18 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. As Thanksgiving with its focus on friends and family recedes, we enter the season of excess, Greedmas and New Year 's.  It is more important than ever now to focus on core values, the chief of which is the unskakeable truth that Trump stinks!

   Great God Almighty, Trump Stinks!

   Stay upwind this holiday season.  This time next year the tyrant will packing and the indictments falling on him like snow in a blizzard.

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   1. To say nothing of the fact that the Holiday season brings us this:

      

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   2. Christmas for some, Festivus for the rest of us!

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2. And the annual, foredoomed, attempt to convince us to give a squat about kwanzaa!

   Though as Ta-Nihishi Coates says:
   Black people have the right to make shit up just like white people do.

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   1. Now we celebrate Wolfnoote.

      Try to keep up, eh?

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      1. I reject all religious traditions that are younger than I am.

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         1. Aren't you old enough to remember when dirt was still a rock? 

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            1. I'm even old enough to remember when we had a balanced federal budget!

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               1. …and when Venango got running water!!

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3. Eighty-five years ago this is what kept county sheriffs and federal agents up at night…

   

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4. Trump Toadies beware! No matter how much you may grovel and humiliate yourself in hopes of currying Trump's favor — Despair —  Your efforts are for naught!

   Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s U.S.-focused foreign policy efforts suffered a severe setback on Monday when his American counterpart Donald Trump pledged to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum on the South American nation.

   Trump initially leveled the threat by Twitter while accusing Brazil and neighboring Argentina, governed by U.S. allies Bolsonaro and Mauricio Macri, of manipulating their currencies and hurting American farmers.

   The stakes are high for Bolsonaro, who has made his relationship with Trump a cornerstone of his diplomacy and is called by both friends and foes “the Trump of the tropics.”

   Somebody apparently put the bug in Trump's ear that Brazil's currency collapse is due to deliberate maliciousness, not you know, simple economics.

   Brazil is grappling with stubborn double-digit unemployment, and its economy is headed toward its third straight year of roughly 1% growth, following two years of deep recession.

   Rubens Barbosa, a former Brazilian ambassador to Washington, told The Associated Press that Trump is “punishing Brazil’s government and companies without a specific cause.”

   But not to worry, Trump's 4-Dimensional master plan involves triple-double reverse psychology by pushing yet another Western Hemisphere ally into the welcoming grasp of China.

   Speaking at a business forum shortly after Trump’s comments, Vice President Hamilton Mourão denied the country was manipulating its currency. He also said Brazil should discuss investment projects with China — a relationship initially shunned by the Bolsonaro administration that has lately grown warmer.

   Both South American countries have benefited from the U.S. trade war with China, taking advantage of Chinese import taxes on U.S. farm products to export more agricultural goods to China.

   Barbosa suggested Trump’s failure to respond to Bolsonaro’s attempts to improve ties could affect Brazil’s decision on whether to buy 5G wireless technology from China’s Huawei.

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   1. Remind me, just what is it that this moronic douchebag saying he’s making America.  Again?? . . .

      . . . another thirteen months of all this winning . . .

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   2. Putin gets what Putin wants. Again. and again and again

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5. Kamala is out. 

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   1. Let the VEEPs stakes begin…………

      Biden/Harris '20?

       

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      1. Yep. 

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   2. AG
      or CFPB

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6. Living in a red state is really, really bad for you.

   In 1990, today’s red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.

   And isn't good for your pocket book either.

   Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income and education. But they have been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer and better educated. In the close presidential election of 2000, counties that supported Al Gore over George W. Bush accounted for only a little over half the nation’s economic output. In the close election of 2016, counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for 64 percent of output, almost twice the share of Trump country.

   Today's Republicans look at the same facts and come up with the wrong conclusion (dating back to Reagan days).

   Conservative figures like William Barr, the attorney general, look at rising mortality in America and attribute it to the collapse of traditional values — a collapse they attribute, in turn, to the evil machinations of “militant secularists.” The secularist assault on traditional values, Barr claims, lies behind “soaring suicide rates,” rising violence and “a deadly drug epidemic.”

   But European nations, which are far more secularist than we are, haven’t seen a comparable rise in deaths of despair and an American-style decline in life expectancy. And even within America these evils are concentrated in states that voted for Trump, and have largely bypassed the more secular blue states.

    

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