Politics The Trump Crazy Train! (2 Viewers)

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This.

And it's stupid. Just because you support the people of Palestine, does not mean you support Hamas. The Trump administration also takes it as being against Israel, or choosing Palestine over Israel, but that's also foolish.

Israel is our ally and military wise we will back them. I get that.

One can not be in support of Hamas or the leadership of Israel but still hope the best for the people's of both countries equally.

It's not just Trump doing this, it's both political parties. And they know full well it doesn't equate to supporting Hamas, but they have no counter argument so they straw man the entire movement.
 
I know I'm gonna get hammered from all sides, but why does being anti-Israeli (or anti-Zionism) equate to being anti-Semitic??? As far as I'm concerned, the Israelis are bullies who are using every excuse and trope to try and excuse their inexcusable actions. The world doesn't like them starving and bombing children? No problem, the world is anti-Semitic. The world doesn't like Israeli expansion? No problem, the world is anti-Semitic. Just because I don't have much if any respect for the Israelis doesn't make me anti-Semitic. It's almost certainly based on millenniums of persecution, but it seems like too many Jews are too quick to play the race card rather than taking a step back and reflecting on their own actions that bring unwanted reactions. Assholes are assholes. They don't need ethnic labels. And Netanyahu is the biggest asshole on the world stage next to Donald Trump.......

Patiently waiting to be lectured on my "ignorance"..........
 
I'm sorry, @riverman. I usually agree with you but you are wrong. Shylock is an anti-Semitic slur. I would hav trouble finding any Jewish person who doesn't react that way.

Sure, Godfather had Italian loan sharks. But they have not been mobs screaming death to the Italians because those in power convinced the mob Italians and not those in power were responsible for their oppression.
 
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I'm sorry, @riverman. I usually agree with you but you are wrong. Shylock is an anti-Semitic slur. I would hav trouble finding any Jewish person who doesn't react that way.

Sure, Godfather had Italian loan sharks. But they have not been mobs screaming death to the Italians because those in power convinced the mob Italians and not those in power were responsible for their oppression.
First thanks for the response. I still think in theater or film or literature that writers will portray Irish firemen. Chinese opium den owners or Amish dairy farmers etc without racist intent but based on historical references I thought Shylock was a nod to biblical references to Jesus and the temple of money lenders. I always thought Shakespeare referenced that for Shylock but I will respect your take on it
 
I know I'm gonna get hammered from all sides, but why does being anti-Israeli (or anti-Zionism) equate to being anti-Semitic??? As far as I'm concerned, the Israelis are bullies who are using every excuse and trope to try and excuse their inexcusable actions. The world doesn't like them starving and bombing children? No problem, the world is anti-Semitic. The world doesn't like Israeli expansion? No problem, the world is anti-Semitic. Just because I don't have much if any respect for the Israelis doesn't make me anti-Semitic. It's almost certainly based on millenniums of persecution, but it seems like too many Jews are too quick to play the race card rather than taking a step back and reflecting on their own actions that bring unwanted reactions. Assholes are assholes. They don't need ethnic labels. And Netanyahu is the biggest asshole on the world stage next to Donald Trump.......

Patiently waiting to be lectured on my "ignorance"..........

I think it's the Israeli government you have qualms with and not it's people. There is a difference.
 
I think it's the Israeli government you have qualms with and not it's people. There is a difference.
My point exactly. But too many people with their own agendas are too quick to use the anti-Semitic card against others who disagree with what the Israelis are doing. Maybe we should dispense from calling Israeli's "Jews" and the anti-Semitic bullshit will go away? I am anti-Trump. so does that make me anti-German?? I'm anti-Musk. Does that make me anti-South African? Playing the race card has gotten to be too easy these days. Too often anymore it's a bullshit way of cutting off productive and informative debate so that shitty behavior can continue.
 
I can only hope that this political climate will defeat the GOP soundly in the midterms. They better before those MAGA idiots rig the voting process
 
Also, don't want to beat this into the ground, but can anyone seriously believe Trump knows Shakespeare? That he ever read Merchant of Venice? Unlikely! This is someone who welcomes as dinner guests anti-Semites who don't deny the Holocaust, they praise it. Someone with a history of racism. Yeah, I think he meant the slur.

It's quite possible a high school drama coach to avoid controversy would portray Shylock as someone who just happened to be Jewish. My mother was an English teacher and Shakespeare buff and that just isn't how he wrote it. Not neutral.

Got her complete works of Shakespeare, after she died my father thought I was most likely of the siblings to actually read it. Read the whole thing during Covid.
 
I can only hope that this political climate will defeat the GOP soundly in the midterms. They better before those MAGA idiots rig the voting process

I wouldn't hold my breath.
 
I know I'm gonna get hammered from all sides, but why does being anti-Israeli (or anti-Zionism) equate to being anti-Semitic??? As far as I'm concerned, the Israelis are bullies who are using every excuse and trope to try and excuse their inexcusable actions. The world doesn't like them starving and bombing children? No problem, the world is anti-Semitic. The world doesn't like Israeli expansion? No problem, the world is anti-Semitic. Just because I don't have much if any respect for the Israelis doesn't make me anti-Semitic. It's almost certainly based on millenniums of persecution, but it seems like too many Jews are too quick to play the race card rather than taking a step back and reflecting on their own actions that bring unwanted reactions. Assholes are assholes. They don't need ethnic labels. And Netanyahu is the biggest asshole on the world stage next to Donald Trump.......

Patiently waiting to be lectured on my "ignorance"..........
While I agree with all of this, I want to emphasize that it's not the Israeli people that you have a problem with. It is Benjamin Netanyahu and his warlords. The Israeli people have tried to get rid of him. He has horrible approval ratings, or, at least he did until OCT 7th.

The Israelis are no more evil than we are here in America. Both countries are failing to control our leadership.
 
Schools are scrambling to plan for what could become a massive budget hole after the Trump administration said Monday it would not release nearly $7 billion in K-12 education funds that had been expected to go out July 1.

The withheld funds, which were approved by Congress earlier this year, include all $890 million meant to help English learners develop their language skills and $375 million to provide academic support to the children of migrant farmworkers, according to an email that was sent to states by the U.S. Department of Education and obtained by Education Week.

The money being held back also includes $2.2 billion in Title II funds that support teacher training, $1.4 billion for before- and after-school programs, and $1.3 billion in funding for academic enrichment programs, such as STEM and college and career counseling.

Several states, Democratic lawmakers, and education advocacy groups are calling on the Trump administration to release the money, calling the move an illegal act of impoundment. The Education Department referred inquiries to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which said Wednesday that the move was part of an ongoing programmatic review of education funding and that no decisions had been made yet.

But the Office of Management and Budget spokesperson also said its initial findings “have shown that many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”

Read the rest here -

https://truthout.org/articles/schoo...in-withdraws-7b-in-federal-education-funding/
 
Brain worm and Agriculture Secretary decided farmers, instead of culling chickens infected with deadly bird flu, should just let it spread and kill off birds so only those with immunity survive

Actual veterinarians and virologists explained this will not only decimate farmers, it increases risk of flu mutating and spreading to humans.

Who needs experts?

Brain worm doesn't accept germ theory of disease.
 
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New York Times reports FBI is shutting down counter terrorism, organized crime, online scams, other crime. They have fired or pushed out experienced investigators. Bureau now focused on deportation and Trump's political opponents.
 
New York Times reports FBI is shutting down counter terrorism, organized crime, online scams, other crime. They have fired or pushed out experienced investigators. Bureau now focused on deportation and Trump's political opponents.

Trump’s Politicized F.B.I. Has Made Americans Less Safe

By The Editorial Board

Only 11 days after President Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the F.B.I. that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Mr. Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.
That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many F.B.I. agents, including other top managers and national security experts, have been fired, pressured to leave or transferred to lesser roles. Hundreds have resigned on their own, unwilling to follow the demands of the Trump administration. Their absence has left a vacuum in divisions that are supposed to protect the public. These losses have “obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the F.B.I.,” Adam Goldman of The Times wrote.

Mr. Trump’s playbook for the F.B.I. is plain to see. He is turning it into an enforcement agency for MAGA’s priorities. He is chasing out agents who might refuse to play along and installing loyalists in their place. He is seeking to remove the threat of investigation for his friends and allies. And he is trying to instill fear in his critics and political opponents. Among his many efforts to weaken American democracy and amass more power for himself, his politicization of the F.B.I. is one of the most blatant.

These developments should unsettle all Americans, regardless of party. As one former Justice Department official told NBC News, the decimation of the bureau’s senior ranks has left it “completely unprepared to respond to a crisis, including the fallout from the current conflict in the Middle East.” Mr. Trump’s politicization of the F.B.I. has left it less able to combat terrorism, foreign espionage, biosecurity threats, organized crime, online scams, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and more.


The F.B.I. has a flawed history, of course. J. Edgar Hoover abused his power as the bureau’s director for decades, and Richard Nixon used it to conduct surveillance of political opponents. Yet after the Watergate scandal forced Mr. Nixon’s resignation, the F.B.I., like the rest of the Justice Department, reformed itself to become more independent from the president.

Every president since the 1970s has at times chafed against that independence, wishing that the Justice Department would be more loyal to the White House’s political interests. But those presidents, from Gerald Ford through Joe Biden, largely respected the bureau’s autonomy. As a result, Americans — from the political left, center and right — tended to trust the F.B.I.

Mr. Trump has taken a radically different approach. He has made clear that he considers the F.B.I.’s first priority to be loyalty. Consider the Signal scandal from this spring, when senior officials disclosed sensitive information in a group chat. In any other administration, the F.B.I. probably would have investigated. Under Mr. Trump, the bureau looked the other way.

To carry out this agenda, he chose as its director Kash Patel, whose main qualification is his unquestioning fealty to Mr. Trump. In 2022, Mr. Patel published a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which a wizard named Kash saves the day by exposing a conspiracy against King Donald. The next year, Mr. Patel published a book titled “Government Gangsters.”

His mission at the F.B.I. is to politicize it. He is dismantling key operations and reshaping the bureau into an instrument of Mr. Trump’s political will. Mr. Trump spent years baselessly accusing the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of being weaponized against him; now he is turning federal law enforcement into the very thing he claimed it was: a political enforcer. Under Mr. Patel, the bureau has assigned agents to pursue long-running MAGA grievances. One example: Mr. Patel had his agents dig through documents searching for evidence to support one of Mr. Trump’s and the online right’s favorite conspiracy theories, that China somehow helped manipulate the results of the 2020 election.

Among the people whom Mr. Patel has scapegoated are the agents he now oversees, which damages the bureau’s morale and its effectiveness. Before taking office, he called the bureau “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He has described its employees as “political jackals” who tried to “suffocate the truth” in order to rig the 2020 election for Mr. Biden. Mr. Patel has promoted theories that the F.B.I. paid Twitter to censor conservatives and that it used confidential informants to stir up the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. There is no evidence to support any of this.

For his deputy director, Mr. Patel hired Dan Bongino, a longtime right-wing podcaster. Mr. Bongino has called the bureau “the single most corrupt law enforcement institution” in America and a “full-blown leftist political action committee.” Together they began singling out agents who had worked on prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters or the federal indictment of Mr. Trump for improperly removing documents from the White House. Many of these agents were fired, pushed to resign or transferred.

Several of the bureau’s most experienced managers have been driven out simply because they angered members of Mr. Trump’s coalition. Bureau leaders ordered the transfer of Spencer Evans, who ran the F.B.I.’s field office in Las Vegas, after Mr. Trump’s supporters accused him of denying religious exemptions for the Covid vaccine within the bureau. Michael Feinberg, a longtime counterintelligence agent who served as a deputy in the Norfolk, Va., field office, resigned after being threatened with demotion simply because he was a friend of a counterintelligence agent who had sent a text message disparaging Mr. Trump.

The resulting loss of expertise and experience is chilling. The bureau today has fewer people with the skills to prevent crime, political corruption and foreign espionage.

Under Mr. Patel, the F.B.I. has also reassigned agents from valuable work to showy efforts that bolster Mr. Trump’s political interests. This pattern is clearest with immigration. We acknowledge that an increased focus on border security and deportations is a legitimate change for Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. He won election last year partly because of public dissatisfaction with Mr. Biden’s loose border policies, which contributed to the most rapid surge of immigration in American history, much of it illegal.

Presidents rightly have the authority to shape the bureau’s priorities. But the approach of the Trump F.B.I. is nonetheless alarming because of its extremity. The administration is pulling agents away from areas that present true risks to the country and assigning them instead to search for undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record. The effort is part of a government-wide effort to meet Mr. Trump’s arbitrary quota of 3,000 arrests a day. “They have cannibalized field offices to create these immigration squads,” one former agent told us in an interview. “They’re taking highly trained agents, many with advanced degrees and military experience, and using them for perimeter security on ICE roundups. And that means fewer people working to prevent foreign influence or public corruption.”

The Trump administration has gone so far as to brag about its decision to deprioritize corporate corruption and white-collar crime. The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Matthew Galeotti, has said that a crackdown on corporate crime burdens U.S. businesses. This shift is another example of Mr. Trump’s effort to protect people he considers his allies — namely, corporate executives. He has been particularly aggressive about reducing investigations into cryptocurrency scams while he has ignored decades of White House precedent by using his office for the profit of his businesses, especially in crypto.

Understandably, the combination seems to be undermining bureau morale. More than 650 bureau employees recently filed for early retirement.

All law enforcement agencies require foundations of public trust, but because of its troubled history and the ease of political manipulation from Washington, the F.B.I. has a particular need to demonstrate that it deserves the nation’s confidence. Agents, for their part, need to know that their managers and civilian leaders have their backs and don’t consider them to be jackals. They need to know that they are enforcing the law fairly, not being used for a personal or ideological agenda. The public — on which the bureau relies for tips and cooperation — has to trust that agents operate without political bias.

By abusing that trust, Mr. Trump, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have put the reputation and effectiveness of the F.B.I. at risk. In doing so, they are risking the safety of the American public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/opinion/trump-fbi-politics-safety.html
 
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