President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Let's see. Twitter profile picture vs. being held withoe.ut bail in a trial that's headed straight for espionage charges. Hard to see how Ms.Butina sees this as a winning move.

 

I was saying 11 mos. relative to the rest of us, not relative to the other servicemen. That's what motivates me to say cutting their benefits is so wrong, wrong for all in the service.

 

Beauty is only skin deep. Ugly goes to the bone.

 

Gotta stick with what they know, I guess. In this case, it's trolling.

 

So let me get this straight (that’s not a gay joke).

Your concern is that three top cyber security officials in a department that is coming off an historically terrible job at cyber security are retiring.

Are you a big fan of Hue Jackson? Do you have a poster of Jason Garrett in your room?

It’s almost as if your concern is not the Russians or the integrity of our elections. It’s almost as if you aren’t truly concerned about anything and just want to knee-jerk complain because Trump.

If you really cared about these important issues, wouldn’t you want better people protecting these things you claim to hold oh so dear?

 

The two biggest winners of Trump’s first term are Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson.

 

And it damn sure is. Basically, cutting benefits after the person made the bargain and did their time gives me the red ass, whether it's military benefits or a state pension. The person involved served in good faith and gave up X years of their life. Coming in after the fact and saying "Whoopsie, we don't have enough money to fund this, so we're going to have to cut you by 30%" gives me the red ass.

Full disclosure: My wife has 29 years in the Alabama Retirement System, which is actually pretty well funded thanks to David Bronner, who has run that fund for many years. There is a continuing effort across the nation to do away with defined pension plans, mostly because a plan that manages the retirement funds for 300,000 people as in Alabama's fund can squeeze the fund charges down to nothing. The Koch Brothers, among others, are pushing to do away with this sort of plan and replacing them with 401k's. That would mean that they could charge management fees on those 300,000 people individually, and that they could raise the charges to boot since there would be no more collective bargaining.

Google up what happened to Kentucky's state pension plan after this happened to those poor retirees up there.

 

He doesn't have enough charisma and wouldn't excite the base, but I have several friends who worked directly for him, both at DOJ and Covington & Burling. They all rave about him in ways you rarely hear about lawyers at that level. It's enough to make me like him.

 

"Trump did not brief his own diplomats on the Helsinki meeting. The American Secretary of State, national-security adviser, and Ambassador to Moscow, who attended the lunch after Trump and Putin’s private session, have been publicly silent on the substance of the meetings, leaving it to the Russians, for now, to make claims about what was actually said and done behind closed doors between the two Presidents.

A U.S. Ambassador in Europe, who has extensive experience dealing with Russia, told me that he and other State Department officials who would need to know have received no post-summit briefings, or even talking points about what happened, both of which would be standard practice after such an important encounter. “Nothing,” he told me. “We are completely in the dark. Completely.”"

“No Way to Run a Superpower”: the Trump-Putin Summit and the Death of American Foreign Policy