Windsor
Veteran Expediter
I totally agree, I just wish that person was anyone but Donald Trump
The Trump Card...
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I totally agree, I just wish that person was anyone but Donald Trump
Windsor
Veteran Expediter
I think you are right about everything except that Trump can't be bought. Everyone knows that he has money. Not sure how much because he's the first presidential candidate in modern times to refuse to release his taxes. Hiding something??? Of course he is, he's a billionaire business man. But that's besides my point. Money isn't what Trump is after, what Trump is after is power. Power that someone with his mental makeup should never have, not in this country anyways. So if we know he don't need the money and we know he didn't suddenly wake up one morning and start caring about the little guy, it's clear to me what he's after. Power and influence. You can hear it when he speaks if you listen. Trump is going to lose this election and that's why I asked earlier for likes from people wishing Paul Ryan was running. For anyone who don't like Hillary/Obama at this point has to be wishing someone like Ryan was running because if he were this election would be all but over already. All in my own opinion of course.
You can hear it when he speaks, if you don't listen too closely, yes. If you listen through the filter of a partisan EQ, then you're gonna hear whatever you want.
Trump's already got quite a bit of power and influence, that's not what he's after. He's already powerful, and has a big ego, and comes off as very confident and cocky, same as many other business owners, which is why many people mistake that for something else. What he's after mostly is revenge. Revenge for past deals gone bad, and it just so happens that those deal parallel the biggest problems the country is facing, so his revenge is our revenge. Back when America was great, it was good for business. Trump wants to make America great again. The country is in the crapper, which is bad for business, bad for Trump, and bad for America. Trump wants to fix all that, because he knows if he can fix the country's problems, his problems get fixed at the same time, and he knows very well that he can't fix his problems unless the country's problems are fixed. Rather than trying to work around those problems, he's going to take the bull by the horns and fix them himself.
Trump rails the most on China and Mexico and the bad trade deals and bad immigration policy. He's had several big deal go sour with Chinese businessmen. The most famous is the Bank of America Building on 5th Avenue that Trump sold them and retained 30% of the profits and part ownership and full management of, and the other Hong Kong owners sold it out from under him 5 or 6 years later for a tidy sum of $1.76 billion, netting Trump 30% of that, but the building was worth at least twice that, especially after the developments Trump made to the building (residential apartments and condos pricing in the double-digit millions). They simply got tired of paying Trump the agreed price of maintaining and developing the building, and sold it without consulting him. Trump pocketed half a billion dollars from that deal, which ain't too shabby, but he's still pissed at them. That and other deals didn't go as well as they should have, in part because the Chinese billionaires took advantage of Trump and of the trade and commerce agreements enacted by Congress and the president (all of them going back to Bill Clinton). Same thing is true for Mexico. He had a few deals go bad, and several that didn't work out as well as they should have, mostly because Mexico took advantage of US Commerce deals with Mexico that allowed them to do so.
Clinton, on the other hand, also wants revenge, of a different kind, but also she wants power and money, with the power giving her the ability to get more money. Her primary goal is the Inauguration. We know what she wants to BE (The President, nay, the First WOMAN President), but we really don't have a clue what she wants to DO as President. I mean, not really. She talks a lot of redoubling efforts for this or that problem, but there's no reason to think doing twice of the same old thing is going to produce anything other than twice the problems. She was all for the TPP, then when it became a political liability, she expediently changed her mind. If she becomes president, it will be politically expedient to change her mind right back.
Her résumé shows her going from triumph to triumph, but her actual career as a public figure has been nothing but relentless humiliation. She's a former Goldwater girl turned into the most conventional sort of 1970s activist, she discovered political power before she discovered political ideas and political ideals. Her political ideals, since the 70s, have changed instantly whenever it is politically expedient to do so. The political idea she eventually discovered was feminism, which she spent a few decades dabbling in as she rode the coattails of her husband. When Mrs. Clinton scoffed at American women who “stayed home and baked cookies,” her husband’s people read her the Riot Act, and she meekly published a cookie recipe. It was a fortelling of things to come: Bill Clinton’s subsequent misbehavior, which was far from being limited to getting a hummer from an intern, got pretty bad, but Hillary, who had once heaped scorn on “Stand by Your Man,” did exactly that. Despite discovering feminism and making that her hobby horse, there are no cracked glass ceilings here, she married her way to power, owing everything to her husband, instead of getting there on her own merits. Not exactly a stellar role model for women, and if her history is any indication, she'll be as good for women as president as Obama has been for blacks as president.
Then she became a senator from New York, despite not being from New York, as a final tribute from a Democratic electorate to her husband. The man who preceded her in office, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, hilariously saluted her “Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm,” Hillary and New York being as much a marriage of convenience as Hillary and Bill. She was a legislative nonentity in the Senate, didn't accomplish a thing, because she was running for president from the day she was sworn in. When her moment came, she was outdone in the Democratic primary by an even bigger legislative nonentity in the Senate, Senator Obama. It was funny, in a cruel way, and people laughed at her, in a cruel way. That made her mad. And sad.
Obama gave her the consolation prize of a Cabinet position, which she thoroughly and royally botched, doing great damage to the Obama administration and the country in the process. She was one of the most inept chief diplomats in memory. Hillary's State Department had the nation, including its Democrats, longing for the steady-handed confidence of the Carter years. OMG. She was bad enough that John Kerry is considered a dramatic improvement. And they all laughed again, and in the same cruel way.
When her moment came again, she was put through the wringer by a dopey socialist from Vermont whose young, idealistic partisans - the same people that people like Hillary likes to think themselves as - still don’t want her. They’ll take her over Donald Trump, sure, of course, and they’ll feel a little like the man who hears: “Your prostate isn't that big, it's only about the size of a grapefruit.”
Thanks to Trump, Hillary must be relieved that policy questions will have almost no effect whatsoever on this election. She's obviously bored by them. She just wants to the calendar to hurry up and get to to the inauguration. Her proposals so far have been the usual product of Clintonian political engineering, more clever than intelligent, and inevitably old, tired, hackneyed, and boring, Obama 2.0. She has big ideas (given to her by Bernie) about “free college,” which along with all the other ideas of Bernie's she expediently latched onto to garner favor with the millennials, have about a zero percent chance of surviving past midnight on January 20, 2017.
She wants to walk in the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as something other than a flaccid appendage of Bill Clinton, as though entering the White House as President and not the First Lady will somehow undo 30 years of abuse and degradation. It won't. But it will give her an avenue she is already familiar with to make more money in side deals and behind the scenes pay for play and influence. The Clinton Foundation should be shuttered if she becomes president, as it's not like a business that can be turned over to relatives or put into a blind trust. She can't turn it over to Bill, and certainly not to Chelsea, and still give even the slimmest appearance of impartiality with no conflict of interest. Any and every foreign policy decision will be looked at in the context of the Clinton Foundation. But it won't be shuttered.
Neither of these candidates are trustworthy or in this race for the right reasons, but at least Trump is in it in such a way that is better for the country. Hillary is not.
My 2 cousins who were marines and veterans of the Iraq war, one of which is a HALO jumper, and my father who is a Vietnam veteran could tell me all about it and they all agree that Trump is a sociopathic piece of trash who knows nothing about foreign policy. And you know who else says that? About 50 GOP foreign policy EXPERTS. Why someone would put more value on the opinion of someone with no experience in a particular field than people with years of experience is beyond me.
You mean Asia. But I agree with you. We should have stayed the hell out of it from the get go. We cant force our way of life or our values on another culture.
Windsor
Veteran Expediter
It doesn't sound like I'm the one hearing what I want to hear. Trump doesn't have near the power and definitely not the influence that he craves. That's why he's running in the first place. In sorry, maybe it's my "filter" but I don't feel he gives one crap about making America great again. Even though it is still great contraire to what Trump tells us it is. And it will be great for long after we're gone. Many of us confuse the country being different then they remember it when they were growing up as "going in to the crapper". There's no time in the history of ANY country where it wasn't in constant evolution or constant change. Change is scary I'll admit, but I don't know what making America great again even means. Does it mean everyone can easily find a good job and everything we use we make here? Well that's not going to happen, we don't live in that would anymore. Does it mean the way things were in the 80's or the 60's or maybe the roaring 20's Idk. A hundred years from now not one of us will recognize America. This country is great and I won't be scared into voting for someone. The larger majority of the humans on this planet want to live here for a reason. All I can do is vote my conscience cross my fingers and hope for the best. Not anyone rich or poor can stop things from changing.
Windsor
Veteran Expediter
Just listened to trumps speech. I'm no expert but maybe instead of going to a white community and talking about African Americans maybe he should go to an African American community and talk at them. Before everyone jumps down my throat it's not criticism its advise.
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I heard the same thing on MSNBC and CNN. They were parroting each other: The audience was too white.
And many of us don't confuse the two at all. Many of us can point directly to the bad legislation and policy changes that have been detrimental to the country and its citizens. President Johnson's Great Society was a set of domestic programs aimed at, among other things, end poverty, feed the hungry, provide care for the elderly, knock down racial barriers, eliminate racial injustice, improve education and promote civic culture.
The result? The poverty rate hasn’t dropped, it's doubled. And we now have multigenerational welfare dependency. The $22 trillion that we have spent on poverty is three times the amount of money that the government has spent on all military wars in its history, from the Revolutionary War to the present. For the $2 trillion the federal government has spent on education since 1965, test scores have plummeted and the achievement gap between minority students and their peers has widened. Families, the bedrock of an authentically great society, have suffered most in this great social experiment. The overall out-of-wedlock birth rate has ballooned from 8 percent in the mid-1960s to more than 40 percent today; from 25 percent to 73 percent among blacks. The Great Society's welfare state entitlement programs, including the Social Security amendments that created Medicare and Madicaid, remain the largest drivers of red ink at both the federal and state level, and it's out of control, with an open end budget that is totally dependent on how many people want in on the programs. And it only gets worse as Obamacare is piled on top of it.
Senator Ted Kennedy's total overhaul of the immigration policy, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act, even though it was all Kennedy's from the get-go), eliminated immigration Quota Act of 1921 which mandated per-country numerical limits on immigrants (it favored immigrants from nations with a similar heritage and culture to our own), but it also created preference visa categories that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. That resulted in not only an unlimited massive influx of unskilled and uneducated immigrants, it did exactly what Kennedy said it would not do - dramatically alter the demographics of the country to the point where disjointed multiculturalism takes precedence over national unity and a national culture. Before Kennedy, 9 out of 10 immigrants came mostly from Europe, countries with the same basic heritage, sense of right and wrong, cultural norms and instincts as the people already living here. Since the Act's passage, 9 out of 10 immigrants have come from Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East.
Yes, the US is a nation of immigrants, but between 1600 and 1799 roughly 1 million people came here, almost all of them from somewhere in Europe. Between 1800 and about 1830, immigrants totaled about 8000 per year, most from Europe, but certainly not all. The main thing was it was a slow enough immigration to allow people to better assimilate and assume a new culture of the national identity. Between 1830 and 1914, as the country grew and expanded, we averaged about 385,000 immigrants a year, again most of them from Europe. The Immigration Act of 1924 put limits on immigrants, and on countries. Some of that Act was blatant racism, for sure, but mainly it sought to slow immigration to a manageable level insofar as allowing people to assimilate into the existing culture, to preserve the cultural norms and sensibilities.
In the 365 years between 1600 and 1965, roughly 61 million immigrants arrived here, more than 90% of them of the same cultural heritage. In the 51 years since 1965, we've seen 72 million legal immigrants, more than 1 million a year, with more than 90% of them having a completely different cultural heritage than exists here. That's not evolution, that's a stark paradigm shift in sense and sensibilities.
"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia or Central America.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think."
Senator Ted Kennedy, 1965
Every single sentence he uttered on the Act was wrong, and he knew it was all lies when he said it.
The result of Ted Kennedy and his Act is we no longer have a national culture, a national sense of right and wrong, a national sense of sense and sensibilities. We are a nation of incompatible cultures each with its own sense of right and wrong, refusing to assimilate into a national cultural heritage. And we are worse for it.
I can point to legislation that greatly benefits the banking industry, and how Congress and the various presidents enacted legislation that actually gives incentives to companies for moving jobs out of the country, and how we have trade deals where we export crops to countries for one price and then import the same crops grown in those very same countries at a higher price that causes consumers to pay more for food but benefits the banking industry and the Washington elites of both parties, all to the detriment of the nation and its citizens.
So when I say, "the country is in the crapper," I'm not just flapping my lips nostalgic. If you would like a few dozen other examples I can point to where bad legislation and policy changes have been detrimental to the country and its citizens, you just let me know. And my list is decidedly non-partisan, despite the two most glaring examples of bad decision-making above of Kennedy and Johnson being those of Democrats. The Republicans are all up in it, too.
Well so let me get this straight Clinton is running for more power and money but even though Trump doesn't need more money and power he's just in it for revenge? That doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense to me......
I thought I laid it out so that it made sense. I guess not.
My only suggestion would be to learn as much about both candidates as you can, learn what their motivations have been historically. Then draw your own conclusions.
Or antagonizing.If he had done that, the media would characterize it as pandering.
Scarborough article from awhile back:
'And if you find that curious, perhaps you will find it even more interesting that a political campaign whose security has been so stifling as to draw angry comparisons to fascist regimes would plan a key rally for Trump in the middle of a racially diverse urban campus. The fact that this campus sits in the middle of a city that is so Democratic that it has not elected a Republican mayor since before Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as president makes the venue’s selection even more bizarre.'
Donald Trump’s Chicago scam
Meh I think you might have touched on it when you mentioned making America great again. If we are already great why in Bob's name we have these choices :O
You nailed it. We aren't that great.
We're still good. Don't get me wrong. We're still the best there is. But that's like ordering your $150 Kobe Beef ribeye medium rare and getting it well done. It's still pretty tasty, but it could certainly be a lot better.
Correct.
Winston Churchill once said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.”
We're not doing what is required.
Interesting you mention Winston Churchill. Today he is held in pretty high regard. In his day it was common opinion that he was a loud mouth jerk not unlike Trump.
Windsor
Veteran Expediter
Well I disagree that this country isn't great. Just like all of you, I drive all over this country and it looks pretty great to me. Trump is going to restore law and order. My whole life and everywhere I go in this country I see law and order. In fact there's less violence and more law and order In this country than almost any other time in our history. Well except for all the Mexican rapists running around everywhere.
JohnWC
Veteran Expediter
I'm not sure about less crime
I think for the last few years they have been juggling the stats to justify their agenda
It's kinda like if we get rid of guns, gun deaths will go down true
But will deaths go down is the real question
Even the media does it when rebutting (instead of reporting) Trump. Trump says violent crime is up in the 50 largest cities, which is true. The media "fact checks" him and goes, "Not true! nationwide the violent crime rate is down!"
... and the beat goes on