That surprises me right down the line. It’s not that I don’t think the Rams can upgrade over those players, but they haven’t. So if you don’t have people as good or better lined up, it seems like a loss to cut them. Barnes wasn’t memorable, but he is better than the players behind him.

Hayes I don’t understand. The guy is a pretty good football player, a starting defensive end (or very good depth), and they gave him away. I don’t know what “System fit” means. The guy could rush the QB, and could tackle. I’m sure Wade knows what he’s doing, but I don’t understand this. Now the Rams have Quinn. No Hayes, no Sims, and Westbrook is in trouble. Now they are thin on the DL – which was the team’s strength – and they’re thin at LB, and need help in the secondary.

Kendricks also was no all-pro, but I didn’t see anything from Hemingway or Higbee outside of pre-season.

This just seems to have created a lot more needs in a year with no 1st round pick.

But it’s not the last move, obviously. I sure hope to see some more FA signings, though.

Apparently defunding Planned Parenthood is going to be difficult, if not impossible, because Planned Parenthood isn’t an item in the budget. PP gets money from the government only as reimbursement for Medicare covered actions like Pap smears and so forth. Money is already prohibited from going to abortion, so Planned Parenthood gets government money as reimbursement for health care services rendered to patients the exact same way that any other medical clinic does. So you can’t just cut out PP. There would have to be language drawn up for qualifications to receive the reimbursement that would somehow apply only to PP, and good luck with that.

nittany ram wrote:

wv wrote:

Well Its not that i disagree with your description of the ‘tangled web of financial shadiness’ but…I dont thihk the the ‘american people’ are gonna care.
I mean Trumps base certainly wont care. And the Dems have zero credibility themselves so whatever they do will look like the usual partisanship-games.

I just think we are past the time when a President can be impeached. The entire system is now BASED on corruption and money and money-influence. The SYSTEM should be ‘impeached’ but it wont be.

Frankly, i think Trump would be more likely to get in trouble for a sex scandal or some BS crap like that. THAT might annoy the voters. Ah well.

wv cynic

It’s true that Trump’s supporters won’t care. But the majority of the American people care. Trump was the first president ever elected with an approval rating below 50%. Then it got worse. I’m sure his speech gave him a bump up but it won’t last.

The problem is that Congress in controlled by the Republicans. And Trump is doing exactly what the Republicans always wanted (increase military spending, decrease domestic spending, dismantle environmental protections, etc) so why would they impeach him? And even if they did, they won’t impeach Trump’s VP and his cabinet, so impeaching him probably wouldn’t change much.

So ultimately, you’re right. There’s no bright side to be had. The stuff Trump has put in motion won’t be reversed for at least four years and by then, if it happens, a lot of stuff is gonna be irrevocably f’d up.

Of course Trump’s “base” won’t care. 28% of people thought Bush was doing a great job as president when his popularity was at its nadir. Those people wouldn’t have lost faith in Trump if he had slammed his penis on the podium like a gavel during his speech to congress the other night. I mean…28% of this country is religiously devoted to total stupidity. So I don’t even worry about his “base.” Their opinions are the cost of doing business, like a retailer who just calculates that he is going to lose x% to shoplifting. So I write them out of the equation from the beginning.

28% will support the most right wing thing they can find. Period.

Okay, fine.

What I said was I don’t think he can survive an “honest inquiry.”

So the question is, “will there be an honest inquiry?” and the answer is, of course, no. But there WILL be an inquiry, and it will be more honest than dishonest, with everyone trying to shine light on some things, and deflect from others, but these things have a way of getting batted around like a beachball at baseball game. No one person can control the way things spin.

There are a few scenarios that could lead to Trump’s impeachment: 1) the investigation takes a life of its own and gets too sordid to ignore the ties. Smoking gun evidence is impossible to avoid. 2) The investigation threatens to affect the way business happens in government generally speaking, i.e. ALL these zillionaires have compromising ties to other governments and businesses, and a sweeping move to shine light on those dealings, and limit them, scares the shit out of everybody, so they throw Trump under the bus to just shut down the entire line of inquiry before it hurts all the grifters. 3) The polls for a significant number of congressmen start approaching that 28% floor as the entire GOP gets tarnished. Hell, not 28%. Depending on the district, 49% will scare many of them. And while they want many of the things Trump promises to do for them, they want re-election even more, and there will be a point where Trump just becomes too poisonous.

I’ve said this since the election. I do not think Trump will make it through his complete term. (Well, I said 50/50). But I think the odds are getting worse for him.

Watch those Maddow videos I posted yesterday or the day before. When Reuters and AP start referencing that stuff, Trump’s presidency will be put on life support.

Well, I do not like the sound of “major rebrand” for 2019.

PA Ram wrote:

The Democratic party is stubborn, hopeless and committed to a corporate agenda at the risk of everything else. They want to “message” differently. I’m not sure they want to “govern” differently.

That’s it. The conclusion of the autopsy is that it was the fault of the Bernie Bros, and the FBI.

The solution is to SAY different shit. No need to change what they DO, or what they SUPPORT.

So…the Democrats decide to follow the most widely rebuked political strategy, and the worst campaign since Dukakis (at the very least), by doubling down on business-as-usual. That is so…Democrat.

InvaderRam wrote:

so then what would be an answer moving forward?

cuz i haven’t heard a solution that makes any kind of success.

i just hear a big shit storm coming our way.

“A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. “

• This reply was modified 9 years ago by Zooey.

Ozoneranger wrote:

Okay, Mack- I’m just not going there with the dictatorship talk. I’ve heard it all before on FB and completely dismiss such talk. About as likely as the Calexit movement.

Why? Because Trump really stands alone. He’s not the leader of any kind of movement that would overwhelm our democracy, like Hitler had in Wiemar Germany. On the contrary, the GOP- most of whom despise him- is just watching and waiting. To get what they want, then pounce when he really does something really egregious. So they ditch him, get Pence (not my favorite but has the experience to lead a government) and they look like the Good Guys.

I think that scenario is far more plausible. And I’m not the only one that’s arrived at this.

That’s pretty much the way I see it, too. That is…I don’t see the same kind of absolute dictatorship that we saw in Germany and Italy, and various 3rd world countries.

Hitler benefited from a highly destabilized and apprehensive society. While few people are happy, there aren’t that many that would throw themselves behind a dictator at the moment, either. There are warning signs, but the conditions aren’t quite right for all out totalitarianism. I do think, though, that he intends to expand voter suppression, and stack the deck even more in favor of the entrenched power elites, further weakening democracy. We could end up with a de facto one-party state with a new figurehead elected every four years. Some people would argue that that is what we already have, though I would still say that the majority of people are on board with the current system.

Congrats on your daughter’s marriage. Best wishes.

I saw this, and it got me thinking about the other proposal (being tested in Finland or Denmark) if the universal basic income. Automation is going to create a big issue. A big unavoidable issue.

And I got to wondering if we really have advanced to the point where there is enough wealth and production in our society that with a different taxation/wealth distribution mechanism, where work will be increasingly “optional” rather than a ball and chain. The next 100 years are going to be the biggest revolution yet, I suppose.

I don’t think Chomsky would like La La Land, though.

sdram wrote:

Thanks for asking. I’m not sure how I feel at this point. I have been constantly trying to sift through all the info and sort of mitigate what’s real, what’s propaganda twisted from reality, what’s true and what’s not true and then where I sit on every issue.

I do feel that perhaps the principle conservative-right message, fueled for decades by Limbaugh and his protégé’s such as Breitbart and including many but not necessarily all of the Fox news team, that the mainstream media’s message is sand has been a false narrative. To me this is one of the main building blocks for where we are politically and what we’ve become. They’ve been spewing this narrative for so long that it seems a majority of US citizens from all political persuasions think this is the absolute truth. This lie helped set up all the others in my mind.

I still believe that most of what the mainstream media reports about and opines on is not a false hood. They’re absolutely not perfect and some of it is hard to sit and listen to but it’s not necessarily false or even misleading. To me, it’s what they think they know to a large degree and sure, they want ratings. That’s their game.

I think we are absolutely reaping the product of the dominant media narrative from the past 30 years or so. The media has become increasingly right wing, has in some branches just become propaganda arms of the Republican party, and have convinced a large number of people that the media is liberal, and the government is the root of all our problems. At best, the media has served as stenographers to power without doing any homework. Trump runs as an outsider to the government, and positions himself as an enemy of the press. That is absolutely the creation of the media itself.

Interestingly now, the media has decided to question everything this government says, and call them on their lies.

Should we survive the Trump administration with democracy still breathing, it will be interesting to see how long the media keeps up its questioning.

We have never seen anything like it. You know, I thought Reagan was the nadir, and then Bush II eclipsed him by an earth-shattering margin. Bush was so bad that there was literally article after article of people writing about historians’ perspective on whether or not Bush was the worse president of all time, and generally agreeing that, yes, he was.

And now THIS.

It’s like watching “Caligula.” You know…somebody actually MADE this film?

I just…there isn’t anything happening with this administration that doesn’t get its own section in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

Let’s extinguish the EPA. Let’s just dump toxins directly into open waterways. Let’s get rid of the Endangered Species Act. Let’s shut down the fucking National Park Service’s communication. Let’s delete all the documents on Climate Change, and gag NASA. Let’s put a donor in charge of wasting public education and diverting all the money to her family and their cronies. Let’s put a fascist loyalist in charge of the government’s legal arm. Let’s bar the Chairman of the Fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from the National security Council and put Steve Fucking Bannon there instead.d

OH

MY

GOD!!!!!!!!!

It goes on and on and on and on.

And that’s to say nothing about his complete denial of objective facts, his total made up bullshit. I mean…all politicians lie, but they usually use the standard issue dissembling, red herrings, card-stacking, straw man, post hoc, and so on.

This guy Just Makes Shit Up out of nothing, that everyone can see is completely made up out of nothing.

Meanwhile, all the Republicans are saying, “Yeah, this or that is really too much, but you know…I’m gonna just sit and wait for the tax cut.”

It’s fucking unbelievable.

And we are just starting….