bearister said:

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Under Trump, Steve Schmidt wrote, the party had become "corrupt, indecent, and immoral." With the exception of a select few, the GOP was "filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party's greatest leaders."

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Same guys rips on Lindsay Graham here:

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/408904-former-top-mccain-aide-graham-has-been-corrupted-by-ambition

Steve Schmidt, the former adviser and strategist on former Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential campaign, blasted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Thursday night, saying:

"He's corrupted by ambition, corrupted by politics," Schmidt told MSNBC's Brian Williams in an interview. "And it's tragic because this country could use a statesman right now and Lindsey Graham, for a long time, was on a path that he would be that person. That he would be a figure of courage. That he would be a serious person in a frivolous era."
"And to see him corrupted by Trump era, to see him becoming sycophantic, to see him become dishonest and angry and smearing, is just tragic," he continued.
Schmidt said Graham was no longer the man he knew while working within the Republican Party.
"If you hang around politics long enough, you tend to get disappointed by people," Schmidt said. "And he is a profound disappointment."

B.A. Bearacus said:

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At this point in his presidency, we can't generate more than an eye roll at the blatant dishonesty...

The official White House transcript shows Trump as saying the following to Vega: "That's okay. I know you're not thanking. You never do."

Update:

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So, listening to it, what did he say?

B.A. Bearacus said:

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bearister said:

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President Mushroom and taxes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

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Shady, shady family of mushroom dicks.
............................................................................
Excerpt:

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found...

But The Times's investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father's real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents' real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president's parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

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I look forward to hearing more about trump being exposed and going down.
His character leads America down the toilet and he needs to be rebuked.

B.A. Bearacus said:

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bearister said:

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Thomas Friedman: The American Civil Wae, Part II
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/opinion/the-american-civil-war-part-ii.html

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Excerpts:

This also feels worse than the divisions over Vietnam and civil rights because there were three huge forces holding us together back then that are missing today: a growing middle class, the Cold War and a sane Republican Party.

It would be easy to blame both sides equally for this shift, noted Ornstein, but it is just not true. After the end of the Cold War, he said, "tribal politics were introduced by Newt Gingrich when he came to Congress 40 years ago," and then perfected by Mitch McConnell during the Barack Obama presidency, when McConnell declared his intention to use his G.O.P. Senate caucus to make Obama fail as a strategy for getting Republicans back in power.

The shift in the G.O.P. to tribalism culminated with McConnell denying Obama his constitutional right to appoint a Supreme Court justice with almost a year left in Obama's term. As NPR reported: "Supreme Court picks have often been controversial. There have been contentious hearings and floor debates and contested votes. But to ignore the nominee entirely, as if no vacancy existed? There was no precedent for such an action since the period around the Civil War."

In a speech in August 2016, McConnell boasted: "One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.'"

That was a turning point. That was cheating. What McConnell did broke something very big.

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Is that on YouTube?
That needs to play on a loop as a rallying cry for Dems to vote!

A leading historian:

Quote:

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If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama's first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell's unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the "steal" of Antonin Scalia's seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings. ...

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

concordtom said:

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B.A. Bearacus said:

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bearister said:

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President Mushroom and taxes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

---

Shady, shady family of mushroom dicks.
............................................................................
Excerpt:

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found...

But The Times's investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father's real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents' real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president's parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

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I look forward to hearing more about trump being exposed and going down.
His character leads America down the toilet and he needs to be rebuked.

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His corruption is not new, and it won't change any minds at this point. Trump will attempt to frame any investigation into him as a Democrat / Republican battle and force everyone to take a side because he knows the R's have the structural advantage.

GOP should just change the last line of our national anthem to... "the land of the free, and the home of the winning at all costs."

B.A. Bearacus said:

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GOP should just change the last line of our national anthem to... "the land of the free, and the home of the winning at all costs."

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Plus something about Russkie money and hacking.

Seriously FCCK the GOP traitors.

golden sloth said:

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A leading historian:

Quote:

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If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama's first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell's unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the "steal" of Antonin Scalia's seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings. ...

---

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

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IMO McConnell is the next evolution of something Newt Gingrich created back in the 90s.

A government of tax cheats, for tax cheats:

"The wealthiest taxpayers, the researchers found, pay on average 25 percent less than they owe and, of course, many individuals pay even less."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/donald-trump-fred-taxes-fraud.html

It was probably wedged in his arse and it fell through his Omar the Tentmaker pants.

If it fell down his pant leg and then he stepped on it, it's because he had some illegal Eastern European immigrant hooker in the limo on the way to the airport, he cleaned up and wrapped the tissue around his mushroom, then it fell out.

The satanic lord speaketh to his lobotomized flock.

B.A. Bearacus said:

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The satanic lord speaketh to his lobotomized flock.

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How do you even diagram this argument?

With a toilet brush and orange spray on tan.

Pardon my repost:

Under Trump, he wrote, the party had become "corrupt, indecent, and immoral." With the exception of a select few, the GOP was "filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party's greatest leaders.....


....We're seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like "invade" and "infest." The third thing he does is a create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces the "deep state." And the fifth thing is the assertion that "I am the law, that I am above it." He just said immigrants don't get a hearing; they don't get a court representation......

......What you've seen is this rapid devolution over the last 18 months of the Republican Party becoming a white ethno-nationalist party, a blood-and-soil party that is protectionist, isolationist, that is rooted in resentment and grievance.....

.....If the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan is to be redeemed and resurrected, then the party of Trump must be obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed. And all of the collaborators, the complicit enablers, the school of cowards, need to go down. Maybe something can regenerate from that. Steve Schmidt

My Private Oval Office Press Conference With Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Mike Pompeo
By Olivia Nuzzi

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/my-private-oval-office-press-conference-with-donald-trump.html

bearister said:

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My Private Oval Office Press Conference With Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Mike Pompeo
By Olivia Nuzzi

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/my-private-oval-office-press-conference-with-donald-trump.html

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Nixon was a normal well adjusted individual compared to Trump and his group of sycophantic freaks.

Nothing says Reality TV show president like that.

Common, Usher, and Jay Z visited the white house too

Is there any conduct tRump could engage in while sitting in the Oval Office that his supporters would consider crossing the line? Could he judge a bikini contest there? Hold WWF wrestling match? Please throw me a bone here. I needs to know.

Putin watching the Oval Office pressie today:

?

Things are looking up.

No pain, no gain.

This would have a good group for tRump to pose with in the Oval Office during a pressie but, alas, it is no longer possible:



Any other suggestions for Oval Office photo ops with tRump?

I think this bunch looks like a representative sampling of his base...

And the obvious choice...

As bat****cray Kanye is, Jim Brown was there too. Quite amazing since he defended Ali back in the day. My neighbor said, got hit in the head once too often.

bearister said:

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Is there any conduct tRump could engage in while sitting in the Oval Office that his supporters would consider crossing the line? Could he judge a bikini contest there? Hold WWF wrestling match? Please throw me a bone here. I needs to know.

Putin watching the Oval Office pressie today:

?

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Trump could name Colin Kaepernick his press secretary, make Barack Obama's birthday a national holiday, Invite NWA to sing F the Police on the White House lawn and declare the USA an atheist nation...and it would make no difference.