buddy wrote: 
I agree with you on both impression and relief.

I am appalled, and very disappointed, that he is taken seriously by too many.

 KurtfromLaQuinta wrote: 
Seein' as how Teddy's been resting comfortably for about 100 years, I'll go with Hillary. 

 kcar wrote: 
I wasn't saying Trump is the answer.
Who is?
Bernie?
Hillary?
Oh they're just wonderful politicians...

Give me Teddy Roosevelt.
Of course he's not politically correct.

 kcar wrote:
That might actually hurt him a little bit in the extremely unlikely event he could make it happen.

Do as I say, not as I do.

 R_P wrote:
You hit the bullseye. Trump used illegal immigrants on at least one project—heavily so—and then stiffed them on their wages. 

 KurtfromLaQuinta wrote:
I'm sorry you're up against it, Kurt. If you support Trump because he complains about illegal immigrants, I can understand your motivation. But I just come back to my main point about Trump:

THIS GUY IS COMPLETELY UNPREPARED TO BE PRESIDENT.
 
Forget the constant lying, boasting and verbal abuse from Trump. Frankly, I wouldn't buy a newspaper from a guy who behaves like that, but let's put that aside. 

Forget the rip-off schemes he's been involved with like Trump University. 

Forget the four bankruptcies. 

The bottom line is that the guy has not prepared at all to make good decisions and back good policies as President. He's great at complaining but is pretty much thinking up policy ideas on his own and then floating them to the public, without any research or facts to back him up. Every time he comes up with an idea like building the Wall, private- and public-sector experts in the field politely say that Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. 

Running a campaign on Twitter and shock statements is a hoot, especially when voters don't care what you say as long as you yell and get angry. Being a President is 1000 times harder than being a responsible, effective CEO—which Trump is not. A President is not a king with unlimited powers as Trump apparently believes. Most Presidents complain about their limited ability to create good policy, especially in a gridlocked Washington. 

Trump talks a good game but there is no way he can keep his promises, especially the ones that deal with bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US or building The Wall or getting tough with China.  A loudmouth can say he feels your pain but that's no guarantee he can or will do anything about it. 

 R_P wrote: 
My job has been slowly sucking for the last 20 years because of "imported " labor.
And it keeps getting worse.
I'm really sick and tired of the saying "They're doing jobs that Americans don't want to do".
B.S. !!!
I like my job I've been doing over 42 years now.
It's really hard to compete with a guy who brings his family in a house and gets paid $8.00 to $13.00 a hour.
Or the guy who screws his own race by taking the money from the job, and then doles out the pay in tiny amounts to his fellow workers.
I've seen all these things happen many times.

I can still outproduce all of these schemers... and do a better job.
I lose jobs daily because I have a license and can't compete.
Thankfully I have word of mouth on my side... it's not as good as it was though.
I want my job back!

 kurtster wrote:
I suspect that would include being "the maid" running her ass off. So it appears you would want to leave the heavy lifting to those immigrants. Opportunistically selective as usual.

Of course the big elephant here, as always is, who is actually doing the hiring of all this cheap labour? Is it people like Trump using his cheap illegals in the construction biz?

 R_P wrote: 
No retirees seeking work in the professions or hospitality ?  Right again you are ! 

 kurtster wrote: 
Hell yeah! Let's see those those slacker retirees back in the fields picking berries and on construction sites...

 kcar wrote: 
You are correct that the 1986 act did not mention a fence, but it was vigorously discussed and with the passage of time it has been wrongly associated as part of the final bill.  I stand corrected.  The unfulfilled promises of meaningful  increased border security do however remain unkept.

I do find that the actual authorization of finally building a real wall dates back to 2006 and remains largely barely started and unfunded.

Still the roots of the anger, empty promises that date back to 1986.

I couldn't find the LAT article I linked to here years ago stating that the county spent $1 bil on illegals in a recent year.  I did find a more recent 2014 article where Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich stated  

“Illegal immigration continues to cost County taxpayers nearly $2 billion dollars a year and siphons resources away from vital municipal services for legal immigrants and county residents,” said Antonovich.  

So its doubled in 5 years.  Its estimated that it costs the State of California $5 bil a year, in 2009.  I am sure that number has risen since just as the cost to LAC has doubled in the same time.  I really do believe that the total of the all costs of illegals in the country is at least $100 billion a year.  All's it takes to reach that number is 50 states X $2 bil, which seems like a reasonable average.

Just a brief mention about displaced American workers.  The common example is that they take jobs that no American is willing to do.  Illegals are largely poorly educated and take low skilled jobs.  There is one segment that is severely impacted that barely gets a mention.  Retirees that must work at some level to fill the gap between their sos sec and actual expenses.  They do and are willing to take many of these jobs, but can no longer get them because they are occupied by poorly skilled immigrants.

The EPA.  It has outlived its usefulness as it presently exists.  It refuses to accept court rulings against their actions towards other government agencies and private property owners.  There are numerous examples.  It is defiant and unchecked.  There is a need for some sort of agency, but it needs to be redefined and started from scratch.
 

A rout! Trump gets 76% of the vote.

 ErikX wrote:

 R_P wrote: 
Grassroots movements come and go in waves. The political establishment accommodates them or gets replaced if any given movement is big and focused enough. Establishment types used to dismiss abolitionism and votes for women and civil rights protection laws as unrealistic and undesirable. 

There really isn't anything preventing new grassroots movements from arising and finding focus. Americans have been angry at their governments for a long time and occasionally put something together like Perot's Reform Party or the Tea Party movement. I'm not hoping for outrageous stuff—just ways for people to get reliable information on candidates and policies, and ways for those people to combine their voices forcefully so that political parties hear them.

There has to be a way to force the two major parties to work effectively and behave responsibly. It's great that Trump has given voice to people who feel economically threatened and politically ignored but that toad has no idea about what to do or how to get things done. He makes Sarah Palin look competent (she actually was briefly while Governor of AK). 

I would love, love love to see political campaign funding get restricted to public-only sources and to see the end of foolishness like Citizens United but right now that seems unrealistic and crazy.  

 kurtster wrote: 
Interesting. I did a bit of googling and could not find mention that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (was that the One Time Amnesty Bill you mentioned?) authorized construction of a wall. With that law, Dutch Reagan gave legal status to around 2.7 million illegal immigrants who'd been in the US before '82. GHW Bush extended that federal protection to around 40% of the illegal immigrant population through a change in INS policy, which Congress ratified in '89:

http://www.businessinsider.com/reagan-and-bush-made-immigration-executive-orders-2014-11 

Oddly, Bill Clinton passed a law that you might find more appealing:

http://connection.ebscohost.com/world/border-walls/history-border-walls-us-and-around-world

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The act increased fines for illegal aliens, provided additional funding for border patrol and surveillance, and also approved the installation of an additional 14-mile (22-kilometer) fence near San Diego. Some landowners in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas erected their own fences, often with the help of militia, but no permanent barrier had been constructed by the government in these areas until recently.

The ACLU is bitterly opposed to the IIRIRA in part of this draconian policy:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/ending-laws-fuel-mass-detention-and-deportation 

Because of IIRIRA, detention is now mandated for virtually any immigrant the government tries to deport based on criminal history — no matter how minor the offense. Detention is mandatory even if the immigrant poses no danger or flight risk, and regardless of the fact that he has already served his criminal sentence and paid his debt to society. At the same time, IIRIRA radically expanded the kinds of offenses that subject an immigrant to mandatory detention. As a result, many immigrants who have strong cases to challenge their removal are forced to choose between enduring additional months or years in detention to fight their cases, or agreeing to banishment from the country they call home. 

 As to whether The Wall would pay for itself (I do hope Paul Wolfowitz isn't hyping that notion like he promised that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself ), 
this Factcheck.org article states that there doesn't seem to be a great cost to state and local governments from illegal immigration:

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/cost-of-illegal-immigrants/ 

So, how much do illegal immigrants cost federal, state and local governments in the U.S.? Estimates vary widely, and no consensus exists. The Urban Institute put the net national costat $1.9 billion in 1992; a Rice University professor, whose work the Urban Institute criticized, said it was $19.3 billion in 1993. More recently, a 2007 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office examined 29 reports on state and local costs published over 15 years in an attempt to answer this question. CBO concluded that most of the estimates determined that illegal immigrants impose a net cost to state and local governments but "that impact is most likely modest." CBO said "no agreement exists as to the size of, or even the best way of measuring, that cost on a national level." 
As for the environmental and water-flow issues surrounding a possible wall, I urge you to go back to the NYT article and read the section towards the end entitled "Maintaining water supplies: A diplomatic challenge"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/politics/donald-trump-immigration.html

Finally, Kurtster, we would be in a world of pain without the EPA. It's just not the job-killer you think it is: 

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/03/1955891/new-omb-study-the-economic-benefits-of-epa-regulations-massively-outweigh-the-costs/


The OMB study looked at a range of regulations across the economy, and found their benefits outweighed their costs across the board. 

...

But no where was the effect greater than with EPA regulations themselves. Over the last decade, they imposed as much as $45 billion in costs on the economy, but they also drove as much as $640 billion in benefits:

The OMB found that a decade’s worth of major federal rules had produced annual benefits to the U.S. economy of between $193 billion and $800 billion and impose aggregate costs of $57 billion to $84 billion. “These ranges are reported in 2001 dollars and reflect the uncertain benefits and costs of each rule,” the report noted.

Rules from the EPA added significantly to both sides of the ledger. “It should be clear that the rules with the highest benefits and the highest costs, by far, come from the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular its Office of Air and Radiation,” the OMB study said. EPA regulations accounted for between 58% and 80% of the benefits the study found as well as 44% to 54% of the costs. Air regulations accounted for nearly 99% of EPA rule benefits, according to the report.

 

Getting into the numbers, the single biggest effect from any of the EPA’s rules came from the recently enacted Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which Republicans have vociferously opposed. MATS also brought the biggest effect of any of the 14 rules issued in fiscal year 2012 — resulting in an estimated cost of $8.1 billion annually, but also offsetting benefits of $28 to $77 billion annually. The runner-up, which along with MATS made up the vast majority of 2012’s costs and benefits, were the vehicle fuel efficiency standards jointly issued by the EPA and Transportation Department.

Since this is a study by the executive branch that endorses policies preferred by the executive branch, it’s worth pointing out that similar findings have been regularly dug up by other researchers. In 2011, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that job loss due to increased energy prices from MATS would be swamped by new jobs in pollution abatement and control. It also found that for each major EPA rule finalized by the Obama Administration at the time, annual benefits exceeded costs by $10 to $95 billion a piece. EPI even returned to the question in 2012, and found net job gains from MATS would reach 117,000 to 135,000 in 2015. The San Francisco Federal Reserve even ran an analysis of regulations more broadly, and found that in states where businesses expressed more concern about regulations over time, employment actually went up slightly.

Surveys of small businesses routinely fail to find compelling evidence that firms view taxes and regulations as a major impediment to hiring, an EPA-mandated clean-up of the Chesapeake BAY is anticipated to create 35 times as many jobs as the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and jobs in the coal industry actually increased by 10 percent after the EPA cracked down on mountaintop-removal mining in 2009.


The link to the OMB report:   https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/inforeg/2013_cb/draft_2013_cost_benefit_report.pdf

The link to the Economic Policy Institute Report: http://www.epi.org/publication/a_life_saver_not_a_job_killer/

Also check out: http://www.epi.org/publication/combined-effect-obama-epa-rules/ 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I would say I'm from California and they'd laugh and ask me if I knew what was going on with Trump, and could I believe it?

Then we'd move to Bernie and I'd argue that Bernie isn't going to be the winner, but he's the advance man waking up the younger generation to mobilize and they'll bring the true change next time. 

 kcar wrote: 
The point is that what the establishment deems unrealistic, crazy, etc. doesn't happen. As the earlier study pointed out. It's never just the wealthy that are part of the establishment. There are the scribes, experts, P.R. people, etc.

Sure, there was "people power" to get changes enacted, but that has declined/been consciously curtailed to some extent in line with the other sentence.

 kcar wrote: 
The Wall was authorized by Tip O'Neill during Reagan's administration.  It was even funded.  We have waited for 30 years to have it built.  It was part of the One Time Amnesty Bill.  I remember being insulted by it because all of a sudden I had to make all my employees and then new hires prove they were citizens with legal penalties if I failed to do so properly.  That put the .gov on my back in a brand new way and everyone else who was legally or wanted to be legally employed.  But it was part of the deal and my job, so I did it.  Another reason I say bull puckey to those who object to voter ID laws.  But I digress.  Its been 30 + years waiting for the freaking wall to be built.  And the primary method used to keep it from being built is objections by the EPA.  Another reason for the EPA to go bye, bye.  

Yes, it has sucked away jobs from citizens and legal immigrants.  No one is or was speaking to and for these people until Trump arrived.  And the same goes for those who are pissed as all get out over the wall not being built.  And they also know the role of the EPA in this, which in the big picture is a typical democratic party bureaucracy hell bent on disrupting businesses with ridiculous regulations and putting national security behind the 'environment'.

The deportation will pay for itself.  How ?  5 years ago the annual local, state and federal government expenses for illegals totaled $200 billion.  5 years ago LA county documented their annual burden to be $1 billion.  If the expense is only $400 billion, then with reduction of the costs of services it would take only several years to break even and then it also means that's $200 billion back in citizen's pockets for the good of the citizen.  That's not a trifling sum either.

Then there is the issue of Sanctuary Cities that I have a major problem with.  I refuse to be tarred by the assertion that I am a xenophobic racist because I have a problem with the people who come here illegally.  I cannot help that it seems to be one primary ethnicity that is coming in.  That's their problem not mine.  Its not who they are, its what they are.   A secure border is supposed to keep everyone out, not just certain people.  

So I'm a xenophobic racist (not saying you said it, but many others here have) for putting my family, friends and neighbors ahead of people trying to get here illegally and f*ck the system at their expense ?  This sure as f*ck ain't the country I was raised in if that's the way it is now.  Angry ?   You have no idea how angry.  30 years angry.  I am not a recent arrival to this party.

 

 Steely_D wrote: 
Unrelated but I was laughing the other day about how when traveling abroad there were times we didn't want to brag about being from the US but now we can just say "Hey, we're not Canadians" and they'll welcome us with open arms.

 R_P wrote: 

When I call Trump's and Sanders' promises crazy, I mean that they have little chance of becoming law or being realized, either for legal, political or cost-benefit reasons. I also refer to the lack of analysis provided by both campaigns to defend their platform planks like building the Wall or providing free healthcare for everyone. Those two promises have no grounding in reality, aside from their power to boost the respective candidates' popularity. 

In contrast, Clinton's push for health care reform as well as Obama's calls for getting out of Iraq and closing Gitmo were serious proposals, bounded by considerations of applicable law, the political landscape and cost-benefit analyses. Interested people could dig into what Clinton and Obama were proposing, although people justly complained about the closed hearings that the Clintons used to discuss health care reform. The Clintons and Ira Magaziner were concerned that lobbying would corrupt and derail the reform process. Unfortunately, lobbyists and Republicans used that secrecy to inflame public fears about "government-run healthcare", death panels, etc. But both Clinton and Obama's ideas were taken seriously and subjected to vigorous, informed debate. 

I agree with you that voters will self-select information to confirm their own biases. I just wish that voters would try harder to become more informed. Even if you read just the stuff that confirms your biases and wish-list for government, you will be raising the level of debate when you voice your biased opinion. You will force politicians to base their promises a little more deeply in the realities that limit what government can do. You will force them to back up their ideas with evidence. 

Right now we're at the point where Sanders and Trump are pretty much promising free beer and steak for everybody. Their supporters are no longer bothering to ask how these promises would happen or what the cost would be. They remind me of people I saw back in a London subway stop during the mid-80s who were putting money into the cap of a man who stood at the bottom of an escalator and chanted "We gonna free-ee Mandela! Free thot man..." The guy couldn't do jack about freeing Mandela but people didn't stop to think about that when they gave their money away. The chanter tapped into people's guilt or vulnerability to peer pressure or stupidity and made himself a little rich that night. 

"The "establishment" or whatever name is attached to it, is what Madison was talking about." 

Not sure what your point is here. Yes, it seems that Madison was talking about institutionalizing the power of landed interests to protect their wealth. 

"The power of grass roots and collective action has long been acknowledged by said establishment as a danger. As such, actions were taken to prevent them, or to try to control/disperse/co-opt them when they threaten to re-emerge." 

 Agreed, and that's one reason why third parties don't last long in American politics. But grass roots efforts can bring about change in American politics—note the success of abolitionists (who were regarded as fringe loons at the start of the Civil War), the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the LBGT movement, the political power that unions once wielded, etc. 
 kurtster wrote:  

From what I've read, Trump supporters want The Wall because they feel their jobs are being taken by illegal immigrants. I'd call that wanting the government to do something for them. It should be obvious to Trump supporters that enforcement of immigration laws on the books isn't going to protect their jobs at this point. One conservative economist calculated that deportation of the 11 million immigrants in the US would cost $400+ billion and then only if the proceedings were spread out over 20 years. 

It's a bit odd to hear people calling for government to get off their backs when they just want government intervention in a different form. 

I'd also call Trump's promise to roll back previous trade agreements a form of active government intervention. Also renegotiating defense agreements with other countries and slapping penalties on firms like Carrier that move jobs out of the country. There are also cases of confusion when people  say they want the government off their backs: for instance, voters in coal-mining country think that clean-air regulations are killing coal jobs but the rise of fracking and resurgence of cheap natural gas in production is doing far greater and more lasting damage to the coal industry. 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
That's a YUGE problem. "Telling it like it is" will likely piss off every major and minor national power, and it will take years to undo the damage.

Examples in recent past: Bush 41, Bush 43, and Bush 43. The harm done to our international reputation and standing as a world power is only now starting to be repaired - despite our OWN attempt to make our President look like an imbecile. Putting someone in the White House who's never even dealt with a city council meeting will be a self-inflicted wound we might not recover from in most of our lifetimes.