Random Politics & Religion #22

I've been to Seattle and the rain and gloomy weather is enough to make any normal person turn crazy.

I didn't realize we had to answer every stupid question anyone ever throws out here to avoid being accused of trolling...

Thank goodness I was never normal.

...But it's hard to see how Kushner doesn't prevail in one form or other, together with the faction including his wife, Ivanka Trump, the influential economic adviser and former Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, and deputy national security adviser, Dina Powell.

Who says bipartisanship is dead? With the exception of Powell—a non-ideological Republican—this group is all Democrats, and not lunch-bucket Democrats, but ladies-who-lunch Democrats who have marinated for decades in the financial and social elite of Manhattan....

Interesting observation:


From:
When Jared Wins
Politico.

So did the dems really loose?

So did the dems really loose?

We were talking about Chanti getting a buck a post from WaPo...
Did anyone see the forbes "top influencers list"?

top influencers

Kayla Itsines (#1 in Fitness) – Her “Sweat With Kayla” app generated $17 million in revenue in 2016 (according to App Annie), making the 25-year-old Australian the Internet’s undisputed workout queen.

how in the hell...

The business community is brimming with optimism across America – the highest level in ten years. I know it, because I hear it from my colleagues every day. We’re hopeful, and for good reason: President Donald Trump is moving his job creation agenda forward resolutely.

First, it was Carrier jobs, then ExxonMobil, and now it’s Ford Motor Company and more are on the way. Importantly, these big enterprises will also create thousands more jobs with their extended families of suppliers, all small and medium-sized businesses.

America’s chief executives aren’t happy with Washington’s flat tire on the road to healthcare reform, but we’re confused by the pessimism coming from Capitol Hill and the media elite. While the President’s critics wring their hands, we see remarkable success getting the short shrift.

Maybe because so few politicians have ever signed the front of a paycheck, they don’t see what CEO’s see.

We look past the remarkable 12 percent growth in the stock market, a rising tide lifting pensioners and middle class Americans alike, and see the Consumer Confidence Index, which just hit its highest mark since December of 2000. "Consumers' assessment of current business and labor market conditions improved considerably," Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at The Conference Board, said in a statement on Tuesday.

That’s all 100 percent Donald Trump. But there’s far more, if you get past the screaming negative headlines and listen.

Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the locomotive of American business gaining steam, stoked by the President every week since his inauguration. He’s clear-cutting the path to robust economic growth, and even Congress is doing its part.

For the eight years of Barack Obama’s aggressive regulatory regime, the 103 million words in the Code of Federal Regulations came down hardest on small business. That’s changing fast.

Now, if Trump’s administration creates one regulation, they must kill two. Congress is fast tracking bills to the President to reverse regulations, using rarely deployed legislative tactics. Trump has already signed seven of these bills - half of all the laws he’s signed so far - and he’s promised many more.

Experts say returning to the regulatory climate of the late '90s can bring 6,000 more new businesses and 100,000 more new jobs every single year. Our first CEO-President has promised to "remove every job-killing regulation we can find." Add that pace to the 298,000 jobs created his first month and it’s not hard to see how President Trump could sustain 200,000-plus monthly job creation and, soon, economic growth beating three percent month-after-month - the first time since George W. Bush.

But the President has accomplished even more: he nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch, a bedrock conservative replacement for legendary Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He’s frozen bureaucratic growth, rejected the unfair Trans-Pacific Partnership, made real moves to end Dodd-Frank’s job-killing spree, turned on the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, and just signed an executive order ending the war on coal and putting thousands of Americans back to work.

By this time in his first term, Barack Obama had passed his first emergency Stimulus, but, little else emerged until a year later in 2010. George W. Bush didn’t achieve his first tax cuts until six months into his presidency, and even his popular No Child Left Behind program took a year. Trump has been in office less than 75 days.

Bill Clinton didn’t fare well in his early months, either: his first economic reforms didn’t come until August 1993; his Brady Bill didn’t succeed until November. And Clinton’s own healthcare reform campaign died a slow, miserable death 18 months into his presidency.

Of course, there’s some disappointment in the recent health care effort. Business leaders are eager for an end to the stifling mandates of Obamacare. America knows it will implode without reform, everyone is bracing for more cost spikes in 2018, and millions of part time workers know Obamacare kills their full time opportunities. This can’t continue.

Economic growth must be our nation’s top priority, and we cannot get there with the broken health care system we have today. Clearly, both parties must listen to the American people, put partisan politics aside, and work together to give all of us the health care we deserve.

But as this train steams toward the milestone of its first 100 days, American consumers and businesses, large and small, are encouraged by the direction we’re going, pleased by the results we’re seeing, and we have real hope for the future.

This article, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example of a deflection. One that so many "news" agencies, most especially CNN, is saying the Rice affair is really doing.

So, instead, they report this trash. Since, you know, they have zero evidence of Russia colluding with Trump, but they put all of their cards on that non-story.

Trump's Results

Sources are bad, mmk?

It wasn't the Rice bit buried deep within that interested me. It was the palace intrigue part.

We were talking about Chanti getting a buck a post from WaPo...
Did anyone see the forbes "top influencers list"?

top influencers

Kayla Itsines (#1 in Fitness) – Her “Sweat With Kayla” app generated $17 million in revenue in 2016 (according to App Annie), making the 25-year-old Australian the Internet’s undisputed workout queen.

how in the hell...

Some are. Yours tend to be worse than mine. Not that either of us has a perfect score, nor limits ourselves to the echo chamber.

The Pentagon said Thursday that U.S. forces in Afghanistan dropped the military’s largest non-nuclear bomb on an Islamic State target in eastern Afghanistan. This is the first time a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB) has been used in combat.

The Pentagon says the bomb was dropped on a cave complex believed to be used by ISIS fighters in the Achin district of Nangarhar province, very close to the Pakistan border.

Here’s what you need to know:

· The MOAB, also known as the “Mother of All Bombs,” was dropped out of a C-130 aircraft in Afghanistan for the first time on Thursday.

· The MOAB had never been used in combat until now. It was brought into service in 2008.

· The MOAB weighs 21,000 pounds, including 18,000 pounds of explosives.

· It is the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

· The MOAB is considered similar to a small nuclear weapon.

· The concept behind the MOAB was first developed in the Vietnam War through the BLU-82B/C-130 weapon system, nicknamed the “Daisy Cutter.” That weighed 15,000 pounds and, with a huge blast radius, was used to clear jungles. In addition, it was a psychological weapon, in that the loud sound and huge flash helped create “shock and awe” in the enemy. The bomb was later used in Afghanistan.

· During the George W. Bush administration, the BLU-82B gave way to the even larger GBU-43, or MOAB.

· It was first tested back in 2003.

· The bomb, in its first combat use, was dropped on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangahar province. MOAB is designed for such a situation—it explodes in the air, which creates air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.

Who gives a ***about Bannon getting kicked out of Trump's inner circle when you have a top Obama official actively spying on a political opponent?

Yeah who cares about current events when you can just make things up and pretend they are real?

The Bannon stuff is all speculation.

Could even be part of some overall Strategy. There is just to much noise in all reporting to not consider the possibility that it's facts I don't like.

More likely that the mainstream media is fixated on one thing that basically nobody cares about in lieu of real news being reported elsewhere, and as their viewship numbers continue to plummet, the question remains: When will they ever learn?

The Bannon stuff is all speculation.

Could even be part of some overall Strategy. There is just to much noise in all reporting to not consider the possibility that it's facts I don't like.

As long as cable companies bundle them with basic packages and subscribers aren't offered the choice of supporting them or not, they'll never learn.

That or the fact that Trump has abandoned Bannon's nationalistic ideals in the last week, completely flip flopping on all of his foreign policy stances, so its only natural to think that Bannon's voice is fading, especially given how he was kicked off the NSC.