If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
Trump has asserted a rather broad understanding of executive power, and the Republican congress has let him do it.
A Dem-controlled congress could and would push back; Trump is likely to continue to assert his executive power, and it would end up in the Supreme Court (again) on a regular basis.
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
Trump has asserted a rather broad understanding of executive power, and the Republican congress has let him do it.
A Dem-controlled congress could and would push back; Trump is likely to continue to assert his executive power, and it would end up in the Supreme Court (again) on a regular basis.
And one way a Dem-controlled Congress could attempt to do that is by reasserting congressional power of the purse.
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
I’m amazed she thought the administration had any credibility to lose.
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
Trump has asserted a rather broad understanding of executive power, and the Republican congress has let him do it.
A Dem-controlled congress could and would push back; Trump is likely to continue to assert his executive power, and it would end up in the Supreme Court (again) on a regular basis.
And one way a Dem-controlled Congress could attempt to do that is by reasserting congressional power of the purse.
Do you think that will work? Trump seems to have ignored existing appropriations in some areas. If there aren't the numbers to impeach and convict is there anything even a Democratic congress can do?
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
I reserve a Circle of Hell for builders, councils and others who cut down mature trees in their full glory. There is plenty of post-industrial land available but even here in South East Wales, precious green spaces are being built on.
Doubled for golf. Awful game (except in Scotland).
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
I reserve a Circle of Hell for builders, councils and others who cut down mature trees in their full glory. There is plenty of post-industrial land available but even here in South East Wales, precious green spaces are being built on.
Doubled for golf. Awful game (except in Scotland).
Where golf courses don't have trees just whins and heather, low-growing on account of the gales off the North Sea.
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
I reserve a Circle of Hell for builders, councils and others who cut down mature trees in their full glory. There is plenty of post-industrial land available but even here in South East Wales, precious green spaces are being built on.
Doubled for golf. Awful game (except in Scotland).
Where golf courses don't have trees just whins and heather, low-growing on account of the gales off the North Sea.
Hey now, our gales come off the Atlantic (and the fairways are maintained by sheep).
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
Trump has asserted a rather broad understanding of executive power, and the Republican congress has let him do it.
A Dem-controlled congress could and would push back; Trump is likely to continue to assert his executive power, and it would end up in the Supreme Court (again) on a regular basis.
And one way a Dem-controlled Congress could attempt to do that is by reasserting congressional power of the purse.
Do you think that will work? Trump seems to have ignored existing appropriations in some areas. If there aren't the numbers to impeach and convict is there anything even a Democratic congress can do?
There are things they could do. Whether those things would work would remain to be seen.
If the Democrats do indeed take the House and the Senate, will that clip Trump's wings, so to speak?
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
I reserve a Circle of Hell for builders, councils and others who cut down mature trees in their full glory. There is plenty of post-industrial land available but even here in South East Wales, precious green spaces are being built on.
Doubled for golf. Awful game (except in Scotland).
Where golf courses don't have trees just whins and heather, low-growing on account of the gales off the North Sea.
Hey now, our gales come off the Atlantic (and the fairways are maintained by sheep).
I would imagine they also keep the fairways well fertilized.
I am not so sure Trump will resign. He has some pet projects he wants to complete. I think he would rather die in office (a good possibility given his age, and presumed health).
In other news: ... Omar came to the United States when she was 16 and became an US citizen.
Actually I think she was younger than that. Born 1982, arrived US 1995, and naturalized in 2000 when she was 17 at the same time as her father (minor child).
Err, the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria) happened in 1938.
Sorry, got confused with the military re-occupation of the Rhineland. That's what happens when tyrants are allowed to annex territory, they start with one little bit, then another, then another and they all sort of merge into one slow step by step expansion of territory. At least until someone with sufficient clout says "that's enough". Rhineland - Austria - Czechoslovakia - Poland.
Err, the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria) happened in 1938.
Sorry, got confused with the military re-occupation of the Rhineland. That's what happens when tyrants are allowed to annex territory, they start with one little bit, then another, then another and they all sort of merge into one slow step by step expansion of territory. At least until someone with sufficient clout says "that's enough". Rhineland - Austria - Czechoslovakia - Poland.
Georgia - Crimea - Donbas - Ukraine.
Sufficient clout is not enough. The will is necessary too, and Britain and France were not willing to oppose the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 although France had colossal superiority in numbers and equipment but was in political and financial turmoil. Britain simply treated the Rhineland as Germany’s territory and looked away. Germany could never have withstood a determined counter occupation.
Well, I was thinking that "that's enough" is the point where political will kicks in. There clearly wasn't political will prior to September 1939 - and even then the response was distinctly lukewarm (when France declared war on Germany there was an almost entirely undefended western border, French troops could have been across the Rhine in days practically unopposed as the vast bulk of Germany military resources were in Poland - it would have taken time to redeploy them and that would have also weakened the advance into Poland). We've yet to see where that point is in relation to Putin. The full scale invasion of Ukraine wasn't enough, or we'd have seen NATO and allies with jets in the air above Ukraine and boots on the ground to help repel the invaders.
Meanwhile, in Trump's lawsuit against the BBC, Trump canceled his scheduled Friday deposition. The date had previously been agreed on, but he canceled based on unspecified "other matters of national importance."
I trust the BBC lawyers will being scrutinizing his schedule on Friday to see what earth-shaking matters he means. If he plays a round of golf, I expect the judge to hear about it.
Trump’s latest verbal attack on Zelenskyy and his comment that Putin is easier to deal with reach a new low. Having messed up global oil supplies he is now blaming the price hike on Zelenskyy’s retaliatory attacks on Russian refineries. And the US is now restricting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
It doesn’t matter whether he is a Putin puppet or just deluded. The threat to Ukraine’s very survival is now real.
@Barnabas62 Trump’s response to “punch down”, whenever there is any kind of choice, could well be his worst habit. I know it’s hard to isolate a single vice, but this has a strong claim.
Amen @Bishops Finger.
Even if we have a blue wave in the midterms, they will not be able to do anything until January, and the orange one can still do immense damage in the meantime.
Zelenskyy was asked today, by a reporter, if he felt that he was being made a scapegoat by Trump for all the latter's misdoings. He simply smiled, rather wryly, and said ' That [the smile] is my answer'...
Those present laughed sympathetically. Zelenskyy is not a tall man, physically, but he towers head and shoulders over the mad Emperor.
One US cartoon I saw on YouTube showed her as a Cabbage wearing a blonde wig, which is perhaps unkind, but very reminiscent of our own dear Liz Truss and the Lettuce...
She was really bad at her first, probably only press conference. Watch this space i.e the one she’s left. It might not be that easy to fill with someone who is both competent and (in Trump’s eyes) “looks the part”.
She allowed others to misrepresent her meagre credentials, but it surely looked as if her office was still vacant while she occupied it.
Well, there don't seem to be any formally required credentials for the job of WHPS, and as far as actually held credentials go, a law degree from Pepperdine seems about of equal rank, if not slightly higher, than eg. Robert Gibbs' BA from North Carolina State University.
So I think it might be more a case of generally adequate, rather than meagre, credentials getting hyperbolized, something that is pretty much the politcal world's equivalent of stealing pencils from the office(*).
My fav moment in the whole spectacle was when Zacharia tried to claim she had misheard the question as "What did you do after college?", even though that clearly didn't match up with her answer: "When I was in China."
(*) In early 2000s Korea, a progressive politican(cabinet, I think), got in trouble for a resume that claimed a theology degree from Princeton University when in fact it came from Princeton Seminary.
I wonder what precentage of Americans either believe or will soon be convinced that Zelenskyy is the main maestro of the USA's current economic malaise. Almost no dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, I'm sure, but I'm not sure how it would go among swing-voters or even Republicans.
I wonder what precentage of Americans either believe or will soon be convinced that Zelenskyy is the main maestro of the USA's current economic malaise. Almost no dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, I'm sure, but I'm not sure how it would go among swing-voters or even Republicans.
I wonder what precentage of Americans either believe or will soon be convinced that Zelenskyy is the main maestro of the USA's current economic malaise. Almost no dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, I'm sure, but I'm not sure how it would go among swing-voters or even Republicans.
I think only MAGA voters would buy that idea.
Probably. On a personal level, I am familiar with sections of mainstream conservative opinion who have a low tolerance for aid sent to foreign governments vaguely perceived as progressive, partly on the grounds that those nations are acting against our own interests. Nyerere of Tanzania was a particular such villain on the Canadian right in the 1970/1980s, and he WASN'T carrying out military operations which could plausibly be spun as wrecking the Canadian economy.
So it wouldn't surprise me if there were sections of US mainstream opinion who could be provoked into at least frustration with Zelenskyy, and if nothing else, debating whether or not Ukraine is the culprit means you're spending less time discussing the Strait of Hormuz as the main problem. But I'm guessing that on the spectrum of American opinion running from pan-Democratic to moderate Republican, opposing Russia in Ukraine is now viewed as the same sorta moral imperative as opposing the USSR in Afghanistan was.
How is Ukraine particularly progressive? I mean, compared with Russia, perhaps, but it's not as though the war is about hot-button culture-war issues...
The war is about the survival of an independent sovereign state resisting totally illegal and unwarranted takeover by its former masters. Ukrainian society may not be as progressive as one might like in certain areas, but they can't do everything at once...
Matters can only get worse, now that the perfidious Trump appears to have gone over to the side of the evil aggressor Putin.
Satan, take your precious pair down to Hell as soon as possible, please.
And one of the things Ukraine is fighting for is the right to join the EU, one of the few remaining bastions of 'wokeism' (= respect for human rights and the rule of law). If anyone really thinks that the EU is less progressive than Russia, I have a bridge they may be interested in buying.
The war is about the survival of an independent sovereign state resisting totally illegal and unwarranted takeover by its former masters.
Absolutely - and that is nothing to do with whether Ukraine is "progressive" or not! As for "respect for human rights and the rule of law" I would not call those "progressive" or "woke" - rather they would be better described as "traditional Enlightenment values"... and if the EU is a "bastion of wokeism" then wokeism is a lot sleepier than I imagined...
Meanwhile, there are several videos on YouTube condemning Trump's infamous AI video of him hugging a tiger, as his reaction to the recent tragic incident in the UK when a young man was killed by a tiger.
Those posting the videos are all of the opinion (some of them are professional therapists etc.) that Trump is suffering from dementia, and that this kind of bilge is not the action of a sane and rational person.
The war is about the survival of an independent sovereign state resisting totally illegal and unwarranted takeover by its former masters.
Absolutely - and that is nothing to do with whether Ukraine is "progressive" or not! As for "respect for human rights and the rule of law" I would not call those "progressive" or "woke" - rather they would be better described as "traditional Enlightenment values"... and if the EU is a "bastion of wokeism" then wokeism is a lot sleepier than I imagined...
Well, my original post said "nations vaguely perceived as progressive[aka 'woke' in the pejorative]", and I think it's safe to say that, among the populist right in Europe and spilling over into America, that is definitely how the EU is viewed. Hence brexit and its transnational mutations.
That said, whether I was correct in speculating that view, as applied to Ukraine, is also present in the US mainstream(as opposed to just the far right), is another question. There might be a bit of "foreign-aid fatigue" that kicks in if Zelenskyy keeps doing things that are seen as hurting the American economy, but that's not neccessarily the same as ideological objections.
Such evidence that I’ve seen suggests that Zelenskyy is much more popular in the USA than Donald Trump and maintains significant popularity in Ukraine. On the other hand Putin is very unpopular and untrusted in the USA.
Trump’s denigration of Zelenskyy and his trusting support for Putin both look like vote losing positions for the GOP in the mid terms.
We’ll see. I certainly hope the GOP gets a thumping in the midterms. Trump has two years to go. It would be much better if Congress is able to exercise more control over his impulsive, erratic, actions.
@TurquoiseTastic ah, I was being at least slightly sarcastic when I equated a respect for the rule of law with wokeism, but it's not that far a stretch from what the more rabid members of the far right seem to believe. They're harassing the RNLI, for God's sake.
I always used to think that respect for human rights and the rule of law were two things both right and left could agree on. Not any more, judging by some of the poison that the so-called mainstream media has been spouting recently.
And, the new press secretary Katie Zacharias (?) is out. Five days. The shortest term in history of the White House Press Secretary.
The Guardian had an interesting piece on the Trump women who have either been fired or stepped down.
I hate to say it, but the one common feature of those women was that they were "pretty faces." There was certainly a lack of substance.
There are rumors the next one to go will be Kathleen Wiles, the current Chief of Staff for the White House.
I think the next two years will see a total collapse of the Trump White House culture.
Some would say it has already collapsed. Several outlets over here are covering the press secretary position becoming vacant again. From over here it seems confusion reigns already
There will be a lot of casualties when the Trump cult collapses. A lot of people are emotionally and spiritually invested. Genuinely deluded.
Trump has caused a great deal of damage in the world through his baleful exercise of power. It’s tempting to look at MAGA cult members and dismiss them. It’s their own fault, surely?
Well, there’s certainly a dimension of that. There has been a successful appeal to baser instincts and self righteousness. But they are also victims of fraud, perpetrated by the most successful fraudster of our time.
Comments
Trump has asserted a rather broad understanding of executive power, and the Republican congress has let him do it.
A Dem-controlled congress could and would push back; Trump is likely to continue to assert his executive power, and it would end up in the Supreme Court (again) on a regular basis.
He keeps acting as if he is above the law. Just this weekend a Judge had ordered the Trump administration not to cut down any trees on a public golf course without her permission. The administration went ahead and cut down 400 trees without her permission. She was furious. She said the administration has lost all credibility in her court.
Do you think that will work? Trump seems to have ignored existing appropriations in some areas. If there aren't the numbers to impeach and convict is there anything even a Democratic congress can do?
I reserve a Circle of Hell for builders, councils and others who cut down mature trees in their full glory. There is plenty of post-industrial land available but even here in South East Wales, precious green spaces are being built on.
Doubled for golf. Awful game (except in Scotland).
Where golf courses don't have trees just whins and heather, low-growing on account of the gales off the North Sea.
Hey now, our gales come off the Atlantic (and the fairways are maintained by sheep).
I would imagine they also keep the fairways well fertilized.
Actually I think she was younger than that. Born 1982, arrived US 1995, and naturalized in 2000 when she was 17 at the same time as her father (minor child).
Georgia - Crimea - Donbas - Ukraine.
Sufficient clout is not enough. The will is necessary too, and Britain and France were not willing to oppose the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 although France had colossal superiority in numbers and equipment but was in political and financial turmoil. Britain simply treated the Rhineland as Germany’s territory and looked away. Germany could never have withstood a determined counter occupation.
Trump - "Hey! Let's make an AI video!"
Don't really care. They're all part of the same coalition of awfulness.
I trust the BBC lawyers will being scrutinizing his schedule on Friday to see what earth-shaking matters he means. If he plays a round of golf, I expect the judge to hear about it.
Or hugging a tiger.
Just when you thought things couldn't get lower ......
It doesn’t matter whether he is a Putin puppet or just deluded. The threat to Ukraine’s very survival is now real.
Even if we have a blue wave in the midterms, they will not be able to do anything until January, and the orange one can still do immense damage in the meantime.
Zelenskyy was asked today, by a reporter, if he felt that he was being made a scapegoat by Trump for all the latter's misdoings. He simply smiled, rather wryly, and said ' That [the smile] is my answer'...
Those present laughed sympathetically. Zelenskyy is not a tall man, physically, but he towers head and shoulders over the mad Emperor.
One US cartoon I saw on YouTube showed her as a Cabbage wearing a blonde wig, which is perhaps unkind, but very reminiscent of our own dear Liz Truss and the Lettuce...
Well, there don't seem to be any formally required credentials for the job of WHPS, and as far as actually held credentials go, a law degree from Pepperdine seems about of equal rank, if not slightly higher, than eg. Robert Gibbs' BA from North Carolina State University.
So I think it might be more a case of generally adequate, rather than meagre, credentials getting hyperbolized, something that is pretty much the politcal world's equivalent of stealing pencils from the office(*).
My fav moment in the whole spectacle was when Zacharia tried to claim she had misheard the question as "What did you do after college?", even though that clearly didn't match up with her answer: "When I was in China."
(*) In early 2000s Korea, a progressive politican(cabinet, I think), got in trouble for a resume that claimed a theology degree from Princeton University when in fact it came from Princeton Seminary.
I wonder what precentage of Americans either believe or will soon be convinced that Zelenskyy is the main maestro of the USA's current economic malaise. Almost no dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, I'm sure, but I'm not sure how it would go among swing-voters or even Republicans.
Probably. On a personal level, I am familiar with sections of mainstream conservative opinion who have a low tolerance for aid sent to foreign governments vaguely perceived as progressive, partly on the grounds that those nations are acting against our own interests. Nyerere of Tanzania was a particular such villain on the Canadian right in the 1970/1980s, and he WASN'T carrying out military operations which could plausibly be spun as wrecking the Canadian economy.
So it wouldn't surprise me if there were sections of US mainstream opinion who could be provoked into at least frustration with Zelenskyy, and if nothing else, debating whether or not Ukraine is the culprit means you're spending less time discussing the Strait of Hormuz as the main problem. But I'm guessing that on the spectrum of American opinion running from pan-Democratic to moderate Republican, opposing Russia in Ukraine is now viewed as the same sorta moral imperative as opposing the USSR in Afghanistan was.
Matters can only get worse, now that the perfidious Trump appears to have gone over to the side of the evil aggressor Putin.
Satan, take your precious pair down to Hell as soon as possible, please.
Absolutely - and that is nothing to do with whether Ukraine is "progressive" or not! As for "respect for human rights and the rule of law" I would not call those "progressive" or "woke" - rather they would be better described as "traditional Enlightenment values"... and if the EU is a "bastion of wokeism" then wokeism is a lot sleepier than I imagined...
Those posting the videos are all of the opinion (some of them are professional therapists etc.) that Trump is suffering from dementia, and that this kind of bilge is not the action of a sane and rational person.
Not that we didn't know this already...
Well, my original post said "nations vaguely perceived as progressive[aka 'woke' in the pejorative]", and I think it's safe to say that, among the populist right in Europe and spilling over into America, that is definitely how the EU is viewed. Hence brexit and its transnational mutations.
That said, whether I was correct in speculating that view, as applied to Ukraine, is also present in the US mainstream(as opposed to just the far right), is another question. There might be a bit of "foreign-aid fatigue" that kicks in if Zelenskyy keeps doing things that are seen as hurting the American economy, but that's not neccessarily the same as ideological objections.
Trump’s denigration of Zelenskyy and his trusting support for Putin both look like vote losing positions for the GOP in the mid terms.
We’ll see. I certainly hope the GOP gets a thumping in the midterms. Trump has two years to go. It would be much better if Congress is able to exercise more control over his impulsive, erratic, actions.
I always used to think that respect for human rights and the rule of law were two things both right and left could agree on. Not any more, judging by some of the poison that the so-called mainstream media has been spouting recently.
The Guardian had an interesting piece on the Trump women who have either been fired or stepped down.
I hate to say it, but the one common feature of those women was that they were "pretty faces." There was certainly a lack of substance.
There are rumors the next one to go will be Kathleen Wiles, the current Chief of Staff for the White House.
I think the next two years will see a total collapse of the Trump White House culture.
Some would say it has already collapsed. Several outlets over here are covering the press secretary position becoming vacant again. From over here it seems confusion reigns already
This is quite interesting on “MAGA face”.
There will be a lot of casualties when the Trump cult collapses. A lot of people are emotionally and spiritually invested. Genuinely deluded.
Trump has caused a great deal of damage in the world through his baleful exercise of power. It’s tempting to look at MAGA cult members and dismiss them. It’s their own fault, surely?
Well, there’s certainly a dimension of that. There has been a successful appeal to baser instincts and self righteousness. But they are also victims of fraud, perpetrated by the most successful fraudster of our time.