US Politics

Interesting

Batshit nuts, you mean. Irrespective of the policies of either Trump or Clinton, irrespective of their actions and statements in the run up to the election, those reasons are ridonk. Trump's entire industry and business has been based on overextending credit, defaulting, ignoring codes and licensing, and not least, evading / avoiding taxes at the corporate and personal level.

As to not being beholden? You don't end up handing over billions in real estate to someone like Carl Icahn through the kindness of your heart.

Trump asks Alabama senator Jeff Sessions to be the next US attorney general - so presumably the US legal system will soon be less forgiving than ISIS.

Unless you're rich - in which case, the system can f*ck off and you'll be ok.

So probably a bit like the current one then, but with more death penalties. Great.

Has anyone read anything about the potential tension between small government/state's rights conservatives and Trump's domestic intentions?

Yuge piece on Obama reaction to election in New Yorker, compares it to 2004

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency

Some of his 2007 bail out came from Russian state owned banks. Or so I was told.

This guy is going to be running the CIA.

Pompeo received $80,000 in donations from Koch Industries and its employees.[9]

Pompeo opposes the Affordable Care Act.[10]

Pompeo is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, which has endorsed him.[11]

Pompeo opposes closing Guantánamo Bay detention camp.[12] After a 2013 visit to the prison, Pompeo said, of the prisoners who were on hunger strike, "It looked to me like a lot of them had put on weight."[13]

Pompeo supported the federal Government shutdown of 2013, blaming President Obama while acknowledging that the Republican Party could take a hit from the shutdown. He stated that he believed the shutdown was necessary to avoid a predicted "American financial collapse 10 years from now."[14] In January 2014, Pompeo voted against a two-year budget deal drafted by Paul Ryan that would avert any government shutdown until 2015 and cut deficits by $23 billion.[15]

Pompeo opposes the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, and supports eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency's greenhouse gas registry program.[16] He signed the Americans for Prosperity's No Climate Tax pledge.[17] He has called for the elimination of wind power production tax credits, calling them an "enormous government handout".[18]

In a 2013 speech on the House floor, Pompeo said Muslim leaders who fail to denounce acts of terrorism done in the name of Islam are "potentially complicit" in the attacks.[19] The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Pompeo to revise his remarks, calling them "false and irresponsible".[20]

Pompeo supports the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, characterizing the agency's efforts as "good and important work."[21]

In March 2014, Pompeo denounced NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's inclusion in the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, and called for Snowden's invitation to speak via telecast at the annual Texas event be withdrawn, lest it encourage "lawless behavior" among attendees.[22] In February 2016, Pompeo said Snowden "should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence."[23] Pompeo has advocated for rolling back post-Snowden surveillance reforms, saying "Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection."[24]

Pompeo is strongly opposed to abortion, except in cases when the mother's life is at risk.[25] He does not support abortion in cases of rape and incest.[26

Some real scary people floating to the top.

I don't agree with her but I don't think you can write off that many people - the 'soft' trump vote, as it were - as batshit nuts. We need to try and understand.

This guy is going to be running the CIA.

Whereas this is total batshit nuttiness. When the Tea Party were first around who would have predicted one of them would end up running the CIA?

Trump is a failure in business, he's lost money rather than made it.

Yep. The irony is that our mutual employer had a big special report in June on how he lost millions of dollars on his golf courses. She hadn't read it.

I don't write off the people - just those particular demonstrably false lines of reasoning.

Very good read that.

Correct, but they also need to try and understand that some groups are understandably scared.

I mean, look at the shit in Northern Ireland understanding DUP voters doesn't mean the issues for LGBT people/women just magically vanish.

(and this is true for any vote BTW...I may unintended cause some bother for some with my votes too)

Odds on Putin handing over Snowden as a moving in present to Trump?

I worry that the (moderate) Trump/Brexit voters will not be persuaded that they have made a mistake until something cataclysmic happens. Hopefully it'll only be an economic disaster, but I worry that hand in hand with that will come violence on a domestic scale that none of us have ever experienced. I really hope I'm being overly pessimistic.
THe rise of the far right in the western world suggests that capitalism in its current form will have to be drastically changed; after all that is the cause of the root problems that has people voting for anti-establishment figures. If it is going to change, there's going to be a period of upheaval and fuck knows what else. It has to change, otherwise we're all fucked anyway. We're so close to the point where we've pumped too much CO2 into the atmosphere that there's no going back, but most big corporations rely on constant growth and resource use.

Aaaanyway, back to Trump. Jeff Sessions - racist. Michael Flynn - racist and Russian-owned. Mike Pompeo - racist pro lifer.

It's like Brexit, really. People voted for a change and then ended up getting the absolute most extreme version of whatever it is they thought they were voting for.
I don't know what is to be done, really. I imagine at least that Trump's America is going to be so fucking extreme that the dems could put a dog in a vest up as their candidate in 4 years time and they'd walk it - but then that's what we assumed about Hilary. Brexit, there's no going back for a generation so, yay, we're fucked and our children are fucked.

Hey that was a long post.

Ex CEO of Blackwater mercenary outfit for Defence Secretary. Fuck me.

Rumoured btw

Rupert Murdoch just arrived at Trump Tower.

Potential Minister of Propaganda?

That stuff about Atlantis is persuasive ;)

This is very similar to what the Trump voters I met on holiday were saying. They don't really like Trump but Hillary is worse and at least Trump will 'get stuff done'.
Then they asked me if I was worried that ISIS had infiltrated the U.K. and I laughed in their faces (politely).

Browsing certain Reddit subs, one gets the impression most Americans think Europe is under siege.

Overheard quote of the day, from someone who should know.
"It's utter nonsense. Everybody knows that being an Ambassador means that you have to be terribly nice to crowds of incredibly tiresome people, 24 hours a day. It's not really Nigel's forte."

I suspect this is people grasping at straws, but perhaps there is a Grand Global Conspiracy:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/23/hillary-clinton-election-vote-recount-michigan-pennsylvania-wisconsin