from the how-your-tax-dollars-are-spent dept.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management (FSO) Subcommittee for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), continued his efforts to reform the big-spending status quo with the release of a Summer 2019 edition of The Waste Report.
Once again, Dr. Paul's Waste Report turns the spotlight on just some of the ways the federal government spends the American people's hard-earned money, with this edition including stories of building up Tunisia's political system and the Pakistani film industry, supporting "green growth" in Peru, teaching English and IT skills at madrassas, studying frog mating calls, making improper payments, and more.
The biggest seem to be:
Converted an abandoned mental hospital into DHS HQ (GSA and DHS) .......... $2,120,040,355.35
Paid out billions from Medicare in improper payments (CMS) ....................... $48,000,000,000
[Editor's Comment: The full 15-page report is found in a Scribd display on the given link.]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Friday September 06 2019, @09:55PM (1 child)
Or, in other words, turned a mental hospital into a mental hospital?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:59AM
The lunatics are running the asylum.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by catholocism on Friday September 06 2019, @10:02PM (20 children)
How is funding basic science wasteful again?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @10:24PM (6 children)
Indeed. For that matter, what is so wrong about building up Tunisia's political system? I guess I could see how there might be flaws in implementation but if this is about encouraging civilized debate over matters of public policy and promoting free and fair elections then I am all in favor of that. I am also in favor of encouraging the good folk of Pakistan to put their energies into making movies; I would much rather they focus on that than...ummm...some other things I could think of. Same with teaching English and IT skills at madrassas; I would much rather the kids are learning useful skills that they can use to get better jobs and contribute to the global economy rather than getting their heads filled with toxic ideologies. Also, what is so god awful wrong with supporting green growth? Honestly, the one that concerns me the most is the part about "improper payments"; I would really like some elaboration on that part.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @01:39AM
Well, maybe if Trump wasn't ruining the American reputation across the world.... No, actually little things like these are the small costs America pays to maintain its worldwide empire. But do feel free to object, and you'll have a fun time bitching again when such places go up in revolt and want nothing to do with the U.S. and become the next stronghold locations for whatever succeeds ISIS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:06PM (1 child)
"US tax dollars", motherfucker. not "world tax dollars".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @10:21PM
Yeah? And? Have never heard of buying goodwill abroad in order to have peace at home?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday September 08 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)
There are some who have this crazy notion that Muslims can't do democracy. Their main evidence for this belief is that when they try to do democracy, those democracies tend to get replaced by dictators or monarchs. What they don't mention is that when that happened, typically the reason for that was that the democracy was trying to carry out the will of their people but that will was inconvenient to western oil companies, and the dictator or monarch was a CIA asset.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Tuesday September 10 2019, @12:59AM
What's been our track record with building up other countries' political systems?
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Monday September 09 2019, @10:54PM
There's nothing wrong with this at all - but he needed some red herrings to pad out his list.
The list comes to $50 billion. $48 billion of which is dodgy medicare payments. Then you add $2 billion for converting a old hospital into something else. Now, you can't have a list with two items on it. So let's find more controversial stuff. To me, the fact that there are entries here that are for $100,000 is just boggling. The US Gov budget is $3.8 trillion dollars. If the third highest thing on your list of "We blew this much monies!!!" list is $51 million - as part of paying for research (Paid for Google Scholar searches in Hawaii (NSF, NOAA, USFS, DOI, NASA) …… $51,722,107) I'd say that's a pretty tip-top budget.
Stop talking about $500k spent on a research grant about frogs. Start talking about things like this "On September 28, 2018, Trump signed the Department of Defense appropriations bill. The approved 2019 Department of Defense discretionary budget is $686.1 billion. It has also been described as "$617 billion for the base budget and another $69 billion for war funding." [Source] [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by MostCynical on Friday September 06 2019, @10:27PM (3 children)
Easy points can be scored with "ordinary" people by mocking esoteric research topics.
"Who cares about frog calls?"
"What sort of weirdo studies frogs at all? Why aren't they researching something that matters?"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Friday September 06 2019, @10:40PM
Heaven forbid people found out how, say, Air Conditioning was invented.
"OMG you wasted all my money helping those gard dang furners?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @01:40AM
Yep. And who needs a centralized database of climate change data and summarizations of all the evidence that's been done over the years, as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:09AM
Like investing in walls. Investigating the "millions" of illegal voters. And how much does all that military hardware cost? For what gain?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Sulla on Friday September 06 2019, @10:37PM (2 children)
In TFA the complaint is about spending at foreign schools when our own are doing so poorly.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:11AM (1 child)
But he doesn't want to fund those either!? And who was the prick with the same idea that wanted to abolish the dept. of energy?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:08PM
look, you dumb ass statist fuck, the Us government is not supposed to have 4 million depts involved in every facet of citizen life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @11:54PM (2 children)
Rand Paul has frequently been critical of NSF as wasteful spending. I agree that basic science research isn't wasteful at all. However, there is a lot of waste in NSF grants.
NSF awards a lot of grants to universities to conduct research. There are direct costs like the salaries and fringe benefits for the personnel conducting research, purchasing or leasing the equipment needed for the research, travel to present research at conferences, and page charges for publishing results. Then there are indirect costs like paying staff to ensure regulatory compliance, accounting to manage the grant, and upkeep for the facilities where the research is conducted. All of this is legitimate overhead, and I have no problem with those things being paid for by grants. Rather than itemize the indirect costs, universities negotiate an indirect cost rate with the federal government. The indirect costs are sometimes known as facilities and administration (F&A) costs. They are calculated as a percentage of the (modified total) direct costs.
The problem is that these F&A cost percentages keep rising. The university I work at recently renegotiated the F&A rate from 53.5% to 55.5%. The F&A costs go beyond simply funding the actual overhead from doing the research. Looking at the university I work at [unl.edu], the F&A costs go toward uses like faculty start-up funds, bridge funding (support for faculty research in between grants), and developing future research projects. They also get distributed to the various colleges where the funds are used for a variety of purposes including supporting administrators who are expected to promote research within their academic unit.
Many of the items I mentioned, which come from the indirect costs of grants, aren't being used to cover the actual overhead of the research being conducted for that grant. They're used for other purposes at the university, so they don't represent the actual overhead of conducting the research for a particular grant. I particularly object to using the money to pay for administrators at the level of individual colleges. Universities have greatly expanded the size of their administrations and the growth of their salaries has greatly outpaced inflation.
The 55.5% F&A cost rate isn't abnormal for what I've seen from other similar universities. That means roughly a third of the money from NSF grants to universities goes to indirect costs, and a lot of the F&A costs have little to do with the actual research the grant is supposed to pay for. I have no problem with paying the actual overhead associated with conducting research, but F&A costs are exaggerated and universities use the money to pay for lots of things that have nothing to do with the actual grant.
Basic science isn't wasteful at all. But the grants are bloated because universities negotiate high rates for overhead costs, much of which seems to be an abuse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:22AM (1 child)
As a scientist in this system, writing grants is a colossal waste of effort. Bullshitters reign supreme and some of them are good people too, I presume. If you don't get your funding then you are essentially ejected from a career in research. This is a tragic loss - those that excel at science often don't excel at talking shit and doing busywork. It's almost as if the grant system has become perfectly opposite what attracts people into science. It's a savage change of direction when you get into your 30s early 40s.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday September 08 2019, @03:37AM
It's even worse than that. Writing grant proposals corrupts scientists.
As a scientist you are supposed to be honest and point out any caveats, etc. But when you are writing grants, you have to make everything sound important and gloss over possible problems. Almost all calls for proposals ask for an impact statement. Now scientists have to pretend that every research project includes a plan to save the world.
The constant stream of press releases from research institutions has similar effects.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:26AM (1 child)
As "species speech recognition", it's very valuable as a tool to assess the population health of a frog species in a given area: just switch on the microphones, turn on the frog's Siri or Alexa software and you don't need to catch all those frogs and tag them to have an idea of how many they are around.
Why frogs are important, you ask? Mosquito numbers are kept in check by frogs for example. And frogs are among the first to die when pollution of a riverways increases, so you have a cheap way to estimate the health of environment in certain areas.
Isn't science wonderful, in spite of dismissive idiotic ignoramuses, like certain Dr Pauls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:57PM
But... FROGS. Their MATING CALLS!. Duh!!!!
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:26AM
Depends what basic science is. And depends on whether you could do better with that funding of basic science - accoutability and opportunity cost rear their ugly heads even if you never stray from basic science considerations.
On the first point, several times I've heard the assertion that basic science, and the related "blue sky" science are all about generating research that will have application a long time from now, say 300 years later (something like how electricity research eventually led to the development of computers). So what does it mean to "have application"? Typically, they'll say something about monetary profit. Sure, we can see how applied science rapidly focuses on that sort of thing while basic science wouldn't.
But there are plenty of other applications that don't fall in the make-a-buck category. For example, if my math model shaves a few man-weeks of time off your lab's research efforts or computer time, that's concrete gain for someone, even gain that can be expressed to some degree monetarily since the funding can now go to other scientific efforts instead. It may even be huge, if we can determine that some research isn't going to be productive that otherwise would consume considerable resources (such as general relativity ruling out various sorts of anti-gravity approaches and physics in general ruling out perpetual motion machines).
Related to this is the unfounded assertion that past basic research has been driven solely by the long term potential gains not by near future applications. I've played this game numerous times where someone comes up with a discovery or field of study and I show how research in that has near future application. It's not necessarily going to make money for someone (though it's not rare that I find short term profitable ventures hiding in there, such as lightning rods in basic electricity research), but it does benefit us in the near future rather than merely in some vague far future where category theory is the key to some massively valuable invention or scheme in a way that we can't yet understand.
Now we start veering into the second problem, how to know that we're conducting useful research. Because we're not seeing a lot of people hopping into time machines from 300 years in the future to tell us which basic science turned out to be valuable.
So what's more likely to work? Fund basic research where the researchers can credibly articulate near future benefits and has a track record of delivering such in the past, even if they are esoteric and not monetizable on any timeframe under a human lifetime. Or fund basic research where we'll have to wait 300 years just to see if anything came of it. On the latter, it's not just that it's a gamble. It's a gamble that you'll never have any idea if it's remotely productive. My bet is on not.
The other huge rub here is opportunity cost. We have solid, near future evidence that this gets royally screwed up all the time. For example, there are a few space science examples of epic levels of waste. Take the International Space Station. For somewhere around $100 billion dollars (in say 2010 money), they managed to create a science platform with remarkable low background acceleration from the force of gravity (on the order of a millionth of a gee - true zero gee is impossible near Earth or the Sun due to tidal forces). It has great research capabilities. But these came at that $100 billion dollar price tag.
Here's an opportunity cost. One could get two or three near equivalent international space stations for the same price - just launch it on Delta IV Heavy rockets (the payloads are volume/fairing sized limited not mass limited), discontinuing the Space Shuttle. And drop the "international" from the name by removing Russia and the European Space Agency from the critical development path for these stations. If basic science is valuable, then surely the capability to do two to three times as much basic science is more valuable, right?
Or the station could be scaled down to Mir size (a 3 person Russian/Soviet space station) with a good portion of the research capabilities and a tenth the cost.
Similarly, with space probes we could launch a dozen near identical probes for about 3-6 times the cost of a single probe (R&D doesn't need to be redone for each probe), including launch and post-launch operations. Surely the additional science would be worth the higher price tag right?
There is this remarkably casual attitude concerning the funding of basic science research which should be peculiar given the insistence on the value of the research. How come it's valuable enough to throw vast sums of money at it, but not valuable enough to do any sort of simple due diligence to try to get more research for the money?
The ugly resolution to that dilemma is that basic science research isn't that valuable, it's just another pork program which is optimized for the delivery of pork not for productive and valuable research on any time scale.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday September 06 2019, @10:45PM (19 children)
Only forty-eight billion in improper Medicare spending? Damn, now I really want us some single-payer, government-run healthcare!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Touché) by istartedi on Friday September 06 2019, @10:55PM
Here here! A properly run private insurance plan would have found a way to deny such silly things, such as a prosthetic that's actually comfortable. A splintering wooden peg was good enough for Ahab, it's good enough for grandpa.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @11:46PM (8 children)
Except that every study that has been done about the topic has shown that a single payer system would save money. The current system has a massive amount of waste, and a single payer system would have a certain amount of waste too, but we'd still save money in the end. If you're going to make the topic about which system is cheaper, you're going to lose.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 07 2019, @12:42AM (7 children)
None of those wild-assed-guesses are based any more in reality than mine. And at least mine acknowledges the epic level of corruption in the government and medical/insurance corporations we have going on here.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:25AM
And nowhere else. Just those places.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:42AM (5 children)
It may take the independent exercise of political power by the working class to prevent our so-called healthcare system from being controlled by D/R team, not libertarian, think tanks (Romney, Hillary, Obamacare oh my). If the Libertarian Party were capable of achieving any kind of mass support, that could be one way forward. But it is not, because minarchist capitalism opposes the class interests of workers, moreso than the mainstream parties.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:18AM (4 children)
The US healthcare system is nearly a total waste of money, I don't see why anyone even wants to partake of it. Look at cuba where they have nearly none of the access to "modern healthcare" but nearly equal lifespans. All that "healthcare" is just a waste of money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @08:11AM (2 children)
And you know why? Because they smoke cuban cigars, that's why. Smoke is good for preservation, it's a fact that has been know for millenia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:15PM
Magical thinking at its finest.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:38PM
Puts a protective coating of tar on their lungs. Like Teflon against air pollution.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:05PM
Well, if we're talking about scare quoted "healthcare," then yes, there are perverse incentives at work to move away from proven treatments towards treatments that generate more profit for the hospital administrators and "insurance" companies (what they are selling is not insurance--it is a buyer's club). Cuba is a good go-to example for those concerned about bang-for-the-buck. Surely a wealthy nation like the USA can improve on the model. Why Is Cuba’s Health Care System the Best Model for Poor Countries? [2012] [blackagendareport.com]
The perverse incentives are harming care providers as administrators drive down wages and staffing levels in pursuit of private profit. The epidemic of nurse suicides and the US healthcare crisis [current] [wsws.org]:
The advent of concierge healthcare is an obscenity. Victors Care brings class-based medical care to University of Michigan hospital [2018] [wsws.org]:
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @12:15AM (8 children)
Yeah, well it helps to understand that any payment whatsoever that is questionable gets tagged as improper spending including quite a few items that are actually differences of opinion in coding or treatment and not 'improper'. Medical coding is not fully and completely deterministic, because what can happen to your body and what physicians do to it is not entirely deterministic.
Which isn't to say that there isn't waste to be found anywhere, just that what Medicare might define as improper spending might not be entirely accurate if it was your life on the line.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 07 2019, @12:43AM (7 children)
And you want the same folks who'd deny a procedure on purely bureaucratic grounds to be in charge of your healthcare? Interesting.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Touché) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Saturday September 07 2019, @01:42AM (1 child)
It only ranks as slightly better than choosing interventions based on the ongoing profitability of insurance companies, and treatments being rejected because they're not profitable enough even if they are better for an individual patient in a given situation.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:40PM
That's just foolish business practices and would be corrected by another company making a smart decision and offering coverage for the issue. Dead people don't pay premiums. If we're talking million dollar treatments though, not many people's lives are worth saving at that cost. They simply have never and will never contribute enough to society to ever return the value.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday September 07 2019, @04:53AM (3 children)
Well I don't know. Are these government or corporate bureaucrats?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:01PM (1 child)
That's the important difference. Are these bureaucrats deny you treatment innovative free market thinkers or appointed members on elite government death panels?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @02:08AM
Those so-called "free market thinkers" only answer to the insurance companies they work for. And, in case you haven't heard, insurance companies tend to make most of their decisions based on their bottom line. Not your bottom line. Not your personal health and well-being. And there are no government "death panels"; that was merely a scare tactic dreamed up by Sarah Palin. Her "inspiration" was a provision in the ACA which was supposed to encourage doctors to discuss end of life issues with their patients (particularly, their older patients) so that health care givers would understand what their patients would want if they were incapacitated and their end was approaching. (What's that? You thought you would live forever?) Also, government bureaucrats working for the government are answerable to the people through their elected representatives. At least theoretically.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday September 08 2019, @01:42PM
Corporate ones are under pressure to make the most sound financial decisions. Government ones are under no pressure whatsoever and have no reason to give a shit about much of anything. I'd prefer the former, so at least where I stand makes sense even if I don't agree.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @09:03PM
Awwwwwe yeaaaah
Another perfect example of TMB being a colossal fucking idiot. Good time!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @11:14PM
What's old is new again.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ilPapa on Friday September 06 2019, @11:15PM (11 children)
This jackoff is gonna talk about waste after voting in favor of Trump's tax cut for corporations that added $2 trillion to the debt and continues to make the deficit balloon.
Fuck him and fuck his stupid hair and I hope another one of his neighbors kicks the shit out of him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/rand-paul-attack.html [nytimes.com]
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:50AM (9 children)
A tax cut should mean the government has less money to waste. There is no contradiction. No matter how much money you give the government it will never be enough. You can read the rest of this thread to find out why, anything that might be a good idea should get funded by the government without any sort of cost/benefit comparison to other things that could be funded instead according to some people.
So the debt and deficit will always continue to grow until it collapses.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ilPapa on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:45AM (2 children)
Where does Rand Paul stand on the president enriching himself and his worthless heirs by directing government funds to his own business?
He's been remarkably silent on that one.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @04:06AM
Try to stay on topic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @07:28AM
Rent free indeed.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday September 07 2019, @01:31PM (5 children)
Treat the government as if it has an addiction to money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:43PM (4 children)
Where are all the libertarians come November every 2 years? The Libertarian Party has excellent ballot access, and they run candidates for the majority of seats up for election.
For that matter, why is Rand Paul a Republican instead of a Libertarian?
- No to the two party system
- No to government revenue through tariffs
- No to government spending on imperialism
- No to government spending on ICE concentration camps
- No to government spending on mass arrests of "illegals," who often enough to be deeply concerned turn out to be citizens
- No to government spending on a militarized police force
- No to government spending on a useless border wall
- No to government spending on a standing army and exercises like Jade Helm
- No to the antiquated nation-state system and barriers to free movement of capital and labor
These are all libertarian and to a good extent, Libertarian Party positions.
If only Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky et al did not have that annoying habit of being right about the objective social forces of capitalism. We could also support CWI Majority [worldsocialist.net]/Socialist Alternative USA for a more feasible way of obtaining those goals.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday September 07 2019, @03:18PM (3 children)
Third party is dead for now.
Donald Trump showed that you can muscle into a major party and win despite major resistance from the party insiders. There was even resistance after he won the nomination and calls for him to drop out following scandals that would have obliterated other candidates.
Bernie Sanders didn't win the nomination, but performed much better than expected for someone who has the appearance and temperament of a "crazy old SOCIALIST man" (it doesn't matter how socialist/capitalist he actually is, only the label matters). He was not the annointed one, he was opposed by party insiders, and he received less media coverage, but he still performed well. Sanders has been able to influence the party platform leftward even after his loss and later HRC's loss.
It's likely that some third party candidates will go viral and become successful in future elections, cutting through traditional media blackouts on fringe candidates. But it looks much easier to parasitize one of the two major parties and utilize its resources to spread your message. That's exactly why Libertarians should run as Republicans (or Democrats, if they think they can get away with it).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @04:11PM
I don't think the democrat party is in any way affected by Sanders' run in 2016. The party stands for retaining the status quo in the nation's ghettos and at the border to retain an uncritical voter pool. What's left about them? When have they last cared about US jobs and tried to get people out of poverty?
Their public appearance since Trump's win has been pure theatrics. Congress is powerless, so they let a menagerie of clowns talk wild shit as if there were a serious opposition to the inner party represented by Pelosi. Next year it will be apparent quickly who the party chooses to field for president: Establishment people like Biden, or Pocahontas if Biden is untenable by then.
Both parties were internally weakened in 2016. Trump ploughed through to the nomination with his money and shamelessness. Sanders had a chance, but failed to counter the establishment control of the lumpen proletariat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:09PM (1 child)
When you say "would have obliterated" you basically mean that his enablers in the Republican party chose not to make a fuss and lower their standards instead. So this is what the Republican party stands for now - and Trump is bringing them even lower. Family members in key positions? Directing tax money to his private business? Coarseness at every level of discussion? Hanging with dictators? Literally faking weather reports - he doesn't even have to pretend, you guys will just go down another notch.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 07 2019, @09:14PM
"would have obliterated" refers to the conventional wisdom (among the media and many others) that the various scandals/gaffes and resulting media firestorms would necessarily force the candidate to quit the primary or even give up being the nominee. Trump's "I like people who weren't captured" line was one of those early moments. The release of the Hollywood Access tape was late in the campaign, causing some Republicans to withdraw support and sending the morale of the Trump campaign into the gutter. The fact that enablers continued to support Trump doesn't mean that they thought he would win.
There was serious resistance to Trump during and after the primaries, but also an expectation that he would lose to Clinton. According to some, Trump and his crew didn't even expect to win and Trump was angling for a television network and other business deals following his loss. That didn't happen, Trump became the most powerful human being on the planet, and Republicans eventually fell in line.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @06:18PM
fuck you bitch. it's not the spending *cuts* that cause the debt , you dishonest piece of shit.