Von einem "republikanischen" Kommentator. Enjoy.

The G.O.P. Is Rotting
A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever. ....

... The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism....

... Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time. They have no vision of the common good, except that Republican donors should get more money and Democratic donors should have less.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opini...is-rotting.html

TRUMP’S GOLDEN RULE OF GOVERNING

... You probably do not recognize it as a metaphor for the presidency Trump is actually administering. But it is both things simultaneously. The only weak point in the analogy is that, back in 2013, the rest of us hundreds of millions of Americans didn’t have to inhabit the hotel suite with him.

It is well-documented that Trump is consumed by his vendetta against Barack Obama. “It’s his only real position,” one top European diplomat told Buzzfeed earlier this year. “He will ask: ‘Did Obama approve this?’ And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: ‘We don’t.'”

As recently as this summer, he was amplifying random twitter accounts, retweeting anything that painted him in a better light than his predecessor, including a days-old, unscientific Twitter poll.

His single-minded obsession with dismantling the Affordable Care Act isn’t an impulse that stems from some deeply held right wing ideology, but from his primitive desire to brutalize Obama, the person, in the public square. He sees the steady progress he’s made rolling back Obama-era regulations and administrative action not as policy changes that will serve the public interest, or as legacy burnishing accomplishments in their own right, but as his most proximate means of needling a defenseless nemesis. Of owning Obama. Nay, of pwning him. ....

A similar error has driven Trump to place America on a path to global isolation and possibly to war. As a presidential candidate Trump trashed the global powers agreement to denuclearize Iran. His position was as much a function of his grudge against Obama as of his membership in the Republican Party, but it had no basis whatsoever in the merits of the deal, which he did not understand at the time, and does not understand to this day. His decision to decertify the deal last week stems entirely from the humiliation he feels every 90 days when, by law, he must attest to whether the deal is in the national interest, and whether Iran is in compliance with it. Refusing serves the dual purpose of ending the shame he feels over having to personally validate something Obama did, and of peeing in a bed he imagines Obama still slumbers in. He does not grasp that it is actually our bed, and his job is to keep the bed unsoiled.

I could tell the same story about Trump’s EPA terminating the Clean Power Plan, Trump’s own decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and even Trump’s reckless anti-diplomatic comments about North Korea. But you get the point. There is no unearthed proof that the compromising Moscow incident ever happened, but Trump’s conduct in office reflects the psychology that supposedly inspired it uncannily. It is the best reason to think the pee tape actually exists.

As long as Trump is president, America will be subject to government by pee-pee tape. He will eventually feel the splashback, but by then we will all be drenched.
https://crooked.com/article/trump-golden...rning-pee-tape/

The Steele Dossier on Trump and Russia Is Looking More and More Real
When news surfaced at the beginning of the year that British intelligence agent turned private investigator Christopher Steele had compiled a report on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, news reports immediately treated its findings as radioactive. The implications of Steele’s reporting were spy-movie-unreal: Trump was the subject of Russian financial and even sexual blackmail, and he and his advisers had been openly colluding with Moscow.

Two details in particular made the dossier seem suspect. First, its report that Trump had paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed that had been used by Barack Obama. And second, the report alleged that Michael Cohen, a Trump crony with Russian contacts, had met in Prague with Russian intelligence officials. ....

... Most reporters have treated the say-so of Cohen, a Trump hanger-on laden with extremely shady associations, as implicitly more credible than the reporting of a British intelligence agent with years of expertise. That is probably a mistake.

And what about the bit about the prostitutes? The detail has been endlessly described as “salacious,” placing it in the category of National Enquirer–type gossip of dubious veracity. We don’t have any idea whether that detail is true. However, Brian Beutler made a fairly persuasive case that Trump has displayed during his presidency the exact same kind of pathological, self-destructive jealousy of Barack Obama (who had publicly humiliated Trump two years before the alleged incident).

As time goes by, more and more of the claims first reported by Steele have been borne out. In general, there is a split between the credibility afforded the dossier by the mainstream media and by intelligence professionals. The former treat it is gossip; the latter take it seriously. ..."
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/201...-more-real.html

Dossier
Knowing What We Know Now
https://www.justsecurity.org/44697/steele-dossier-knowing/

The World Has Taken Trump’s Measure
From Asia to Europe, he has squandered America’s influence and moral authority.

Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to make America great again. As president he is doing the opposite: He is making America smaller than at any time in the past 100 years.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-h...4&ad_id=6636272

So sieht surrender to a foreign power and an abdication of responsibility aus:

Exclusive: Rex Tillerson, In Meeting With U.S. Diplomats, Says Russia ‘Interfered’ in Election
The secretary of state acknowledged Moscow’s 2016 interference. Then he continued to talk about cutting back on U.S. diplomacy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-...red-in-election

‘Fake News,’ Trump’s Obsession, Is Now a Cudgel for Strongmen
President Trump routinely invokes the phrase “fake news” as a rhetorical tool to undermine opponents, rally his political base and try to discredit a mainstream American media that is aggressively investigating his presidency.

But he isn’t the only leader enamored with the phrase. Following Mr. Trump’s example, many of the world’s autocrats and dictators are taking a shine to it, too.

When Amnesty International released a report about prison deaths in Syria, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, retorted that “we are living in a fake-news era.” President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who is steadily rolling back democracy in his country, blamed the global media for “lots of false versions, lots of lies,” saying “this is what we call ‘fake news’ today.” ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world...-dictators.html

Yes, the Truth Still Matters
Of all the questions that the ascendancy of Donald Trump has raised — on the value of political experience in governing, on the fitness of business executives as government executives or the profile of the Republicans as defenders of the rich and the Democrats as the sentinels of the poor — none is as perplexing as perhaps the central question of the age:

Does the truth still matter?

... Mr. Trump has turned that accepted truth on its head, sowing doubts about the veracity of news reporting by promoting the notion that the mainstream media spews “fake news.” Employing an evocative, sinister phrase dating to the French Revolution and embraced by Lenin and his Soviet successors, he has declared that great portions of the press are the “enemy of the people.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/opini...-fake-news.html

Will Trump's lows ever hit rock bottom?
With his latest tweet, clearly implying that a United States senator would trade sexual favors for campaign cash, President Trump has shown he is not fit for office. Rock bottom is no impediment for a president who can always find room for a new low.

A president who'd all but call a senator a whore is unfit to clean toilets in Obama's presidential library or to shine George W. Bush's shoes: Our view

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2...ates/945947001/

Trump’s Numbers Near a Tipping Point
Things fell apart for Nixon when he dropped below 30 percent approval in his second term. Trump is getting there in his first year.

At 32 percent in the most recent Pew and Monmouth polls, he is perilously close to what most historians and political scientists say is a tipping point of 30 percent, below which a president can no longer effectively lead.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-num...a-tipping-point

A New York cosmetics executive who publicly alleged Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s repeatedly solicited the future president to become his campaign makeup artist and to pitch her new product line in the months before her story roiled the 2016 race, according to the woman and her contemporaneous emails.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administrati...-before-her-sex

So ein Glück, dass dieser Verbrecher Obama nicht mehr im Amt ist !

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

https://www.politico.com/interactives/20...-investigation/

"trickle down economics"

"American Businesses Announce Major Bonuses For Employees Because Of Trump Tax Reform"


https://www.dailywire.com/news/24926/ame...s-ryan-saavedra

Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2837

---

So ein Glück, dass dieser Verbrecher Obama nicht mehr im Amt ist !

"In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation."

https://www.politico.com/interactives/20...-investigation/

---

"With the new law, families will be also able to withdraw up to $10,000 per year tax-free for elementary, high school or homeschool expenses."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiepf/201...s/#6a5d9615729a


Kein Wunder dass Willie-Boy still geworden ist.

Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2836

---

A New York cosmetics executive who publicly alleged Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s repeatedly solicited the future president to become his campaign makeup artist and to pitch her new product line in the months before her story roiled the 2016 race, according to the woman and her contemporaneous emails.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administrati...-before-her-sex

---

Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2838

---

"trickle down economics"

"American Businesses Announce Major Bonuses For Employees Because Of Trump Tax Reform"


https://www.dailywire.com/news/24926/ame...s-ryan-saavedra

---

Zitat von nahal im Beitrag #2840

---

"With the new law, families will be also able to withdraw up to $10,000 per year tax-free for elementary, high school or homeschool expenses."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiepf/201...s/#6a5d9615729a


Kein Wunder dass Willie-Boy still geworden ist.

---

Money Talks: Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR dial up donations to key GOP lawmakers as tax bill protects carried interest loophole
If you want to know how one of Wall Street’s biggest players managed to keep a massive and controversial loophole in the GOP tax bill, just follow the money.

The $2.5 trillion private equity business, comprised of Wall Street behemoths Blackstone Group (BX), Carlyle Group (CG) and KKR & Co. (KKR), funneled massive amounts of campaign cash into the coffers of Republican leaders in the House and the Senate as these same lawmakers voted for a tax bill that preserves the so-called carried interest loophole, campaign contribution documents reviewed by FOX Business show.

In 2017 alone, members of the three private equity firms gave a combined $1.31 million to GOP lawmakers in the House and the Senate, compared to just $438,000 to Democrats, documents show.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/2017...t-loophole.html


Billionaire Koch Brothers Invest Millions More to Promote Tax Overhaul
Groups backing the Republican tax-overhaul plan invested tens of millions of dollars promoting the legislation only to see its popularity decline over time. That isn’t stopping one group of conservatives from investing millions more in marketing.

Conservative groups led by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are beginning a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to highlight the benefits of the freshly passed legislation.

The effort comes amid dismal polling for the tax legislation. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 41% of Americans surveyed viewed the bill as a bad idea, up from 35% in October.
That’s despite the Republican-aligned groups spending at least $30 million to market the bill as good for the middle class.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/tax-bil...card/1513859346

House Republicans Don’t Know Some Very Basic Facts About The Tax Bill They Wrote
It took us 18 tries to find a GOP congressman who could tell us the individual income tax brackets.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hou...kushpmg00000009


After GOP tax bill passes, worker bonuses get headlines but the real money goes to stock buybacks
Trickle-down economics don't work.
https://thinkprogress.org/trump-tax-buybacks-5f9f78cf6e27/


You Cannot Be Too Cynical About the Republican Tax Bill
The rush to enact the tax bill was designed to mask — as a break for the middle class — what is in fact a $1.4 trillion package of benefits for key donors and lobbyists, the richest members of Congress, President Trump, his family and other families like his.

The speed from introduction to passage — seven weeks, with no substantive hearings — effectively precluded expert examination of the legislation’s regressive core, its special interest provisions and the long-term penalties it imposes on the working poor and middle class through the use of an alternative measure of inflation — the “chained CPI.”

Two days before Congress gave final approval, a group of 13 tax law experts released the most incisive critique of the tax bill to date, a 30-page document called “The Games They Will Play: An Update on the Conference Committee Tax Bill.”
The primary authors of the report — Ari Glogower, David Kamin, Rebecca Kysar, and Darien Shanske — describe the legislation as “a substantial blow to the basic integrity of the income tax” that will “advantage the well-advised in ways that are both deliberate and inadvertent.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/opini...l?smid=fb-share

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t...bed&oe=5AB69011
https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t...cae&oe=5ABBF918
https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t...655&oe=5AFD2A6C
https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t...18e&oe=5ACB9FD4

The GOP Tax Cuts Are Even More Unpopular Than Past Tax Hikes
About a third of voters currently support the Republican tax reform package, according to an average of five surveys released1 this month. In a Quinnipiac University survey, just 25 percent of voters approved of the plan. Surveys from ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Morning Consult and YouGov put approval of the plan slightly higher, but all are still at 36 percent or lower. Meanwhile, an average of the five polls puts opposition at 46 percent.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the...past-tax-hikes/

Americans have already made up their minds about the tax bill — and it looks brutal for the GOP
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop...d-polls-2017-12

Most voters disapprove of GOP tax proposals, think they help the wealthy most, poll says
Most American voters — 52 percent — disapprove of the GOP proposals to overhaul the tax system, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday. Only 25 percent of respondents approve of the Republican effort.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/15/voters-d...-poll-says.html

Republicans warn Trump of 2018 bloodbath
The White House knows the midterm election will probably be bad. Behind the scenes, top aides are scrambling to avoid the worst.

A few weeks before Alabama's special Senate election, President Donald Trump’s handpicked Republican National Committee leader, Ronna Romney McDaniel, delivered a two-page memo to White House chief of staff John Kelly outlining the party’s collapse with female voters.
The warning, several people close to the chairwoman said, reflected deepening anxiety that a full-throated Trump endorsement of accused child molester Roy Moore in the special election — which the president was edging closer to at the time — would further damage the party’s standing with women. ...

The backstage talks provide a window into how those closest to Trump are bracing for a possible bloodbath in the 2018 midterms, which could obliterate the Republican congressional majorities and paralyze the president’s legislative agenda. The potential for a Democratic wave has grown after Republican losses this fall in Virginia, New Jersey and Alabama, and as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to the 30s. ...

Among GOP leaders, however, there is widespread concern heading into 2018. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said privately that both chambers could be lost in November. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has told donors that he fears a wave of swing district Republican lawmakers could retire rather than seek reelection.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/2...-warning-312404

Tax Cuts Buoy Republicans, but They’re Swimming Against an Undertow
The sweeping tax overhaul approved by Congress this week hands Republicans a long-sought achievement they believe will bolster their defenses in next year’s midterm campaign, but party officials concede the measure may only mitigate their losses in what is shaping up to be a punishing election year.

While the tax legislation is broadly unpopular as it reaches President Trump’s desk, the bill offers Republicans the sort of signature accomplishment they have been lacking to galvanize their demoralized donors and many of their voters.
Republican lawmakers, who spent much of this year forced to explain or defend Mr. Trump’s erratic behavior, now have an opportunity to go on the offensive with an issue that unites their increasingly fractious party. And they hope that up-for-grabs voters will reward them should the economy keep growing while their tax bills are falling....

...“Republicans have a big storm coming at them,” he added. “We just don’t know if it’s a bad wind storm or a Category Five hurricane.”
Mr. Trump has the lowest approval rating of any modern president this soon into his tenure, and midterm elections are inevitably referendums on the party that controls the White House. He is especially unpopular among women, who in this year’s statewide and special elections have overwhelmingly supported Democrats. According to a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, 62 percent of female voters disapproved of Mr. Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/us/po...erms-trump.html

Prosecutors Said to Seek Kushner Records From Deutsche Bank
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have sought bank records about entities associated with the family company of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, according to four people briefed on the matter.

In recent weeks, prosecutors from the United States attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the giant German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner family real estate business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/busin...6&rref=politics

Big German Bank, Key to Trump’s Finances, Faces New Scrutiny
During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump pointed to his relationship with Deutsche Bank to counter reports that big banks were skeptical of doing business with him.

After a string of bankruptcies in his casino and hotel businesses in the 1990s, Mr. Trump became somewhat of an outsider on Wall Street, leaving the giant German bank among the few major financial institutions willing to lend him money.

Now that two-decades-long relationship is coming under scrutiny.

Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks.

Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter. And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/busin...w-scrutiny.html