I see it with originalism though is that it's a mistake to assume that the original authors intended their words to be timeless, otherwise why did they use ambiguous language like "general welfare" or "cruel and unusual" or "freedom of speech." Another problem is that it's also a mistake to assume the original authors themselves agreed on a clear meaning of all the language in the constitution. In fact, they did not agree on most issues like slavery, the size of the government, and state representation. For example, as a nation, we have been defining and expanding what the meaning of "freedom of speech" actually is even since the first draft of the constitution. The Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, for example, would be unfathomable today, yet in our early days they were used to squash dissent, and free speech and jail a grandson of Benjamin Franklin and a revolutionary war hero and deny immigrants their rights. Indeed, we have been defining and changing what the phrase "all men are created equal" means, and thank goodness we have because in the beginning it clearly meant you were a white-European male of British, French or Nordic descent. Hence, I'm no fan of originalism, and I think it's a mistake to place the framers of the constitution upon some pedestal that assumes they were omniscient and infallible in their views. We have been bending shaping and molding their views since the beginning. Why should our views on health care be beholden to an over 200-year-old document that at the time could never have even foreseen the need to provide health care for a nation of 300 million people?

Favorite quote so far:

Q: "When Trump said 'I hope this investigation will be dropped' did you take it to mean he expects you to drop it?"

COMEY: "It rings in my ears as 'Will someone not rid me of this meddlesome priest?' "

Greg Shaffer said:

Smart like a fox.....How better to insure your enemies stay honest than to imply that there may be recordings of your conversation? So Trump has now stated there are no Comey tapes after implying there may have been......

Thus "I hope" stayed "I hope" instead of becoming "drop it" during the Comey testimony......LOL

Trump is a perpetual liar with an invincible capacity for self-destruction. Lies like a snake would be a more accurate animal metaphor.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

The conjecture that somehow Trump is being maltreated or is subject to more vitriol than normal is an absolute falsehood. Invective and character assassination is something that has always been part of American politics. There are simply too many examples for anyone who is even remotely familiar with American political history to think otherwise. Here is one, for instance, that I came across recently. George Washington's farewell speech is in modern times considered to be a canonical text that is even read aloud each year in Congress on Washington's birthday. At the time, however, the Republican reaction was, venomous and denounced Washington's words as "the loathings of a sick mind." Benjamin Franklin Bache, a grandson of the Benjamin Franklin who published a newspaper in Philadelphia called the Aurora, regurgitated the old claim that Washington conspired with the British during the Revolution. Bache also dredged up an open letter that Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, wrote to Washington that hoped Washington would die and further said, "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any."

The truth is that Trump is his own worst enemy and almost all of his current troubles are of his own doing. It's his fault that he is under investigation by a special counsel and will almost surely not emerge unscathed. It's his fault that current polls have him at one of the lowest approval ratings ever this early in a presidency and it's his fault that most people when polled think he's doing a poor job. He has failed at repealing and replace Obamacare so far. He has failed at tax reform so far. Pulling us out of the Paris accord was a big nothing burger because no matter what he did, the agreement remains in effect until the next administration at least and many governors in many states are openly defying his actions. His executive orders have mostly been toothless and ineffectual. His travel ban remains essentially worthless, and the only reason it has any effect at all is that the Supreme Court partially allowed it. It was not a 9-0 victory; it was a 6-3 split decision. Never mind that the travel ban accomplishes nothing of value. The real face of terrorism in the US is white and mentally unstable. You are in more danger of being killed if a white racist merely perceives you as being Muslim in the US than you are suffering from violence at the hands of a Muslim. The bogus voter integrity commission he is insisting upon is a joke of the highest order, whose only purpose is to soothe his fragile narcissistic ego and provide some cover for why he lost the popular vote by over 6 million votes. That loss is the highest popular vote loss in modern history, and many states are openly defying the requests of the commission. Even Mississippi told the "Election Integrity" committee to go "Jump in the Gulf of Mexico."

People called Obama a Muslim. People said he was not qualified. People said he was a closeted racist with a deep-seated hatred for white people. People called him a hater of Israel. People said he wasn't born in America. People said he hid his secret gay life to become President and should come out of the closet. People like Ted Nugent said he should be assassinated. The vitriol waged against Obama was beyond the pale. However, one thing Obama never did, was act like the petulant, childish, immature and misogynist scum-bag that Trump is every day.

The whole administration is just embarrassing at this point.

As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them–they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of the stuff? It's over,” the President said aboard Air Force One yesterday, according to the official White House transcript. “As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall.