February 23, 2017

"If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason, and that is the deconstruction."

"The way the progressive left runs is if they can't get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some kind of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed."

Steve Bannon, speaking at CPAC.

138 comments:

The Bergall said...

Hate to say it but what he said is true...........

A pen & a phone.......what a way to govern

Sprezzatura said...

Make America Deconstructed

buwaya said...

This is correct, and what I assumed the new administration had to attempt.
In the end this is where the administration will succeed or die trying.

The actual government is not organized and run through legislation anywhere near as much (or at all) as it is through regulation and administrative decisions, as well as masses of interpretations, guidelines, and best practices to avoid legal risks, etc.

The whole thing just starts at the Department secretaries - the control is exerted through layer upon layer of their departments, into endless Quangoes (Quasi-NGO's), and out into the fuzzy borderland of the legal systems (plural) and into every sort of private sector entity - some of whom themselves make regulatory-compliance implementing decisions with semi-government authority.

The whole thing is much more massive and complex - and effectively out of any responsible persons control - than most realize.

Sebastian said...

Take that, Derrida. Anyway, if postmodernism gave us nothing else, at least it gave us a way to make destruction sound better.

traditionalguy said...

Bannon is a weapon of war. I loved his line, " If you think they are going let us take our country back without a fight, you are wrong."

And his line, "We are an economy. Not just a border less part of the world economy. We have a purpose."

David Begley said...

Bannon is the bomb. Trump will dismantle the administrative state. EPA will be a prime target.

Bannon and the Man from Wisconsin are a formidable team. Pelosi? Schumer? Keith X? Warren? All toast.

Seeing Red said...

De-evolve it to the states.

Seeing Red said...

Drudge had a story on Pelosi yesterday.

She thought Kasich was the governor of Illinois. She also kept repeating herself.

Seeing Red said...

Open source all climate research. A pen and an EO.

Let the swarm begin.

buwaya said...

PB&J,

"Make America Deconstructed"

Indeed. Subsidiarity is a nice idea. May help.
I'm not sure if the current situation can be fixed.
Personally I thought you people had caught a terminal disease of, among other things, bureau-sclerosis, and Trump et al was just a last gasp of a dying body. Maybe that is still the case. But who knows.

Otto said...

The revenge of Marcusse and the Frankfort School. Deconstruct the deconstructed.

Oso Negro said...

Please, God, let it be true!

Sprezzatura said...

BTW, I'm guessing that this year DJT didn't need to write checks for $50,000, as he did in both 11 and 13, when he bought a speaking slot.

The question this year is if CPACer (!?) Ed Schultz had Russia pay for his slot, or was he also swept in on DJT coattails.


Ha ha.

Sprezzatura said...

It's cool that so many are so eager to have the States deconstructed. Putin is pleased.



Carry on.

Sprezzatura said...

MAMA

Make America Mississippi Again = Make America Deconstructed

rhhardin said...

He means disassembled.

tim maguire said...

Sure, the left used to go the democratic route and then, if they lost, find a sympathetic judge to overturn the will of the people. THey've since discovered it's better to simply take over the unelected isolated bureaucracy and decree laws under the guise of regulation.

It can still be challenged in court, but look what happened to burden of proof: when the liberals want to overturn a democratic result, they bear the burden of proof, but when conservatives want to stop a burdensome regulation, they bear the burden.

Brilliant switch!

rhhardin said...

Regulations are all called protections today by the media, Rush points out.

rhhardin said...

If you do have sex, wear regulations.

Tommy Duncan said...

I worked 35 years in sales for a real big computer company. Years ago my team worked with the USDA to attempt to implement modern technology to replace their decades old, on-life-support systems from the 1960's. The USDA was paying a fortune every year for hardware and software maintenance on tragically obsolete machines.

The director we worked with made every effort to keep our effort on the QT. He had found a way to fund a replacement system that was within the guidelines and outside the formal bid process. But he knew that if his effort became known it would be sabotaged by bureaucrats who would force it through the formal process, which would take multiple years, involve bureaucrats who would insist on an obsolete design, waste man-years of effort and doom the project.

One of his staff members was overheard in a hallway talking about the project. Within hours the project was dead. To the best of my knowledge they are still running the original, impossible to maintain, obsolete equipment.

The project died in darkness.

Drago said...

3rdGradePB_GoodPerson: "It's cool that so many are so eager to have the States deconstructed. Putin is pleased."

"... the States deconstructed..."

Uh, no.

Would you like to try again?

buwaya said...

PB&J,

Just a minor matter, just a minor example, but -

Even in Mississippi, because of SOX we have to do useless (and totally redundant) security reviews of authentication (and only authentication) of remote machine instrumentation in order to satisfy SOX, which is a piece of financial reporting legislation (they certainly didn't care about any of that in the text of SOX) that has been endlessly expanded and elaborated into absurdity by a mindless system.

And I only mention SOX because it affects everyone.

Do you have any idea how big, messy, mindless and pointless the whole mass of this stuff is?
Some of us have to live in this reality.

Bay Area Guy said...

Can I just flat out say it?

I love Steve Bannon.

Drago said...

Remember, if your 12 year old daughter does not want to see an adult male penis in her locker room, according to the left it's the 12 year old girl that has a problem.

Yes, the left is that malignant.

traditionalguy said...

DJT Twittered out a complement to Ellison. It was simply a true statement, like the ones admitting Putin is a strong leader. Is he setting these guys up?

Ellison would totally destroy all Dem chances for many years to come. Go Ellison.

gspencer said...

"That’s all going to be deconstructed."

YES !!!

Michael K said...

Do you have any idea how big, messy, mindless and pointless the whole mass of this stuff is?

He/she doesn't care. That is the situation with the left.

Some are government employees of one type or another.

Some aren't employed or are with menial jobs.

Some have good jobs but care only about social matters, like gay marriage or transgender bathrooms.

A huge problem and one that Trump will encounter if he tries to use legislation to fix things, is that Congress people no longer write legislation. Because of McCain-Finegold, they spend all their time fund raising. The staffs write the legislation, which is left vague to leave room for the administrative state to write all the regs.

The staffs run the government. The Congressional staff and lobbyists write all the legislation, which is incomprehensible to most people. The Legislator is spending all his/her time "Dialing for Dollars," as the staffs say,.

Drago said...

My favorite part of all the winning is Schumer begging republicans to stop making Senator Tomahawk the face of the Dems!

Lol

Carry on dems and good luck with your Farrakhan directed future DNC chair!

Drago said...

I wonder if there is some bizarre numerology basis for Ellison's DNC Chair candidacy?

Like, how tall the Washington monument is + number of joooos in Israel = Democrat profits!!!

Earnest Prole said...

“The deconstruction of the administrative state”: I don’t know what’s sadder, the fact that most people have no idea what the administrative state is (and thus there cannot possibly be a popular Congressional mandate for its deconstruction), or the fact that the few who do know what it is (including many at this conference and watching the video) believe it could be deconstructed by executive order.

YoungHegelian said...

Hey PB&J,

You, you miserable motherfucker with your constant attacks on Mississippi (no doubt you're real fond of the rest of the South).

Take a gander at this. Notice that Mississippi & Alabama have bond ratings better than the wunderkinds of California & equal to the worldly sophisticates of New York state.

I guess even boofers can sometimes balance a ledger better than legends in their own minds can.

Sprezzatura said...

Buw,

It turns out that the honor system and invisible hand benefits don't, w/o rules, cut it where the rubber meets the road.

But, I don't care if all these things go out the window. In fact, if we could roll back to the pre-S&L time, then some of these R areas may do well, w/ S&LII. It seems to have worked out for friends/family of the Clintons and Bushes in these R strongholds. Today it's too tricky for backwards folks to hit it in finance. Now it takes the quants and Ivy League folks on Wall Street to win. SNL bad, S&L good, MAGA.

YoungHegelian said...

The way the progressive left runs is if they can't get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some kind of regulation in an agency.

You know, on their saner days, there's a large chunk of Democrats who know that the federal government shouldn't work that way, & that they've just got to suck it up & win back more seats.

I mean, it's our legislatures that are supposed to take the lead in oppressing us, not the judiciary or executive branches. That's just the Federal way!

Drago said...

I don't blame PBJ for attempting to construct weird nonsensical unicorn worlds where he/she gets to be on the side of the angels.

Although I will caution him/her that "The Bubble" was a joke skit and not a recommended course of action.

Carry on and hooray for Senator Wigwam and Congressman Farrakhan's Pocket!

Drago said...

The question for the lefties is now this: given that the left is now on record as happy to force underage girls to view adult male penises in locker rooms and bathrooms, does the left view the education of any underage girl who hasn't been forced to view adult male penises as "incomplete"?

Sprezzatura said...

YoungH,

You should also highlight that Kansas is highly rated.

That's more proof that their con tax system is really great. Not to mention that if it wasn't awesome the override would have gotten through.


Carry on.

Original Mike said...

"The way the progressive left runs is if they can't get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some kind of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed."

Steve Bannon, speaking at CPAC.


BRAVO!!! Of course, saying and doing are two different things.

I've known nothing about Steve Bannon except what the Ingas have told us. This first impression is positive.

buwaya said...

PB&J,

There are no rules, merely chaos. The system runs itself with no relation to reality or the public interest or cost-benefit or legislative intent - nothing at all. It is a mindless human-machine, a monster out of some apocalypse-movie - chewing through the US economy heedless of what it does.

That is the reality of the reality based people, like my guys who are merely trying to keep the actual machines running.

MaxedOutMama said...

Well, isn't that what elections are for? If people wanted a change from previous presidential actions, they vote for a guy who says he'll do it differently?

What one president does, the next can undo, unless Congress changes the law. But when the current president is conforming more closely to current law, it's difficult not to call that "the democratic process".

Bob Loblaw said...

A huge problem and one that Trump will encounter if he tries to use legislation to fix things, is that Congress people no longer write legislation. Because of McCain-Finegold, they spend all their time fund raising. The staffs write the legislation, which is left vague to leave room for the administrative state to write all the regs.

It's worse, even, than that. The interest groups write the legislation. Congresional staff just collates what the industries and pressure groups have provided.

Drago said...

PBJ, you will have to speak up as it's too difficult to hear you over the collapsing of California's infrastructure and the wailing from its cities declaring bankruptcy.

Maybe those MS-13 "dreamers" could be disarmed, convinced to stop beheading people, and put to actual work.....

...Nah.

Bob Loblaw said...

Drago, apparently cities in California have far more pressing business than, say, paying for retirements or filling potholes.

Michael K said...

Richmond is the small city where my son was married. It is a suburb of Berkeley, with all that implies.

Those people are just off the charts in uselessness and foolishness.

LYNNDH said...

One can only hope, but I am getting to feel hopeless. My wife thinks a Civil War, actual shooting was, is going to break out. Several of my neighbors feel the same.

buwaya said...

"It is a suburb of Berkeley, with all that implies."

Well, not really a suburb of Berkeley. Its quite far from Berkeley actually, separated from it by El Cerrito.

Its an East Bay town that was and to a degree still is a lower-class area, an alternative to West Oakland. Its had much the same sort of reputation as Oakland, and until recently it was predominantly black.

A lot of former black residents of SF moved there looking for lower rents when they were driven from SF.

buwaya said...

I'm in parts of Richmond quite a lot actually. Its where BART connects with Amtrak. I catch the Capital Corridor to Sacramento or the San Joaquin down the valley there.

Earnest Prole said...

Berkeley is a rich, upper-middle-class professional town of whites and Asians, while Richmond is a poor, lower-middle-class industrial town of blacks and Latinos. They are two separate worlds.

Sprezzatura said...

"while Richmond is a poor, lower-middle-class industrial town of blacks and Latinos."

Isn't there an area (literally across some tracks) that ain't so bad. I know someone who always claimed that they were from the good side of the tracks.

I dunno.

Earnest Prole said...

There is indeed a small portion of Richmond toward the hills that is middle-class, and for that matter a small portion of Berkeley that is lower-class.

buwaya said...

"I know someone who always claimed that they were from the good side of the tracks."

Yes, East and West side, but neither was great.

Richmond has changed quite a bit. Much was redeveloped and rents have risen.

heyboom said...

“The deconstruction of the administrative state”: I don’t know what’s sadder, the fact that most people have no idea what the administrative state is (and thus there cannot possibly be a popular Congressional mandate for its deconstruction), or the fact that the few who do know what it is (including many at this conference and watching the video) believe it could be deconstructed by executive order.

He didn't say it was going to be done by executive order.

Michael K said...

"They are two separate worlds."

Physically but not mentally. Still crazy after all this time. The Catholic Church is quite nice and survived the 1906 earthquake.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

Drago said...
Remember, if your 12 year old daughter does not want to see an adult male penis in her locker room, according to the left it's the 12 year old girl that has a problem."

The Left: shrieking about a fake "Rape Culture" on campus while doing their best to encourage an increase in real rape.

Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...

Meanwhile, John Boehner - yeah, THAT John Boehner - is saying Congress can't seem to get organized enough to just drive a stake through the Afraudable Care Act.

What a bunch of wimps. If ever there was a bunch of folks in need of getting grabbed by their pussies, it's gotta be them Republican Congress Critters.

Jeebus! Just do it and get it over with. What y'all doin' is just prolonging the agony.

Gahrie said...

Every executive organization except the military (and even them in some cases) should be ordered to eliminate two levels of supervisory or management positions immediately.

Francisco D said...

Back to Steve Bannon:

I greatly admire the man's courage. The left will not rest until he is destroyed. I wish him the best of luck.

Earnest Prole said...

Every executive organization except the military (and even them in some cases) should be ordered to eliminate two levels of supervisory or management positions immediately.

Government staffing levels are set by Congress and not the Executive, per the Constitution. I know eight years of moist media coverage of Obama might lead one to believe an American President is some kind of king who rules by pen and cellphone.

Hagar said...

Buwaya,
Star Trek had several episodes based on wonderful computers disguised as gods and programmed to govern primitive societies after the designers had left or died off for some reason or other.

buwaya said...

Hagar,

Yes, and then Kirk would give them some indigestible paradox, and then they would blow up. I'm not sure how many times that plot ran. Would it were so easy.

A better SF analogy I think are Saberhagen or Benfords self-replicating AI war machines, that after the passing of their alien creators continue their quest to destroy all other intelligent life. Add some flavoring elements from HP Lovecraft and the picture approaches our reality.

richlb said...

Bannon also looks clean and we'll kept in this appearance. That itself changes perceptions.

cronus titan said...

One way to "deconstruct" things is to move federal agencies out of the DC metro area and into America. There is no reason the IRS HQ cannot be in the midwest or EPA in the Mountain states or Energy in Texas or Education in Florida. Interest in those agencies from political activists would nosedive, they would lose their immediate access, and the fights in Congress over whose district gets the agencies would be highly entertaining.

Earnest Prole said...

He didn't say it was going to be done by executive order.

Exactly. Bannon's statement was an Underpants Gnome classic:

1. Trump's new cabinet
2. ???
3. Deconstruction of the administrative state

But to be clear, I'm not criticizing Bannon, I'm criticizing gullibility.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

You guys are really enjoying his leninism, I see.

How long until we experience our first Chernobyl?

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Two total phonies never before looked so congenial!

Mr. Majestyk said...

Even better would be to just get rid of (or drastically shrink) worse-than-useless agencies, like Education, Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, Labor, Housing and Urban Development. Sure most of those agencies likely have some function or functions you'd want to keep, but, for the most part, they are mucking arounf in matters the federal government has no business mucking around in.

I hope they go after the FCC's Net Neutrality rules and HUD's "Affirmativley Furthering Fair Housing" rules.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

So the generic conservative phonies love Trump for actually being "authentic." Wonderful.

Now start poisoning the water, start repealing protections, start muzzling and gagging the scientists, start doing whatever the corporations want.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

1920 here we come!

I've never seen so much excitement for so many things proven not to work.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

"You guys are really enjoying his leninism, I see."

Yeah. Deconstruction of the administrative state was a big item on Lenin's agenda.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

So these two have been tasked with greasing the propaganda wagon, in conjunction with CPAC.

Trump the vaccine denialist.

Poisoning the air and water is the new anti-corporatist, economic nationalist agenda, apparently.

Keep muzzling those scientists, guys.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Yeah. Deconstruction of the administrative state was a big item on Lenin's agenda.

His words, lady. His words. And it's destruction, not whatever fancy pants baloney word you used.

So which 1920s model of American government are you going for, exactly?

Interestingly, 1920 being about the same time as Lenin was doing his thing.

Make America 100 years antiquated, again.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

When can we expect the Vaccine Denialist in Chief and his minions to start chipping away for a repeal of the Pure Food and Drug Act?

buwaya said...

Ritmo,
Lovecrafts monsters also had their degenerate worshipers.
So they must have had their reasons too I suppose, besides being mad. Men like to worship demons.
The one I'm thinking of, in this case, probably, is Shub-Niggurath, the amorphous, many tendriled "black goat with a thousand young".

" Ever their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the woods! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! "

Jupiter said...

Why do we never see Peanut and the Toothless Fairy at the same time? Is a "sock puppet" an actual, real piece of hard rubber that you have to lube up to get into or something?

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

I have no idea what that means, "Lovecraft". Your "culture" (seeing as how President Bannon's so fond of talking about that stuff), is apparently closer to paganism than mine is.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Because the stupidest posts rile up the same people.

This clip is the biggest jerk-off fest I've ever heard. Barely a month and they're campaigning already. Campaigning again. Just before anyone has time to gauge the extent of the damage that will be caused by their fuck-ups. Polluting your food and water takes time for the effects to be seen. Let's see these fuckwads take Scott Pruitt on a tour to Flint MI and show the "free market solution" for getting lead out of the water. Or maybe just muzzle the scientists (and Wikipedia) and tell people that lead poisoning is over-hyped.

Except when it comes to vaccines, of course.

buwaya said...

HP Lovecraft, one of the glories of American literature.
Go read "At the Mountains of Madness" at least.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

No thanks.

Not denying his impact. But I'm just not into that genre.

Or that racism.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

America's just not ready for this 1936 stuff. Let alone 1950 or 1980.

Make America 1920 again.

buwaya said...

I worship with devotion, and practice with rigor the insane ritals of the administrative state. My compliance is complete, though I am often berated for missing some passing whimsy of its priesthood. It isn't always easy to serve, but serve we must.
Some of my favorites are those of "Sarbanes-Oxley", not because they are demanding, but because of their delightfully spicy unreason.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

If you like Lovecraft's nativism, and his thing for monsters, just go read fucking Beowulf. Plenty of both in there - minus the need to pretend that we should think, let alone construct society the way they did in the 700s.

Make America medieval again.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Just follow the fucking law and don't you dare tell me your love of deregulation is due to anti-corporatism.

And let me know when the Pure Food and Drug Act is up for repeal/"deconstruction." Letting coal companies pour run-off over the land that Trump wants to despoil/rape is small potatoes. Lesser Republicans than him have been doing that for decades.

The real fun will be once Colony Collapse Disorder takes full effect and then American agriculture reverts back to the days of hunting/gathering - picking berries and mustard seeds for sustenance.

Make America pre-agricultural again.

I really don't see an end to how far back in primitive time we can reach back to find our greatness.

Make America stone-age again.

buwaya said...

Lovecraft is entirely modern, or extra-modern Ritmo.
His is a world, or worlds, where man exists, it turns out, in an overlooked instant of time, missed for the moment, which may be ending, by powers immensely greater, incomprehensible, and unsympathetic.
This is not our past, but very likely our future.
Imagine what, in this vision, becomes trivial.
This sort of thing is a literature of perspectives.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Lovecraft is entirely modern, or extra-modern Ritmo.

Kind of in the way that Hitler loved deploying top-notch cutting edge technology in order to carry out the most ruthless of triabal pagan displays of zeal?

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

I guess once the bees are killed off we'll need some small people to do all our pollinating, by hand.

Can you think of who would do this? Any guesses?

I guess by the time groping gaslighter is out of office we might let the Mexicans in again through the neat door of that big beautiful wall to do it. But pollinating takes work even more intricate than those tiny hands can carry out.

buwaya said...

But Ritmo, its not "law", really. You really must join our religion, we true worshipers, to contemplate the immensity.
We are truly humble pilgrims.
The "law", passed by Congress, is the least of it, the pebble merely, that seed, now overlooked, of the ecstatic growth of the strange forms and bubbling protoplasm!
It is the difference between a pebble indeed, and a planet, with gravity and atmosphere. And a mind, or minds, all inhuman.
No, it is the journey among the actual forms, the kiss of the holy mucous, and the constant rituals, that makes one understand, and pass understanding.

buwaya said...

Hitler would have hated Lovecraft. Hitler was an optimist.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

So it is a "religion" to muzzle scientists or to fight for their right to speak out?

Sounds like the science haters are the ones needing some "alternative" to fall back on.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Hitler would have hated Lovecraft. Hitler was an optimist.

Doesn't sound likely. But glad to know that's what you see as the crucial difference.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

"Just follow the fucking law"

Tell that to the mayors of sanctuary cities.

ManleyPointer said...

"Isn't there an area (literally across some tracks) that ain't so bad. I know someone who always claimed that they were from the good side of the tracks."

Yes. Point Richmond is a beautiful little peninsula. But it's isolated from Richmond proper because the isthmus is overrun by train tracks & freeways. I didn't even know it existed until my teens.

Richmond's official slogan is "City of Pride & Purpose". But we kids (of all complexions) referred to it as "City of Pride & Prejudice". It's one of the most miserable, racially tense places in America. The gangs are strongly correlated with race & openly chauvinistic. As others said, it had a largely white/black population of shipbuilders during WW2. Then white flight happened. Then Asian immigrants arrived in the wake of the Vietnam War. Then you had a Hispanic boom in the 90s.

The locals aren't particularly "liberal". But most are working for crap wages & open to economic populism. Mix that with the bougie, radical chic from surrounding suburbs & you get stupidity like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/09/richmond-california-ons-gun-crime

Chuck said...

So according to Steve Bannon, Trump is "maniacally focused" on delivering an actual agenda based on his campaign stump speeches.

I am sure Bannon believes that; and that Trump also thinks he is doing that.

It is a terrible model, or goal, or operating principle, or whatever you want to call it. It's fine that Trump got elected, and that his election put him in a position to nominate a judge like Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. And that he brought an attorney General like Jeff Sesssions to reverse eight years of the most ideologically leftist Department of Justice in American history. There is good in Trump, insofar as he isn't four more years of Obama Democrats.

But Trump's campaign rhetoric isn't a positive at all; it's a negative. It is the worst feature of TrumWorld. Trump's idiotic campaign statement about a shutdown of "all Muslims" entering the United States was used against him, as was Rudy Giuliani's probably-true indication of what it was that Trump wanted in an executive order. Those things have made it harder to do what the immigration hawks, including Trump and Bannon and Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions, wanted. Even if a hard-edged immigration ban is your earnest goal for whatever reasons you think are meritorious, Trump's campaign rhetoric is an obstacle, not a benefit. Unless of course Team Trump's true goal doesn't have anything to do with actual immigration but in fact is just to tick off the list of Trump speech items and to blame the Ninth Circuit, or the GOP Establishment, or whoever else, if they foil those stump-speech plans.

Multiply that scenario times however many hot-button issues there are in a typical Trump stump speech. There are a great many more examples.

One of the things Trump promised in his Trump speeches was that he'd repeal and replace Obamacare. He -- Trump -- would do it. And the extent of what he described as a replacement wasn't much more than "something great." "Everybody will be covered," he said. And he said it will be "less expensive and much better coverage." Everybody "will be beautifully covered," Trump claimed.

And as of more than a month ago, before he was inaugurated, as President-elect, Trump asserted that his replacement plan was at that time "formulated down to the final strokes."

Of course Trump further predicted that he would have bipartisan support for his replacement, and as is Trump's style, he told an interviewer that he would not say just how he'd obtain Democratic support, but that he would.

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/16/trump-vows-to-provide-insurance-for-everybody-in-republican-health-care-replacement-plan/

Obama has been hammered for having used the tag line, "If you like your doctor your can keep your doctor" in his own stump speeches." Trump is going to have about two dozen of those lines to live down, with the millions of people who may be hurt by the repeal of the ACA, and those who are disappointed by the not-so-beautiful thing that TrumpCare leaves them with.

buwaya said...

You make the error, forgivable, that there is a purpose, or a purpose you can comprehend. These are, after all, the words on those pebbles. Poor vain things.
But we who worship, and pass among the forms, and commit ourselves to the rituals, know better. The purpose, if it can be called such a human word, is emergent, contingent, and in any case not fit for our weak minds.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

Now Trump is Lenin.

Here I thought he was Hitler.

I suppose tomorrow he'll be Mao or perhaps Genghis Khan.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

But not Che or Castro. Leftists just love those guys.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Tell that to the mayors of sanctuary cities.

Anyone who thinks treating non-citizens humanely is a bigger problem than letting corporations re-write the laws so that they can poison our rivers and streams is actually, clinically insane.

But why should the land be left off of the list of things that the groping gaslighter gets to rape?

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

If it's gonna be 1920 again will Babe Ruth be reanimated somehow? I hope so. F. Scott Fitzgerald too. Forget about the cloche hats though, those things must have caused terrible hat hair.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Now Trump is Lenin.

Here I thought he was Hitler.

I suppose tomorrow he'll be Mao -


Take your pick. He's no FDR. And neither were any of those cats.

No wonder the right-wing has such an identity crisis. Their whole reason for being is to find some anti-FDR alternative.

Other than that, it was BANNON who called himself a leninist. Get it right.

Bannon is a master manipulator. And insanely lustful for power.

He has to be. He has ambitions greater than any previous ruler of Christendom.

Yeah, there were popes who went to war against "Izlem", as he calls it.

But Bannon wants to re-structure the nuclear balance of power around 10th c. religious terms.

I really see that working out much better than Iraq. Much less grand a scale, too.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

No, I'm not taking you at all seriously tonight, Ritmo, I'm in too good a mood.

Good night!

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

If it's gonna be 1920 again will Babe Ruth be reanimated somehow? I hope so. F. Scott Fitzgerald too.

People who weren't in government.

Let's do the people who say they hate government a favor, and get them out of government.

Let them find other ways to destroy lives. I'm sure they can do it.

There's plenty of room for that already in the private sector.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

But not Che or Castro. Leftists just love those guys.

Actually they like FDR.

Overcame the Great Republican Depression. Won against fascism and imperialism in WWII. Put to use a weapons program that contained communism.

All while being a cripple.

It's time for your Republicans to get over their inferiority complex and admit that they're never going to create a better alternative to what he did. Ever.

buwaya said...

Lovecraft too was a man of the 1920s mostly. His best stuff came in @1920-31.

Gospace said...

The Toothless Revolutionary said...
Tell that to the mayors of sanctuary cities.

Anyone who thinks treating non-citizens humanely is a bigger problem than letting corporations re-write the laws so that they can poison our rivers and streams is actually, clinically insane.


I've already seen those plans where the evil corporate executives are going to poison the rivers and streams that their children and grandchildren and other assorted relatives use for recreation and as sources of clean water for drinking. In addition, they're planning on releasing lead and dioxin and other pollutants into the air to settle down on the soil and poison the populace that way. There are a couple of other really nefarious schemes they have, but I've been sworn to secrecy on them.

Birkel said...

@ TTR

Reading buwaya toy with you, practically begging you to engage on more than a superficial level, is embarrassing. I am sad for you.

As for dismantling the regulatory (Leviathan) state that has been constructed -- as predicted by Nobel Laureate James Buchanan -- by and for big business, it would be nice if even a single Leftist could see how destructive the formulation has become. Adam Smith wrote:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary."
in The Wealth of Nations 240+ years ago. Ever has it been so. And if Leftist Collectivists truly wanted to disarm the modern day robber barons they would recognize what is patent: The coercive power of government has been captured and is wielded by the state against the people.

The only way to confront this increasingly obvious plight is to decentralize power. If power is diffuse it is harder to capture. Physically moving agencies is less important than making them less intrusive. It is that intrusion which invites capture because the stakes are so high.

I may as well howl at the moon as inform you recalcitrant Leftist Collectivist dullards.

buwaya said...

Now, Lovecraft missed a point (or if he didn't, its definitely not something man was meant to know).
Lovecrafts alien God-monsters were ancient, long pre-existing man, to them the merest, transient vermin. And these would, of course, long outlive man.
But in this modern understanding, it is man himself that has, inadvertently, created these evil Gods, the entities of the state that exist for their own sakes and whose actual purposes are emergent, contingent, and obscure to our understanding. These entities contain men, its internal jellies and protoplasms, but they, and we, merely serve, worship and are directed, by what we cannot know. And to these God-monsters we are also, each, mere transient vermin.
And it seems, these, our man-made Cthulhus and Shub-Nigguraths, will long outlive man.

Earnest Prole said...

The Guardian article perfectly captures Richmond, California -- click through the pictures for the Cliffs Notes version.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Oh, I see! So when you gave us The Great Depression and The Great Recession you guys were just following Adam Smith's orders, then. Well, I guess that makes it ok. I guess that's what you mean by making American "great" again.

When you gave us the isolationism that left us ill prepared for WWII, that was another Adam Smith prescription, I guess. And preventing a poisoning of the land and people is tyranny.

Other than that, what you wrote was a nice exercise in cant and name-calling. If there's a leviathan in any of this, it's Trump's ego - precisely the sort that gave the tyrannical monarchs of the 18th century.

You're out chest-beating to keep the propaganda machine going since, apart from isolating America, poisoning America and welcoming in a regressive, dependent judiciary and press attacks - there's nothing to show.

There won't be anything to show in 2020, either. And you know it. So get the propaganda machine on board early with this belligerent, phony administration. The perfect administration for a 1920s economy and a 10th century foreign policy.

Next time you comment to me stop avoiding specifics. Anyone can throw around cant like yours. Usually much better than yours, actually.

Birkel said...

Earnest Prole:

You are quite wrong about the Trump Administration's ability to change administrative law. All it takes is a refusal by the Justice Department to defend a rule. A court will have no discretion, even under the APA, to rule for the only side that presents a case. We have seen this play out in other areas with the recruitment of favorable litigants and it can easily work again.

Further, agencies can be commanded to adopt shifts in rules under the APA through the normal administrative process. Allies can be called to comment, en masse, to proposed rules in the Federal Register, flooding the process and giving providing cover for otherwise unpopular actions.

Further, any Administration can work with Congress to insert language into bills nobody will read to restrict agencies' degrees of legislative freedom. There are many Republicans who will help in that endeavor.

(Ask me whether some conservatives managed to study the last eight years and might use the techniques that were paraded before us like so many Triumphs against our would-be oppressors.)

buwaya said...

There are very easy ways to prevent poisoning the land and people. The easiest is simply not to have people. They are after all quite inconvenient, really. The modern government-Leviathan-God-monster can deal with this. Depopulation of the countryside is very much part of the program, here in California anyway. And whomever is still out there, avoiding assimilation in the warrens, can be prevented from prospering. Soon they will die, leave, or join us. Leviathan works with kind incentives. That is why we worship, we in the warrens, and perform the rituals.

Birkel said...

@ TTR

Not a single word was responsive. Again, I am sad for you.

These are the nights when we both know you have been drinking. Something about you becomes quite pathetic. And I mean that in the Greek tragedy sense.

You'll not be able to see that I sincerely wish you could overcome the addiction. But I do.

Bay Area Guy said...

@Toothless,

"When you gave us the isolationism that left us ill prepared for WWII"

Poor reasoning. In Sept 1939, the Nazis signed the non-aggression pact with the Soviets, and both monstrous regimes then carved up Poland.

For nearly 2 years, 1939-1941, the LeftWing Communist party line in the US was to not enter the war and to call FDR a warmonger.

That changed, of course, when Hitler invaded USSR in June 1941.

Birkel said...

@ Bay Area Guy

Facts and dates are the oppressive tools of those who would poison and enslave TTR. After all, the policies of the 1910s and 20s prevented FDR from doing stuff. Anything, really.

Well, he gave electricity to us dumb Althouse Hillbillies and our grandfather-uncles.

/once written

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Not a single word was responsive.

Well not to a proven fact-hater like you they weren't. You're much better with manifestoes.

And meaningless propaganda. Like that clip.

Reinz and Steve are friends, everybody! It's all for the movement!

Yep. Lots of facts, there.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

After all, the policies of the 1910s and 20s prevented FDR from doing stuff. Anything, really.

Policies written by whom, dummy?

bgates said...

He's no FDR.

That would explain why there are no internment camps for citizens.

bgates said...

Bannon wants to re-structure the nuclear balance of power around 10th c. religious terms.

The last guys who tried that got Obama to send them a plane filled with pallets of cash.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

That would explain why there are no internment camps for citizens.

No shit. He's got an NSA for that and drone authority instead.

bgates said...

He's got an NSA for that and drone authority instead.

Thanks, Obama!

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

The last guys who tried that got Obama to send them a plane filled with pallets of cash.

The first ones were the Taliban under Reagan.

Thanks, Reagan!

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

If you think Obama started the NSA, let alone what they're up to, then you need to self-deport immediately as you would probably fail a basic citizenship test.

bgates said...

I think Obama used the NSA to spy on American citizens for eight years, and used drones to execute American citizens, both without due process, and over the objections of principled voices mainly on the right. I think Saint Delano violated the constitutional rights of a lot of citizens too, over the objections of principled voices mainly on the right. I wonder if you notice that you have now tried to criticize Trump for not being hostile enough to Russia, Reagan for being too hostile, and whatever phantom Republican you apparently think was president for most of the 30s for staying out of Eurasian politics entirely.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

You think, you think, you think = bgates speak for you "pulled it out of your ass."

Tell me what W. and Clinton used the NSA for, then. What a DIL - DO!

I'm fine with drones to kill Americans in combat against the U.S. abroad. Private citizens and the police use deadly force against Americans threatening their lives all. the. time. If you want to give up your right to a gun in your home (or on your person) to defend yourself or for the cops (an arm of government) to do the same, then I'll take your pacifism against citizen combatants abroad seriously. But you know you're incapable of any kind of seriousness apart from serious partisanship.

FDR violated rights as we acknowledge in retrospect. So did Lincoln. Giants up against something much greater than President Huge Big League could ever imagine.

Letting Russia hack his domestic political opponents and running off unabashedly like a bandit with the results is Nixonian - if Nixon used foreign agents. And we know what happened to him.

buwaya said...

In 1941 President Roosevelt took my people, used them to bait a giant fish-hook in the South China Sea, and waited for Japan to snap on it.

Lets say his concern for, oh, 17 million people under his protection (not being permitted their own foreign policy) was a cause for some dissention at the time. Conveniently forgotten later.

History is, very often if not always, a matter of perspective. But the understanding of perspective doesnt come until you are soaked in history, and have examined a great number of things from all sides, well argued. It also helps to have had experience in matters of policy, to understand how things go, how the minds worked, probably, behind the bare words of the text. And when discussing military matters it helps a great deal indeed to have at least attempted such a career. Perspective comes very hard.

Paul Snively said...

"The way the progressive left runs is if they can't get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some kind of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed."

Even if that only turns out to be 50% true, it will be as significant as the Revolutionary War.

Earnest Prole said...

You are quite wrong about the Trump Administration's ability to change administrative law.

Sure, Trump can dick around at the margins of administrative law just like Obama did. Fluffers and plumpers both Right and Left have a mutual interest pretending this dicking around is significant.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Here comes buwaya puti to save the world from imperial Japanese aggression, everybody!

He's a genius. That's why he talks in vague generalities as if he's a goddamn guru on a mountaintop.

buwaya said...

I quibble - a minor matter perhaps.
How did Mr Trump "let" someone hack his opponents email and other data, him not being in power and all the massively powerful security agencies of the state being under the control of his bitter opponents, and some of which was done long before he even declared his candidacy?

And the data releases occurred, or began, long before he even seemed like he was likely to be the Republican candidate.

The chain of causation, of plausibility, let alone the chain of responsibility, does not connect. The only connection seems emotional, on his opponents part.

buwaya said...

That, the sad events of 1941-45, is my historical specialty. I have been studying the period obsessively since I was a tiny boy listening to my many (surviving) aunts playing mahjong in a cloud of cigarette smoke, as was their custom, speaking about someone or other who "died in the war", or didn't. Most of those not in the present company (on those occasions) it seems, had indeed "died in the war".

I calculated it once, and the scale struck me. There were about as many "old" residents of Manila in 1941 as there were German Jews (about a half-million). About the same proportion seem to have "died in the war".

Hence my interest.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Obama has been hammered for having used the tag line, "If you like your doctor your can keep your doctor" in his own stump speeches.

Yeah he really paid a price for all that prevarication. Hell, he barely beat McCain because he was hammered so hard for it. Remember all the Pinocchios he got at the time? And then the way the Dems were forced to defend him all the time! Wow that was something wasn't it?

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

As for "poisoning rivers" it would be hard for any corporation to beat the record the EPA itself set in the Obama years. That agency should fine itself into bankruptcy court.

buwaya said...

If you want an idea of what real history is, little though it may impinge on the modern American consciousness, I recommend "By Sword and Fire", Alfonso Aluit. Sadly quite hard to get in the US.
I know that book by heart, because I heard a great deal of it firsthand many years before, and I grew up on those streets, playing on many of the ruins it describes, in progress of ruination, as it were. Some of mine were interviewed or quoted. Which is no surprise as every single relative of mine, of those generations, was a survivor.

Its the only really good work on the subject, oddly.

Oddly too, its in no general US history of the period, no matter that a very large number of Americans were involved, as soldiers or victims, and it was of considerable wartime and post-war significance.

All my kids went to US High Schools, and for some strange reason the two most significant bits of WW2 were the Japanese internment and the Atomic Bomb. And this is in "good" schools, private and public. I have long noted the deep decadence (or rather political corruption) of US education.
Manila?

Achilles said...

The Toothless Revolutionary said...

Tell me what W. and Clinton used the NSA for, then. What a DIL - DO!

The NSA and the most powerful of it's capabilities really started under Bush. They weren't really weaponized against americans til late in his term and then for real by Obama.

I'm fine with drones to kill Americans in combat against the U.S. abroad. Private citizens and the police use deadly force against Americans threatening their lives all. the. time. If you want to give up your right to a gun in your home (or on your person) to defend yourself or for the cops (an arm of government) to do the same, then I'll take your pacifism against citizen combatants abroad seriously. But you know you're incapable of any kind of seriousness apart from serious partisanship.

If you are in Yemen and you are working to kill Americans I don't see what the issue is with killing you. But when it is the State that decides to kill you there is a different standard. If I had more trust in the State I would agree with you. As it is I don't trust the State at all. It is clear that Trump as President has not change who the State is as well.

FDR violated rights as we acknowledge in retrospect. So did Lincoln. Giants up against something much greater than President Huge Big League could ever imagine.

Hogwash. The German Americans that were interned were treated far differently than the Japanese Americans. FDR was a racist and does not belong in the same league as Lincoln. FDR appointed a member of the KKK, Hugo Black, to the supreme court among many other disgustingly racist acts including internment of the Japanese Americans.

Letting Russia hack his domestic political opponents and running off unabashedly like a bandit with the results is Nixonian - if Nixon used foreign agents. And we know what happened to him.

WTF? I thought you were over this. This is stupid. You should be embarrassed to use this as a crutch.

Achilles said...

bgates said...
I think Obama used the NSA to spy on American citizens for eight years, and used drones to execute American citizens, both without due process, and over the objections of principled voices mainly on the right.

Bunk. Most people on the "right," myself included, stupidly supported the patriot act. There was no principle there. It was a lie. They turned the NSA on Americans before Obama. Obama just politicized it. FISA is a joke. The 4th amendment has been flushed down a toilet. The only principled person in DC is probably Rand Paul.

I think Saint Delano violated the constitutional rights of a lot of citizens too, over the objections of principled voices mainly on the right.

Who?

Achilles said...

3rdGradePB_GoodPerson said...
MAMA

Make America Mississippi Again = Make America Deconstructed


Pathetic straw man argument. Pure bad faith argument.

I would like to see you try. Just come out of the little troll shell and engage in good faith. It is liberating.

Rusty said...

Is PB&J volunteering to patrol the streets of Chicago? Did I hear that right?

Known Unknown said...

Well, this thread died a toothless death.

Skeptical Voter said...

So? What is wrong with that?

Unknown said...

If those are the words of a "Nazi!!!!!!!" he has everybody fooled.