Voodoo Chile in Wonderland wrote on Feb 20^th, 2017 at 8:27pm:





Answer  :   Please Leave it Voo !!!!!!!!



This Thread is for the " Big Boys and Girls !!!!!!!!   "


Great Material Here on this Thread  -- Time for some " Serious  Shots "   :

Ok, I've been wondering about the title of this thread: Politics thread (ssc!!). What does Safe, Sane and Consensual have to do with this? Wouldn't RACK be more applicable in politics?

I agree voo....give us an outlet to vent. and to gloat. We are all adults (except for Joey) and we have to learn to accept the things that we can't control. if someone has a different opinion than you, you have to learn to engage them on a mature level.

gimmekeef wrote on Feb 20^th, 2017 at 9:58am:

leonid wrote on Feb 21^st, 2017 at 5:53pm:





FUNNY !!!!! 



How do you create this material ?


Great Postin'  . Top notch !!!!!!   ...... Top NOTCH !!!!!!!!!




" That is what me Lil' Friends and meself running around the plains of Nebraska during the summer of 1974 ( Watergate )  playing stickball use to call Postin '   ...... You are POSTIN' !!!!!   "



Snuggles ™

https://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow/videos/10155060200991800/?pnref=story

Wait...was there an election? I have been too busy listening to Blue & Lonesome to notice!

gimmekeef wrote on Feb 22^nd, 2017 at 7:13am:

<  -------------- Some Guy    .... ?!  .... !!!!! :



https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-vs-trump-1487809142





" Trump vs. Trump "

" Trump the president is looking like he’s trapped inside Trump the campaigner.  "



By DANIEL HENNINGER



" Donald Trump is right that the media is making a mountain out of every Trump molehill. Despite the “resistance,” it also remains true that most Americans want the Trump presidency to succeed.

These Trump Hopefuls, whose number includes people who didn’t vote for him, want the presidency to succeed because they understand that if it fails, the social and economic condition of their country will be in a bad place.

Despite this reservoir of goodwill for the Trump presidency, the degree of anxiety about it is palpable. You have to be living in Netflixed isolation not to have had conversations with people wondering what the hell is going on at this White House.

Beyond the Beltway bubble, I think most people look upon the pitched battle between Mr. Trump and the news media as they would a playground fight between sixth-graders.

“He hit me first.”

“You hit first.”

“You’re a liar.”

“No, you’re the liar.”

Millions of Americans simply gape.

We could spend the next several years arguing whether Mr. Trump or the dishonest mainstream media started this, but a more productive question is, why is the mayhem happening?

It is happening mainly because the presidential campaign didn’t end last November. The political culture of the 2017 campaign endures inside the White House and among the press and the Trump opposition.

Presidential campaigns are an essential feature of the American political system—long, raucous, fiercely contested. But that glorious tumult is supposed to give way to the more substantial, harder politics of the presidency.

The permanent campaign has been with us a long time, and Barack Obama was the first president who didn’t disband his campaign operation after winning. But we’re in a different dimension today.

Propelled by new media, campaign politics has become a national addiction. It’s similar to the way people drive cars into trees because they can’t stop texting. No one will let go—not the tweeting president, not the surly press and not the hooked, agog public.

Still, there’s a political casualty waiting to happen inside the great American thrill ride—the presidency. Trump the president is looking like he’s trapped inside Trump the campaigner.

To be sure, the Trump presidential machine is executing the president’s orders and making fine appointments. The president’s downward ratchet on the vast Obama regulatory state is the main reason for the upward-bound stock market.

But Mr. Trump himself can revert in an instant to campaign mode—Hillary’s failures, voter fraud and past media transgressions. Or a Florida presidential rally that looks just like a Florida campaign rally. Bill Clinton once said that to win an election you do what you’ve gotta do. But are the tactics of a campaign transferrable to the daily life of a presidency?

Some will say the political world underestimated Donald Trump from day one. That’s true—but as a candidate. The presidency, by contrast, is one part of a large and complicated political system, complicated because the Founders wanted the process to be difficult and to require getting buy-in from unavoidably divided factions.

Mr. Trump and his White House are justified in wondering how it is their politics get hammered, while the factions of the alt-left are generally misrepresented as a benevolent children’s crusade.

A further Trump argument would be that they owe their distraught opposition nothing. That’s mostly true. It isn’t Mr. Trump’s responsibility to provide kumbaya solace to a political left whose street bullies turned Chuck Schumer into a progressive factotum.

The argument here isn’t that Donald Trump as president has to step up to “heal” a divided nation, not least because our age of limitless sentimentality has turned the phrase “heal the nation” into soap bubbles. But it’s obvious that the hyper-hot emotions in the country’s political life now are unsettling many normal people who don’t wish Mr. Trump ill.

There are risks, to the Trump presidency, its goals and the system itself, if the volatile personality-driven politics of the Trump campaign remain the norm for the 45th presidency.

Yes, we know it’s a populist movement. Populism, though, is what gets you elected. The president who tries to govern with populism inside the U.S.’s system of distributed, three-branch authority will fail.

There are going to be tough votes soon in Congress on the president’s tax bill, ObamaCare reform, a Dodd-Frank revision, the budget, infrastructure and the rest. That agenda, intended to raise the U.S. from its doldrums, is the reason so many different kinds of people want this presidency to succeed.

The Trump margin for delivering victory to these hopeful Americans is narrower than it should be. The president’s goals could falter or fail if enough Republicans running for election in 2020 decide their own needs require putting distance between themselves and the permanent volcano of the Trump White House. There will be no moral victories for a presidency that cannot produce 50 votes in the Senate.  "

He was in home alone 2..

<  -------------- Edith ?!  ....  !!!!!!!!!!!   :




https://www.wsj.com/articles/mattiss-pyrrhic-personnel-war-1487894275


" Mattis’s Pyrrhic Personnel War "

" The defense secretary clashes with the White House about staffing the Pentagon.  "


By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL



" Every military tactician fears the Pyrrhic victory—winning a battle but losing the war. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis might want to brush up on his Plutarch, as he continues to fight a one-man personnel skirmish.

President Trump promised to rebuild our hollowed-out military, a cause as urgent as any domestic priority. Years of Obama budget cuts and neglect slashed force sizes and provoked a readiness crisis. Over half the Navy’s aircraft are grounded. Of 58 Army brigade combat teams, only three are ready to immediately join a fight. The Air Force is short pilots and aircraft maintenance workers.


Mr. Trump chose a man singularly gifted to take on such a huge challenge. “Mad Dog” Mattis is a highly intelligent and revered Marine, whose time on the battlefield has made him intimately familiar with the needs of a fighting force. He’s a steely-eyed warrior who’ll fight for the rebuild mission, and who is willing to speak truth to his boss and Congress about what it will require. That is, if he will stand down long enough to get the project started.

Because right now, Mr. Mattis is fighting alone in the Pentagon, a situation of his own design. He was confirmed on Inauguration Day, yet as March approaches the White House hasn’t nominated a single subcabinet position in the Defense Department. No deputy secretary. No undersecretaries. No assistant secretaries. This is because Mr. Mattis is battling with the White House over who gets the jobs.

A soldier first—a politician only by presidential request—Mr. Mattis hews to the honest belief that defense should always be a bipartisan cause. He wants to choose his own team based on the strength of their views, political affiliations be damned. He wanted, for instance, former Obama undersecretary Michèle Flournoy for a top post. He’s looked to recruit from Ms. Flournoy’s liberal-hawk think tank, the Center for New American Security. And he’s pushed for some names who hail from Never Trump backgrounds, including Mary Beth Long, an official in George W. Bush’s Pentagon.

Perhaps only to make a point, Mr. Mattis is blocking some rock-star conservative talent. One is Mira Ricardel, a former Boeing executive and Bush Pentagon alum who helped with the Trump transition. Mr. Mattis continues to nix a long list of names offered by the White House team.

This defense secretary has one of the biggest jobs in the administration, and he’s right to want to be consulted and to have a team he trusts. There’s also nothing wrong with looking outside the partisan box.

At the same time, Mr. Mattis surely understands the chain of command. This isn’t just a question of choosing random “staff.” These are presidential appointments for consequential positions, with authority over budgets, personnel and operations. The Trump White House has a right to want people it trusts as much as it trusts Mr. Mattis. The former Marine is accorded influence. The president is accorded the call.

The bigger point is the damage this standoff is inflicting—short and long term. The Pentagon today remains in the hands of Obama holdovers who have spent years thwarting congressional requests, minimizing readiness problems, and generally covering for Obama failures. Those holdovers include Deputy Secretary Robert Work, an opponent of reform, and Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Stephen Hedger.

Mr. Hedger helped write an infamous 2016 Pentagon memo outlining how the Obama administration could use a presidential veto of greater defense spending as a “weapon” to get other Obama priorities. Civil servants are also place-warming other key positions. As well-intentioned as many are, it’s unrealistic to expect this crew to march in a new direction after eight years under President Obama.

Congressional reformers such as House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry are warning that the obstruction continues. The frustrated Texas congressman was recently driven to tweet that while Mr. Trump’s commitment to rebuilding was “100% right” and that he couldn’t have a “better leader” than Mr. Mattis, the Trump promise “is facing Obama holdovers @DOD who have been fighting against rebuilding & are still undermining agenda.”

Here’s the bigger problem: Mr. Mattis’s own standing. The former general is about to go into the policy fight of his life, and he’ll need all the political capital he can muster. Getting crosswise with the White House over personnel, and leaching credibility now on controversial nominees the White House clearly doesn’t want and who aren’t integral to victory, makes no sense.

Mr. Mattis may not come out of his personnel fight “utterly ruined” (to quote King Pyrrhus), but he’ll likely be weaker than necessary. And right now the country, and the military Mr. Mattis has promised to restore, needs a defense secretary operating at full and unquestioned strength.  "