The Trump Presidency

[57Brave]

North Korea cut off all lines of communications with South Korea nearly two years ago, when Mr. Moon’s conservative predecessor, the since-impeached President Park Geun-hye, shut down a joint industrial complex in the North Korean town of Kaesong. At Panmunjom, which has served as a contact point for the two Koreas for decades, North Korean officials did not pick up the phone when their South Korean counterparts made a daily call to keep the line alive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/w...ine-south.html

[Hawk]

North Korea cut off all lines of communications with South Korea nearly two years ago, when Mr. Moon’s conservative predecessor, the since-impeached President Park Geun-hye, shut down a joint industrial complex in the North Korean town of Kaesong. At Panmunjom, which has served as a contact point for the two Koreas for decades, North Korean officials did not pick up the phone when their South Korean counterparts made a daily call to keep the line alive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/w...ine-south.html

You must've meant monologue.

Kaesong opened in 2002.

[Jaw]

South Korea’s Sunshine Policy to coax North Korea to end its nuclear quest? The Clinton Administration’s Agreed Framework of economic carrots and heavy oil to encourage regime moderation? Two decades (or more) of rational U.S. appeals to China to help curb the noxious Kim regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and to help terminate Pyongyang’s cyclic bouts of military attacks on South Korea?

These soft power gambits may have thrilled the editorial board of The New York Times, but they didn’t stop North Korea’s dictatorship. The Kim regime now has an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in its arsenal—one that threatens Anchorage, Alaska, and perhaps Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

http://observer.com/2017/07/donald-t...korea-options/

[Hawk]

Why? How many aggressive and destructive foreign policy fiascos has NK entered into in the last 25 years? Whose the bully?

You consistently take the most weird and wrong-headed positions on North Korea.

[Hawk]

I have to say that I attribute North Korea's sudden good behavior (they even wished the South Koreans well for the upcoming Olympics) much moreso to Moon Jae-in than I do to Trump.

But there's a long way to go with all of this yet.

[57Brave]

This chatter and its initiators is all too reminiscent of Iraq circa 2000-2002.

1/3 of the voting public to this day believe Sadaam Hussein was responsible for 9/11

[Jaw]

Here's an interesting tidbit I hadn't seen before today:

https://www.realcleardefense.com/art...ed_112833.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the first month of Donald Trump’s presidency, an American scholar quietly met with North Korean officials and relayed a message: The new administration in Washington appreciated an extended halt in the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests. It might just offer a ray of hope.

North Korean officials responded defiantly. The nearly four-month period of quiet wasn’t a sign of conciliation, they retorted, insisting supreme leader Kim Jong Un would order tests whenever he wanted. As if to ram the point home, North Korea only two days later launched a new type of medium-range missile that ended Trump’s brief honeymoon.
....
Diplomacy isn’t dead, however. The Trump administration was quick to restore a back channel for talks between the State Department and North Korea that disappeared in President Barack Obama’s final months. The U.S. envoy on North Korea, Joseph Yun, secretly met North Korean officials in Oslo in May to press for the release of Americans imprisoned in Pyongyang.

Various officials have said that meeting could have augured more substantive U.S.-North Korean talks.

But the only release was college student Otto Warmbier, who had suffered brain damage in detention and died days after his return. Warmbier’s shocking condition ended any hopes of a thaw. Trump tweeted angrily and Pyongyang promptly stepped up its weapons tests.

[Julio3000]

This chatter and its initiators is all too reminiscent of Iraq circa 2000-2002.

1/3 of the voting public to this day believe Sadaam Hussein was responsible for 9/11

I get the echoes, but IMO we're neither there nor likely to get there.

[thethe]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/manuf...150000297.html

'Those jobs aren't coming back' - Hussein

[57Brave]

this is not new. We knew this 18 months ago, yet eople still voted to give him a "bigger button"

from the article nsacpi posted:

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-*literate. He trusted his own expertise *— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

[57Brave]

[nsacpi]

this is not new. We knew this 18 months ago, yet eople still voted to give him a "bigger button"

from the article nsacpi posted:

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-*literate. He trusted his own expertise *— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

I've occasionally had to interact with a kind of person that Trump typifies on a grand scale. People who can't read a map but insist others follow them.

[Jaw]

Gee whiz, he sure has been successful for someone who is only semi-literate, dangerously insecure, and prone to lashing out at his staff.

I'm quite literate, reasonably confident, and a heck of a nice guy, but I haven't climbed out of the middle class yet. I guess I, and about 98% of the rest of America, are just doing it wrong.

[57Brave]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/manuf...150000297.html

'Those jobs aren't coming back' - Hussein

I read this article 3-4 times and still don't see a word about jobs.
Manufacturing accelerating is an empty statement standing by itself. Guess you could make it say what ever you want

Is there an explanation or context ?
Manufacturing of what? Where ? Who manufactured ? Was there in fact new employment attached ?
Of the 4 W's we only know when.

The article spells out this poll was before the tax give away

[Oklahomahawk]

Gee whiz, he sure has been successful for someone who is only semi-literate, dangerously insecure, and prone to lashing out at his staff.

I'm quite literate, reasonably confident, and a heck of a nice guy, but I haven't climbed out of the middle class yet. I guess I, and about 98% of the rest of America, are just doing it wrong.

Careful dude, you're treading on borderline sacred ground there.

[thethe]

I read this article 3-4 times and still don't see a word about jobs.
Manufacturing accelerating is an empty statement standing by itself. Guess you could make it say what ever you want

Is there an explanation or context ?
Manufacturing of what? Where ? Who manufactured ? Was there in fact new employment attached ?
Of the 4 W's we only know when.

The article spells out this poll was before the tax give away

You can't possibly be this dense naturally can you?

[Krgrecw]

You can't possibly be this dense naturally can you?

Did you really just ask that?

[goldfly]

Gee whiz, he sure has been successful for someone who is only semi-literate, dangerously insecure, and prone to lashing out at his staff.

I'm quite literate, reasonably confident, and a heck of a nice guy, but I haven't climbed out of the middle class yet. I guess I, and about 98% of the rest of America, are just doing it wrong.

Well, you were dumb to turn down the small million dollar loan from your dad

[Jaw]

Well, you were dumb to turn down the small million dollar loan from your dad

He went bankrupt after that, right?

[thethe]

WOW