I was thinking about this and wrote a great political cartoon in my head. Ready? Okay, it's a 4-panel comic. Panel 1 reveals the date, let it be arbitrary, and there's Trump in front of a crowd of people next to a man with a bunch of words on him, like "deficit", "environment", et al he's destroying. Then panel 2 Trump just whips out a gun and shoots the man. The crowd gasps, but in panel 3 Trump proceeds to **** his pants and cry like a baby. In Panel 4 you just see a newspaper for the next day with the headline "TRUMP ****S PANTS".

Bonus panel 5: Breitbart’s headline, “Man dead, how is it connected to the Clinton Foundation?”

Looks like there's going to be some big news tomorrow...

What's that?

Or as a mouseover text, if we're XKCD

Bitcoin to 15k ETH to $100

oh no i am mixing up my ****posting

Anyone else ever notice how our media almost universally extricates poverty from view?

I think part of the success of Stranger Things is that it doesn't do this. At least Season 1, later it loses the touch. But in Season 1, we watch Winona Ryder negotiate with her boss for an advance on cash, struggle to pay for basic essentials and goes through a complete breakdown when something happens to her son (which can serve as a metaphor). I think (but don't have much evidence) that these scenes drive much of the empathy we feel.

Also in vanilla WoW, if you're alliance there's a big faction/quest thing where you literally kill off a union that's rebelling for not being paid. Straight Pinkerton agent ****.

Bitcoin to $more than 50% of miners in control of the Chinese government, Eth to $I heard about it because some guy on Caltrain told me about his crypto currency portfolio and now I can’t ever take it seriously

I don’t know what you’re referencing specifically, but Deutsche Bank handed over financial records for Trump and Kushner today.

You don't have to take it seriously for me to be rich enough to be a bad guy

Damn. Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. lol

Well now you know why he’s doing it.

Yours is an interesting theory.

Trump reminds me of the aggrandizing scam artist, who is still working his level best to dazzle his audience, even as the authorities are making their way down the isle as they prepare to cart him away in handcuffs.

Then again, if L Ron Hubbard found a way to avoid serving some well deserved time, I'm not too hopeful....

And for my last trick, I will pardon myself

To the bitter end...

"Mr. Trump, what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Trump is doubling down on the same anti-Arab bull**** that has done so much damage. **** that guy.

He's moved on from trolling CNN to trolling ISIS.

More like angering and radicalizing ISIS. This kinda stuff increases the odds U.S. citizens will be the victim of a terror attack, which will cause Trump to declare war which will cost a ton, make us less safe and do even more damage to the region.

It's trolling because he probably wants that kind of escalation (for political reasons), human causulties be damned.

Hitler was a really funny guy to talk about in the media ubtil the bodies started piling up.

Eh. I'm going to wait and see how tactful he is in his speech tomorrow. If he plays it right (and he very well could), there shouldn't be much that's really objectionable about his position. I'm not convinced that he's motivated primarily by domestic American politics here.

Maybe this is about Jared doing something mean to Trump's daughter.

That's certainly possible, but you gotta admit that if it turns out as benign as you suggest, it'll surely be on account of luck.

Arabs throughout the region and Palestinians have a strong incentive to make it seem as if they're going to tear the world down if Trump recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but they will have a much more limited incentive to protest endlessly and murder.

That's certainly good to hear.

Probably. It still increases the threat. It makes us less safe.

It'll be easier to discern what role luck plays tomorrow when we see what he's planning on doing. But to be honest, I'm not even convinced that this is the wrong thing to do. Obama's strategy was to put intense pressure on the Israelis, and in turn, he didn't even have enough leverage over the Palestinians to stop them from defying American foreign policy and seeking recognition through various international fora while they refused to participate in negotiations. We tried that for eight years, and Obama had startlingly little to show for it compared to any other president since... Eisenhower, probably. It might be time to try pressuring the Palestinians, and showing them that if they don't negotiate, time won't be on their side (if we continued on with Obama's strategy, it would be, because the longer the conflict goes on, the more it damages Israel's reputation, and the Palestinian leadership knows that and take advantage of it, at the expense of a deal).

Also, I'm not quick to dismiss Trump's choice as mere racism. For one thing, Trump has magic in the Middle East that he doesn't have elsewhere in the world. He's more popular in the region than anywhere else in the world.

We really don't know. Personally, I don't think it's not a very flattering representation of people who live in the Middle East to speak of them as if they're a powder keg and Trump is playing with fire. I don't think it represents how people are. But, as I said, we don't know. Still, we shouldn't be so sure that there's no upside here, because tolerating the risk may be worth it.

What's the upside? A bunch of AIPAC lobbyists get a bonus check?

Interesting. I will be interested to hear your take as this plays out. To be perfectly honest, I am not incredibly well informed on what Obama's strategy was, or if it was a good idea.

Isn't this a caricature way of looking at things, to put it nicely?

As I indicated in my previous post, it signals a strong departure from Obama's strategy, which may be useful going into negotiations. It takes away much of the Palestinian leadership's leverage. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been frantically calling heads of states of foreign countries trying to persuade them to convince Trump not to go forward with recognition. They haven't been able to help him, because they can't, because Trump has resolved to make this choice. If he feels isolated, it will perhaps change his calculus and put pressure on him to reach a deal now.

Yes.



Oh, right. Using force to get unilateral "victories" is something Eversor advocates.

My opinion: yes. Yes, it is. There are less... charitable ways of putting it. Yep.

Besides, AIPAC isn't what it once was. Not getting it's way on the Iran deal really destroyed the myth that it was invincible, which created a vacuum that J Street (which is center-left rather than right-leaning, like AIPAC, and not far from where Obama was on Israel-Palestine) filled. It's a really different situation when you go from being the only game in town to being one of two big players. As it stands now, pro-Israel lobbying has become much more fractured, so that AIPAC doesn't have the strong ties with the Democratic party that it used to have. J Street has exclusive access to a lot of Democratic politicians now, so AIPAC has been shut out in a way that was unthinkable three years ago.

Right, supporting peace talks not predicated on force and bull**** really makes me an antisemite.

Uh. The Palestinians who murder Israelis or Americans in protest of American foreign policy will be using force. Trump will be recognizing the capital of a country and deciding where to build a building. I'm not sure that those things are entirely comparable as "using force".

My take is that 99% of the people who bring up AIPAC don't know the first thing about it beyond using it as a signal that they dislike the Israeli government.

So was Hitler. Wonders never cease.