Trump for the win in November.

[MajGenl.Meade]

The second-most honest man in the world enjoys relaxing at home on the weekend and pork farming



Now we can rest easy in his assurance that politics will never never dictate Justice Department actions and particularly those of the Attorney General of these yere United States.

[Joe Guy]

"What they need's a damn good whacking...."

[Gob]

Your system is fucked.

Now I know I've been saying this for 20 years, but those 20 years have done nothing but prove me right...

And it's getting worse...

[Darren]

Your system is fucked.

Now I know I've been saying this for 20 years, but those 20 years have done nothing but prove me right...

And it's getting worse...

I agree. The amount of incompetence and self-serving in the federal government is astonishing. Every time an issue comes up and the solution proposed is to write Congress and beg for money it demonstrates how far down the path the US has gone.

We no longer remember when it was much smaller and simpler.

[Scooter]

Still waiting for the number of deaths that will transform COVID-19 from a "mediademic" into a matter of real concern for you.

[Big RR]

We no longer remember when it was much smaller and simpler.

You're right, those good old days before social security and medicare--if people can't afford to go toi the doctor, they should either die and decrease the surplus population or take whatever charity care they can get. Before we had a federal highway system permitting easy interstate travel by car, or an agency overseeing the airlines, even one or more agencies to deal with disasters... I can handle everything myself with a pocket knife and a bag of beans, right?

[Gob]

if people can't afford to go toi the doctor, they should either die and decrease the surplus population or take whatever charity care they can get.

"Are there no prisons?"
"Plenty of prisons..."
"And the Union workhouses." demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
"Both very busy, sir..."
"Those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

[Econoline]

An actual "win" for Trump might not be what most people think it would be...

Is this what he really wants?

I was fired from 13 jobs in a little over a decade — so many times that I wrote a book about it. I’ve been fired from an Internet start-up, a 24-hour adult bookstore, a national nonprofit, a mall video arcade and a telemarketing firm, among many others. All those jobs had one thing in common: I hated them. And yet, even though I was young, mobile and college-educated, I never just quit and found a better job. No, at each one I dug in, scowled through every day and exuded toxicity like a South American tree frog until everyone’s morale was as low as mine. I wanted out, and they wanted me out, but the only thing I wanted more than my freedom was to not give them what they wanted.

If you’re lucky or, at least, a healthy, well-adjusted adult, you’ve never been in this situation. But it’s one I know intimately, and I see the same psychology playing out every day in the White House.

We didn’t need insider exposés about “executive time” spent shouting at the TV to know that Trump hates being president. It’s there in every seething tweet, every prickly exchange with reporters, every shrug of a coronavirus briefing. He despises everything about Washington — the modesty, the expertise, the functionaries around him who have the temerity to do their jobs and expect him to do his. At night, he must dream of telling them (us) to take this job and shove it, so he can return to his natural calling of selling subpar steaks and repeatedly filing for bankruptcy.

He wants out, but we all know he'd never step down. I get it. I do! It’s the reverse of the Groucho Marx saying about how he’d never want to be in a club who’d have him as a member: I’d never voluntarily leave an office where I wasn’t wanted. They had to drag me out each time, the HR lady snatching the key card out of my hand, then signaling for security to escort me to the elevator. Why did I resist leaving so many places I hated, and why does he? It’s a matter of spite: At some point, making your enemies unhappy becomes more important than making yourself happy. And if that was true for me, it has to be true for Trump, too: Spite animates his personality as much as his politics.

After one firing, the security guard at the elevator told me, “Don’t come back here.” I thought he was crazy, but later I understood that he’d recognized something I hadn’t yet: the way you can glean a narcotic satisfaction from a toxic workplace. I’d look at my obsequious cubicle neighbors, fake-laughing at the boss’s jokes, working unpaid overtime in pursuit of raises that would never come, and my own petty disgruntlement seemed, in contrast, downright heroic. No doubt Trump has tapped into similar compensations. He looks at Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and he thinks, now there’s a guy even more despicable than me. He can honestly say he’s less unhinged than Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who said the coronavirus came from a Chinese “super-laboratory,” and slightly craftier than Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who is alleged to have engaged in insider trading right before the pandemic hit. He may hate D.C., but it’s the only place where he can feel like a winner.

He won’t get any of that once he leaves office. The false sense of superiority doesn’t survive outside the bubble. As soon as you hit the sidewalk after being fired, you go from the antihero of your own prestige miniseries, Sisyphus pushing a boulder of balled-up expense reports up a hill, to a jobless nobody. If and when Trump loses in November, he’ll just be a guy who doesn’t know how to tie a tie — or close an umbrella. In other words, an average loser.

And yet, the heart wants what it wants. Even as I spitefully hung on, I desperately wanted them to make me leave. I swaggered in late and left early, rolled my eyes in meetings, messed up on purpose, and, in a lot of cases, simply refused to do my job. Sound familiar? Trump’s not just bad at the job — his incompetence seems intentional, a plea for release, like a kid doing the dishes badly so he’ll never be asked to do them again. Someone who wants to keep their job doesn’t brag, on live TV, that he’s taking a drug that his own Food and Drug Administration has warned can cause “life-threatening heart problems.” Again, I’ve been there. At one job, at a Netflix-type start-up, I was given three months to research and make selections for a million-dollar purchase of movie licenses. I waited until the day they were due, spent 10 minutes picking random titles, and then went out for a burrito. Surely, I thought, this would be the final straw. They couldn’t possibly keep me on after a performance this poor.

But so many Fridays rolled around without the fateful summons (“Can you step into my office?”), and I left for the weekend nearly in tears. You mean I have to come back on Monday?

Eventually, I always got the firing (and the unemployment checks) that I wanted. But Trump’s situation is a little stickier; his nightmare (and ours) continues. It will probably even get worse. Impeachment failed, so the election is his next off-ramp. He knows now that he has to fail harder, go farther. He will come in even later, sigh even louder, pore over the employee handbook (in his case, the Constitution), looking for rules to break. If you were to point out that his actions have consequences for others, that he’s making everyone else miserable, he’d shrug and say, perhaps rightly, that if you put a reality-TV huckster in the White House, you deserve everything you get. I used the same logic; if you only skimmed my padded and exaggerated résumé, if you didn’t even bother to check my (fake) references, you sort of brought this all on yourself. And if you’re too cowardly to fire me, aren’t you endorsing all this in a roundabout way?

Now we just have to wait, like my former cubicle neighbors, for the self-destruction to enter its final phase. Take heart from this: No matter how horrifying a second Trump term sounds to you, it probably sounds even worse to Trump. And there’s still the outside chance that he could find the guts to seize his destiny and just quit. Donny, if you’re reading this, trust me: It feels wonderful when you finally escape. Resign, go home, block all your former co-workers on social media, and have a good cry. Someone else will take care of the whole coronavirus thing. It’s not like you were really trying, anyway.

[BoSoxGal]

Interesting piece (how did the writer get unemployment after so many firings for cause? Makes one wonder at the veracity of the yarn) which fails entirely to discuss one of Trump’s major motivations for staying in a job he certainly hates the details of: the minute he steps out of office he’s exposed to criminal and civil liability in a number of pending cases that could very well see him in real orange, not the spray on kind. Four more years gives him lots more time to stack the courts, corrupt the DOJ (and maybe get some SDNY cases mothballed), destroy evidence and try to guarantee a friendly #46 who will have a pardon on offer.

Trump is a raging narcissist whose ego craves another biggest ever inaugural (he’ll happily claim it even if it means hundreds of thousands of his followers spreading coronavirus on the Mall and all over DC, then back at home), but he also needs the win to maintain any semblance of life as he’s known it for 77 years. I think he must have moments when he chokes with the fear of what comes after a loss this November.

[Econoline]

If you're really curious, this is the book which he mentions having written: (I haven't read it; he probably gives more details there.)

Canned: How I Lost Ten Jobs In Ten Years and Learned to Love Unemployment (2nd Revised Edition) by Franklin Schneider

This is the book for you, if you're a fan of: George Orwell's “Down and Out in Paris and London,” the self-immolation of late stage capitalism, the Cam'ron song “I Hate My Job,” working for six months and then getting unemployment checks for a year, Charles Bukowski, the fifteen hour workweek, getting blackout drunk and hurling a lawnmower through the picture window of your ex-boss's house, Michel Houellebecq, the surprisingly Marxist undertones of Dolly Parton's “9 to 5,” things that cost exactly $3.99, makeshift break room tiramisu made from crushed Twinkies, instant coffee, and stolen yogurt, Mikhail Lermontov, abruptly throwing yourself onto the third rail while waiting for your morning train, hate-reading Dilbert comics, “The Office” (the funny one, not the American version), universal basic income, “Tropic of Capricorn” by Henry Miller, bad attitudes, shoplifting from Wal-Mart, saying “on the dole” even if you're not British, that scene from “Seinfeld” where George and Jerry are trying to think of a new career for George, using lots of emojis and novelty fonts on your resume, ironic poverty, “Journey to the End of the Night” by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the more depressing stories in the Raymond Carver oeuvre, or the theory of surplus value.

Yeah, the piece was interesting, and some parts REALLY rang true. (E.g., “We didn’t need insider exposés about “executive time” spent shouting at the TV to know that Trump hates being president. It’s there in every seething tweet, every prickly exchange with reporters, every shrug of a coronavirus briefing. He despises everything about Washington — the modesty, the expertise, the functionaries around him who have the temerity to do their jobs and expect him to do his.”) You're right about the legal realities of why he really can't just walk away from it all at this point, but I can't help feeling that if someone offered him some sort of magical way to just leave and go back to his previous life with no legal repercussions, he'd take it in an instant.

[Darren]

Even with Chauvin's murder of Floyd, the rioting increased the odds of Trump winning in November by adding a law of order aspect to the election.

[Bicycle Bill]

Even with Chauvin's murder of Floyd, the rioting increased the odds of Trump winning in November by adding a law of order aspect to the election.

Much as I hate to admit it, Darren speaks the truth here — even though he conveniently neglects to mention that the inhumane treatment in the original confrontation between the police and George Floyd is pretty much the same thing Trump has been espousing even since his 2016 campaign when he was inciting his followers to 'rough up' hecklers and protestors at rallies and claiming he would pay their fines if they got arrested for doing so.

But what we're talking about and seeing now are not protests, but criminal actions.  The Democrats need to move more toward the center on the issue of crime and punishment.  Protests are one thing; riots and civil disorder are another.  Do the crime, do the time.  You loot and we'll shoot.  Set a fire, and we'll open fire.  They used to hang highwaymen; they used to hang pirates; they even hung cattle rustlers and horse thieves — and those individuals who went into that line of work anyway went in knowing what was gonna happen to them when they got caught.  Maybe we need to go back to some of that "eye for an eye" way of thinking again, and not be so goddamned reluctant to carry it out.  

Yeah, I know .... it's only property, and it's (supposedly) not worth a human life, but when all is said and done, you still don't have the right to deprive someone of it just because you're pissed off over some injustice.  Just ask the Twin Cities fireman (who, ironically, is a 'brother' himself) whose life savings went up in smoke because the sports bar he was going to open turned out to be in the wrong spot when someone decided to escalate a 'protest'.  Ask the developers who saw their affordable housing development under construction burn to the ground because someone thought that this is the way to 'protest' police brutality.  Ask the executives of Target who, trust me, will be taking a long and hard look when the topic comes up about reopening the Lake Street store because some individuals went from civilized to savage in the course of a couple of hours.  Ask all the other proprietors and employees of places that were damaged and destroyed (list here), not just in the Minneapolis neighborhood where the original police encounter took place but elsewhere across the Twin Cities metro area, just because some people went from 'peaceful protesting' to all-out anarchy.

The point is, America has been trying to "rehabilitate" criminals and lawbreakers for decades, but statistics show that there are some people who just cannot be rehabbed.  We need to finally accept that fact and make sure people like these are not allowed to interact with civil society, but need to be kept separate from it.  It's time for prisons go back to being places of punishment rather than being a finishing school for felons.

-"BB"-

[Darren]

But what we're talking about and seeing now are not protests, but criminal actions.  The Democrats need to move more toward the center on the issue of crime and punishment.  Protests are one thing; riots and civil disorder are another.  Do the crime, do the time.  You loot and we'll shoot.  Set a fire, and we'll open fire.  They used to hang highwaymen; they used to hang pirates; they even hung cattle rustlers and horse thieves — and those individuals who went into that line of work anyway went in knowing what was gonna happen to them when they got caught.  Maybe we need to go back to some of that "eye for an eye" way of thinking again, and not be so goddamned reluctant to carry it out.  

Yeah, I know .... it's only property, and it's (supposedly) not worth a human life, but when all is said and done, you still don't have the right to deprive someone of it just because you're pissed off over some injustice.  Just ask the Twin Cities fireman (who, ironically, is a 'brother' himself) whose life savings went up in smoke because the sports bar he was going to open turned out to be in the wrong spot when someone decided to escalate a 'protest'.  Ask the developers who saw their affordable housing development under construction burn to the ground because someone thought that this is the way to 'protest' police brutality.  Ask the executives of Target who, trust me, will be taking a long and hard look when the topic comes up about reopening the Lake Street store because some individuals went from civilized to savage in the course of a couple of hours.  Ask all the other proprietors and employees of places that were damaged and destroyed (list here), not just in the Minneapolis neighborhood where the original police encounter took place but elsewhere across the Twin Cities metro area, just because some people went from 'peaceful protesting' to all-out anarchy.

The point is, America has been trying to "rehabilitate" criminals and lawbreakers for decades, but statistics show that there are some people who just cannot be rehabbed.  We need to finally accept that fact and make sure people like these are not allowed to interact with civil society, but need to be kept separate from it.  It's time for prisons go back to being places of punishment rather than being a finishing school for felons.

-"BB"-

I have mixed feelings about the prison system.

I've never used drugs, smoked weed, etc. In my much younger days alcohol was my drug of choice. After waking up on ship and not remembering walking back from the bar, I went cold turkey on the hard stuff. You don't dock in the nice sections of cities.

I still drink a beer on occasion. That's it. The War on Drugs never caught me or mine. That's not the case for those that got warehoused in prison for drugs like weed. Lots of people went to prison for BS. Politicians got plenty of praise for passing laws, washing their hands of the situation and moving onto the next problem.

We're back to the same point now. Stick offenders in prison. I'm not saying some do not need to spend the rest of their lives with three hots and a cot or bologna sandwiches while they're locked down for whatever.

In one of my previous incarnations I had access to a federal prisons for two reasons. One was as a firefighter which meant another background investigation and being schooled on what to do and not do while inside. Leave your gun at home was on the list.

The other was an up close and personal interaction with inmates when I picked up items for a local business and returned the same when finished. Those inmates lived in a camp outside the wire. They were in for nonviolent crimes. They worked in the warehouse which supplied the material for the prison industry. Any of them could walk away. Very few did.

Other than having a bigger screen TV and more cable channels than I had, I never heard about education from them. Compare that to the Amish guy who mentioned he regretted he could not take algebra.

The violent offenders were the worse of the worse. They got one and only one tool at a time for their work. When they got frisky, they got locked down and the entire prison staff had to make bologna sandwiches. The point is there's obviously people that are a risk to others. Others are not at least in a life or limb sort of way.

So what do we do differently than we've done before? We already tried the lock them all up strategy. More of the same to add to the victims of police brutality? Floyd wasn't an oops. He was an on purpose in a sense.

I don't think Chauvin killed Floyd on purpose. Did he suspect Floyd would continue to resist as he had already done? Thus he wasn't letting up because he heard BS before and had people under arrest start resisting violently?

Of course you're thinking I'm defending Chauvin. What I'm pointing out is we have an issue with policing, the militarization of the police, the War on Drugs and who knows what else. We can't just build more prisons and say we solved the problems.

[BoSoxGal]

The vast majority of inmates in our prison system are not violent offenders. Our prisons aren’t cushy comfortable rehabilitation-oriented facilities - if they were, as they are in Norway, our recidivism rates would likely be vastly lower. Our prisons are warehouses where inmates are treated with brutality and learn brutality - non-violent offenders often go in with no criminal inclination other than selling a dime bag of weed to a friend and come out with PTSD from repeated rape and other brutality endured in prison, with no ability to get a decent job or find decent housing thanks to a felony record, and some of them then turn to violent crime.

Yes we should have violent predators in prison serving significant sentences, but we should end the war on drugs framework and the private prison industry which has grown our incarceration rates to mind boggling levels in recent decades and destroyed families and communities in large scale ways.

[Darren]

Even with Chauvin's murder of Floyd, the rioting increased the odds of Trump winning in November by adding a law and order aspect to the election.

[RayThom]

Even with Chauvin's murder of Floyd, the rioting increased the odds of Trump winning in November by adding a law and order aspect to the election.

AND...?

[ex-khobar Andy]

Wow! I am agreeing with Darren and BSG in the course of a single thread.

More seriously, BSG you usually speak sense and I'm with you far more often than not, so it's no surprise.

Darren - you're obviously thoughtful and can construct an argument and you make some very valid points. You're not the stupid redneck you sometimes make yourself out to be. (And yes, I am well aware that 'redneck' is a derogatory and prejudiced term but I can't think of a better one for Darren's persona on this board.) But why oh why oh why do you persist in supporting the feral and wicked imbecile currently occupying the Oval Office? It just doesn't make sense.

On one point. "I don't think Chauvin killed Floyd on purpose." I agree based on no more evidence than I have seen which isn't much. A driver who sets off home from the bar with BAC 0.25 has no intention of killing a pedestrian. But we hold him (it's usually, but not always, a him) criminally liable. Someone smarter than me can figure out the appropriate charge. I know that in some jurisdictions if the prosecutors go for Murder 2 (for example) the jury has a simple yes or no. If they think that maybe it meets the criteria for Murder 3 (and excuse me if the terminology is wrong) but not for Murder 2, he walks - not guilty.

[BoSoxGal]

If the measure is did Chauvin intentionally set out to end Floyd’s life then I can’t say from the evidence currently available to me that is the case.

But I think given his 19 year record of numerous complaints, with excessive use of force being among them, it is very likely that Chauvin simply did not recognize the value of Floyd’s life from the start of the interaction - a total lack of empathy and regard for the humanity of a potential defendant in a criminal matter. That is a perspective far too widely held in our law enforcement ranks and it leads to depravity in the application of force that they are licensed to utilize.

Sadly because reverence for law enforcement is still widely held in the citizenry despite these many filmed cases of egregious abuses of force, they have every likelihood of never being charged and if charged, every likelihood of being acquitted. This is not my left leaning outrage speaking, it is a totally accurate depiction of the statistics on criminal prosecutions of law enforcement officers in this country - the research has been done and done again.

[Darren]

Trump is exercising his tough on crime option. I never thought he'd become a politician.

"WASHINGTON D.C./PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Sunday, saying that ANTIFA will be designated as a terrorist organization by the United States."

[Econoline]

"Terrorist"? Maybe. "Organization"? Not so much.