They aren’t dumping Trumpism, just Trump. Indeed, what some pundits have termed Trumpism is really just what mainstream Republican politics have been for decades.
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board Responds to Trump’s Criticism: “Thanks for the Attention”
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal responded to former President Donald Trump after he criticized their coverage of him and his administration. The Journal, one of the more conservative nationally syndicated publications, said Trump is to blame for Republicans losing their Senate majority in the most recent election.
“He cost the GOP two Georgia Senate races on Jan. 5 as he made his claims of election fraud the main issue rather than checking Mr. Biden and Nancy Pelosi,” the editorial board wrote. “Mr. Trump essentially told his Georgia supporters their votes didn’t matter, and many stayed home. The GOP lost the Senate.”
Opinion: McConnell Denies Reality And Abandons Americans In Real Need
Watching the senate, under the callous and inhumane rule of Mitch McConnell, fail to respond sufficiently and urgently to the dire suffering and needs of out-of-work Americans, largely denying their reality, brought to mind a scene from American author William Dean Howells’ 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes.
Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Murder Allegations Against Scarborough Are “Ugly, Even For Him”
The reliably conservative Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board criticized President Donald Trump in an editorial this morning, calling his murder allegations against former congressman and “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough “ugly even for him.”
“Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories — recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination — but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him,” the board wrote.
They continued: “Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.”
The board concludes that its editorial is not written with “any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.”
The Wall Street Journal‘s condemnation comes after the president
falsely accused
Conservative Commentator Accuses Democrats of Hijacking #MeToo Movement
The conservative assault on women’s basic human rights just doesn’t stop.
And just as the GOP hired Arizona-based sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell to serve as a kind of figleaf to cover the obscene nakedness of their shameful misogyny, we also see Republican-aligned women coming out in full force to play an identity-politics game geared toward masking the extreme anti-feminist ideology steeping the conservative political agenda.
If a woman says it, can it really be anti-woman?
I can hear now that swarm of white male Republican senators who hired Rachel Mitchell telling us, “Hey, some of our best commentators are women.”
Take conservative commentator Carrie Sheffield who recently published an opinion piece on CNN.com titled “Democrats Have Hijacked #MeToo for Political Gain.”
Positioning herself as a #MeToo supporter, she charges the democrats with having “hijacked #Me Too for political gain.” While lauding the movement for toppling serial sexual predators and harassers and advocating for and protecting the most vulnerable, she expresses concern that “the noble justice of #MeToo has been politically hijacked and weaponized, co-opted by Democrats seeking to extrapolate this just cause for liberal policies that go beyond equal and fair treatment for women.”
We really never get an answer in her column, which focuses on Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school, as to how pushing for the FBI to investigate these accusations goes beyond advocating for the “equal and fair treatment of women”? Doesn’t trying to ensure that someone appointed to the Supreme Court isn’t a sexual predator, misogynist, and liar a rather big deal when it comes to defending the “equal and fair treatment of women”? After all, appointing a justice who disrespects, maybe even hates, women wouldn’t bode well for guaranteeing the highest court in the land will decide law that protects women’s rights.
She does endorse a recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled “The Presumption of Guilt: The New Liberal Standard Turns American Due Process Upside Down,” in which the editorial board argues, with particular regard to Kavanaugh’s situation, that “the Democratic standard for sexual-assault allegations is that they should be accepted as true merely for having been made. The accuser is assumed to be telling the truth because the accuser is a woman. The burden is on Mr.
Kavanaugh
WSJ Tells Republicans Good Luck Running on Trump’s Tariffs in November
On Sunday we reported that “Trump’s trade war is hitting the agricultural Midwest hard as farmers in eight of the top ten soybean producing states that voted for Trump are going to be looking at bankruptcy as they are already being hurt by Trump’s trade war with China.”
We also said that Trump’s trade war was a “ticking time bomb” that was set to go off very soon once his ridiculous tariffs go into effect.
And now the venerable conservative newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, has demolished Trump in a new editorial lambasting the president’s decisions to impose 19th century trade restrictions on the global economy of the 21st century.
According to the Journal, Trump is killing the jobs of the people he had promised to protect. They also issued a warning to Republicans, saying that Trump will cause them to “take a beating at the polls in November.”
“Donald Trump’s trade war has been an abstraction for most Americans so far, but the retaliation has now begun in earnest and the casualties are starting to mount,” the editorial said.
After U.S. manufacturer Harley-Davidson announced they are moving jobs to Europe the Journal said that American workers are the biggest losers under Trump’s policies:
“President’s beloved stock market took another header Monday on news of more restrictions on investment into the U.S., and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down for 2018. But the biggest losers Monday were the American workers who make Harley-Davidson motorcycles whose jobs will soon be headed overseas thanks to the Trump tariffs.”
Trump and Cronies Lie About How Capitalism Works in Claiming Tax Cut Will Lift Wages
Celebrants of the recent tax bill have claimed, echoing Trump’s top economic advisors, that the massive corporate tax cut will indeed trickle down or, to mix metaphors, serve as the proverbial rising tide that will lift all boats.
CNBC’s Patti Domm was quick to validate this exuberant claim, pointing to announcements from Wells Fargo and Fifth Third bank that they will be raising their minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour and from AT&T and Comcast that they will be showering their employees with bonuses. Other reporting on CNBC suggest it’s too early to tell, as many companies Fred Imbert and others reached out to hoping to forecast the impact of the corporate tax cut were more reticent about how this tax windfall will trickle down to employees, adopting a wait-and-see attitude.
Before we get too exuberant, let’s keep in mind not just recent history but also the longer arc of history in terms of the relationship between corporate profits and wages as well as the most basic dynamics of capitalism. The bottom line of capitalist dynamics is that higher corporate profits do not translate into higher wages. Indeed, higher profits have typically been achieved through lowering workers’ wages and benefits.
First, recent history: Remember when Trump lavishly offered up seven million dollars of taxpayer money to the Carrier corporation in order, supposedly, to persuade Carrier not to re-locate factories and jobs to Mexico? Trump generated a self-aggrandizing headline, but Carrier ended up still moving jobs to Mexico and eliminating over 600 jobs from the Indiana workforce.
That’s one reason not to get prematurely rapturous about corporate trickle down.
Another reason to be skeptical about corporate windfalls translating into rising wages is that since the 1950s we have seen corporations fare better and better while worker wages, including the minimum wage, have stagnated. Indeed, last March, well before the passage of this tax cut, The Economist reported, as part of its cover story, that corporate profits in the United States were in fact enjoying record performance.
So, given this record corporate performance in terms of profit generation, we should have already seen corporations raising wages, expending monies in capital and infrastructure investment, and showering generous bonuses on its employees.
If this scenario happened, I guess I missed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t miss it. It just didn’t happen.
And it likely won’t.
Indeed, at a meeting of the Wall Street Journal’s CEO council in early November, Gary Cohn asked CEO’s to raise their hands if the GOP tax cut proposed at the time would spur their companies to invest more and raise wages. In a moment Business Insider termed “awkward,” few CEO’s raised their hands, reinforcing the reporting of CNBC’s Fred Imbert.
These are not left-wing anti-capitalist ideologues doing this reporting. These are business journalists.
And these business journalists are just reporting the facts validated by the history of capitalism’s dynamics. The end game of corporate behavior is to increase profits, not to give money away charitably because they have it. In fact, corporations often push to lower wages and benefits to increase profits. They aren’t looking for any reason to raise wages.
Are we really supposed to be buying this bill of goods capitalist President Trump and the corporate bedfellows with which he has staffed his cabinet and advisors are trying to sell us?
They know full well how capitalism works. And corporations raising wages because profits and income increase ain’t how it works, and it never has been.
Take Trump himself. Recently Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort requested and was awarded 70 H-2B visas to hire foreign workers. According to Trump, John Bowden at The Hill reported, “It’s very, very hard to get people. Other hotels do the exact same thing.”
Really? Is that why Bowden also cited CareerSource spokesmen Tom Veenstra as highlighting, “We currently have 5,136 qualified candidates in Palm Beach County for various hospitality positions listed in the Employ Florida state jobs database.”
Free-market advocates typically oppose minimum-wage legislation, believing that the market should determine wages. Capitalists understand that corporate profits don’t determine wages but rather the dynamics of labor supply and demand do.
In the case of Mar-a-Lago’s hiring practices, Trump’s resort is deliberately trying to undermine the forces that raise worker wages by bringing in foreign workers—because that’s how capitalism works. Corporations, like Carrier and Trump’s businesses, seek to pay the lowest wages possible.
So, if history is any indicator, as it typically is, the dynamics of capitalism won’t change, such that we cannot expect increased corporate profits and income to translate to better treatment and higher pay for workers.
Such a scenario would defy the logic of capitalism, as Carrier and Mar-a-Lago demonstrate. And our capitalist President, his cronies, and the Republican Congress are simply lying about this reality of which they in their wealth are well-aware.
Trump’s Lawyers Wanted Jared Kushner To Step Down Over Shady Russia Connections
A number of the president's lawyers wanted Kushner out, worrying that he would become a legal liability as the special counsel investigation intensified.
GOP Approval Takes Double-Digit Nosedive After Trump, Republicans Accomplish Nothing In 100 Days
As the GOP-controlled government continues to wage war on middle-class Americans, this number will likely get worse.
The Wall Street Journal Turns on Donald Trump With Blistering Editorial
"The President clings" to his false wiretapping claims "like a drunk to an empty gin bottle," say the editors of the Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal Enables Trump Dishonesty by Not Calling His Lies “Lies”
"I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.”
Fearing Corrupt White House, WSJ Tells Trump To Liquidate All Assets
"Donald Trump promised to change Washington's culture of self-dealing, and if he wants to succeed he's going to have to make a sacrifice and lead by example."
Conservative Newspaper Joins The Chorus Calling For James Comey to Resign
F.B.I. directors are supposed to be above politics, not in them. Mr. Comey has to do the right thing - resign.
Fact Check: Republicans Are Lying About Obama’s “Secret” $400 Million Payment To Iran
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus claimed President Obama “secretly gave the Iranians $400M at the same time 4 Americans were released from their custody” and linked to a Wall Street Journal story that has the right up in arms this fine Wednesday morning. This, of course, is false.
Report: Hillary Clinton Likely To Pick Tim Kaine As Her Running Mate
According to the Wall Street Journal, Clinton is close to choosing the Spanish-speaking Virginia senator.
Peggy Noonan Says Linking Climate Change and Terrorism Makes Bernie Sanders Look “Daffy”
Despite all the evidence he is 100% correct about the connection between climate change and terrorism, Noonan thinks Sanders sounds "daffy"
The Koch Brothers Complain About Buying Low Quality Republicans Who Lack Substance
The Koch brothers have no right to complain about the tone of Republican politics because it is exactly what they paid for and wanted
Wall Street Journal Warns Republicans Are Greatest Threat To America’s Economy
WSJ economists are fearful that Republicans will repeat their past "serious damage to the economy by harming consumer confidence"
Survey: Americans Prefer A Gay President Over An Evangelical
It turns out that not only are Americans not the least bit enamored at the prospect of an evangelical fanatic as president, they are, by a large majority (61%), much more supportive of a gay or lesbian occupying the White House than a religious Republican seeking to rule according to Christianity.
Debunking The Lie That Obama Was Forced To Apologize For The Deaths of 2 US Hostages
Republicans and the media are accusing President Obama of being forced to apologize for the deaths of two Americans who were killed in a US drone strike, but the reality is that it was the White House who gave the scoop to the media.
Poll Finds Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Religious Based Anti-Gay Bigotry
A solid majority of Americans oppose discrimination against gays and lesbians, even if it is based on religious beliefs.
Donald Trump Quits TV Show, Forms Exploratory Committee To Kick Off Presidential Campaign
Billionaire Donald Trump has formed an exploratory committee and hired staff for a 2016 presidential run.
A Murder Here, A Suicide There, Ask Republicans If They Care!
In yet another senseless gun episode, a highly respected, accomplished and beloved professor, Raja Fayad, was shot to death on campus on the afternoon of Thursday, February 5, 2015.
A Mitt Romney-Jeb Bush Brawl Will Divide The GOP Establishment And Help The Tea Party
The GOP is poised for an epic clash of plutocrats that is likely to split establishment donors and benefit the Tea Party
McConnell Promises Republicans Will Escalate The Religious War on Women
Now, the Republicans' first order of business with Mitch McConnell sharing Senate Majority Leader duties with Ted Cruz is precisely what they did when they won the House majority in 2010; attack women's right to choose when they give birth.
Obama Has Best Job Creation Streak Since 1939 So Republicans Vow To Return To Bush
In Republican vernacular, returning to the "old ways" is "taking our country back;" but back to what? If the subject is the economy, it is back to Bush-era economic policies that are wildly popular with conservative mainstream media, but still not austere and severe enough for the Koch brothers.
Republican Gov. John Kasich Frantically Backtracks After Being Caught Praising Obamacare
Ohio Governor John Kasich spent his Monday night calling up different media outlets after the Associated Press ran an article where he was quoted as heaping praise on the Affordable Care Act and stating that the law will not be repealed.
Mitch McConnell Admits Republicans Want Kansas’ “Conservative Hell” Enacted Nationally
McConnell is anxious to lead the Senate and join House Republicans in enacting Brownback's Koch brother model at the national level.
U.S. Intel Failures Have Become the Latest Republican Benghazi Hoax
Led by Fox News (again), the mainstream media's reaction to Obama's admission of American intel failures has become the latest Benghazi hoax
SOFA Has Become As Mythical for Fox News as George W. Bush
The one thing you will never hear mentioned by Fox News is SOFA. It gets in the way of their Obama is to blame for ISIL narrative
Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh Claim That President Obama Is Deliberately Hurting America
On Tuesday, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, appeared on The Rush Limbaugh Show to discuss Iraq and basically trash the President. All three people claimed that Obama is hurting America on purpose.
Dick Cheney Claims Obama Is ‘Dead Wrong’ On Iraq While Rand Paul Insists Cheney Is To Blame
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos Sunday to discuss the recent violence in Iraq, as well as his infamous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal where he claimed that President Obama is directly responsible for the chaos in Iraq and the Middle East.
You Built That: Why the Conservative Base Will Ignore Rupert Murdoch’s Immigration Advice
In a recent op-ed, Rupert Murdoch made a case for comprehensive immigration reform. However, due to is own Fox News network, that possibility does not seem likely.
Dick Cheney Rewrites History And Blames Iraq Violence On Obama In Disgusting Op-Ed
Dick Cheney, along with his daughter Liz, penned an unbelievable piece of retcon tripe for the Wall Street Journal where they claimed that Obama lost the war that was already won, while at the same time positioning Dick Cheney as a hero.
Do Other Countries Really ‘Hate’ Obama as the Right Claims?
Oh, how they hate Obama. I mean 'hate' with a capital "H." We're talking about most of the world's population. I know this animus to be true because the right wing echo chamber led by wildly overpaid, radical talk show hosts, Fox News, and pollsters tell me so, relentlessly.
Howard Dean Destroys The Media’s Narrative That Obama Does Not Have A Clear Foreign Policy
During Thursday's broadcast of Morning Joe, the panel, which included former Democratic Vermont Governor and DNC Chairman Howard Dean, discussed President Obama's commencement speech at West Point earlier this week. I
Chris Wallace Says Climate Change Isn’t Occurring Because It Is Cold On The East Coast
There is no place better for conservatives to wrap themselves up in self-denial and make up stuff than Fox News Sunday. Discussions around climate change are no exception.
Boeing Machinist Union Members Approve a Lousy Deal to Save Their Jobs
Boeing celebrated the new year by claiming a major victory over the Machinists Union. By a 51% plurality, workers chose to OK a bad deal.
Bumpy Ride: How Chris Christie’s Traffic Scandal May Wreck His Presidential Bid
Friday the 13th was a very unlucky day for Chris Christie. So unlucky, in fact, that it might cost him a chance at the presidency.
NBC/WSJ Poll Shows Majority of People Reject the Republican Party and Their Views
While the media will focus on the President's disapproval ratings showing as an all-time high in this poll (54%), the real story here is that, for the most part, this poll shows that the American people are still rejecting the Republican Party and its ideals.
Stuff Rich People Say: Austerity Admissions and Banker Bonuses
Rich people should talk more openly, more often. It would make a progressive agenda a whole lot more achievable.
Deconstructing Hypocrite Rand Paul’s Dog and Pony Filibuster Sideshow
It would be great if Rand Paul was truly against the harming of innocent Americans, but his track record against women and the civil rights movement suggests otherwise.
A Big Win for Women’s Liberty on the Anniversary of Roe V Wade
There's good news for liberty on this 40th anniversary of Roe V Wade. For the first time ever, a majority of Americans support a woman as having the right to make her own medical decisions.
Even the Beltway is Catching on to Romney’s ‘Desperate Dishonesty’
Today on Bloomberg News, Al Hunt called Mitt Romney's GM and Chrysler lies desperate and dishonest. The word fraudulent was also used.
Press Wakes Up to Romney’s Lies, Says There’s ‘no excuse’ for ‘astonishingly misleading’ Jeep Ad
Romney jumped the lie shark with his new ad. The press is not impressed and they are calling Romney out on it. Here's a roundup of reaction.
Anderson Cooper Takes Down Mitt Romney’s Secret Tax Plan
On the eve of the second presidential debate, Anderson Cooper took down Mitt Romney's false claims about the six studies he claims support his secret tax plan.
The Republican Party Turns the Page on Truth – And the Media Helps
The Republican National Convention set new records - and lows - for blatant dishonesty and the mainstream media makes it all possible
An 18 Point Swing in Economic Optimism Powers Obama Over Romney
Buried in the latest results of the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is an 18 point swing in economic optimism for President Obama.
Debunking the Myth of Paul Ryan Policy Wonk
The right is heralding Paul Ryan as a policy wonk, but a closer look at his ideas and where they come from reveals that he is anything but.
Wall Street Journal And AEI Throw The Tea Party And GOP Under The Economic Bus
Remember when President Obama said the private sector is doing fine, and all the conservatives poked at that comment? Well, now even two major conservative publications are saying the same thing!