foxbat

I hear the experience sticks with you for a lifetime!

My guess is that one of the first witnesses to be called to testify against the President will be ... Donald J. Trump. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/430215-trump-says-he-didnt-need-to-declare-emergency-but-wanted-faster FTA: "I want to do it faster. I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster," Trump said during a press conference at the Rose Garden in the White House.

While I appreciate her general fervor, she needs to be careful that she's not reading her own press releases.

I wasn't looking at it from a W2/1099 perspective, but more from the standpoint that I don't think it's going to move the needle unless the last of my charitable stuff, Goodwill, kicks me over that $24,000 floor. It's going to be a lot like tracking medical expenses for me in the past as I normally couldn't get past that 7.5% of AGI ... which I guess is actually a silver lining in a different way.

There's a lot of items that used to make the green numbers spin in TurboTax that don't this year. Used to be that, once I got done entering in the wages section and taxes withheld, I was at a little green and then, once I started putting in all of the charitable deductions, mortgage interest, property taxes, and education stuff, that sucker would spin. This year, I'm almost done with all of the charitable stuff and it's still just staring at me unmoving. Kind of a bummer when you put in a single , nearly five-figure donation, and that number doesn't move. I used to track my mileage for volunteer coaching, even created a spreadsheet so all I had to do was enter in the number of practices and game locations and it would automatically crack out my mileage for me. Probably not going to need that anymore. One thing I'm curious about will be if ancillary charitable deductions will be impacted moving forward. I expect that won't be the case with folks' core charities, but I wonder if there would be a potential drop in charitable giving or, at minimum, a change in the timing ... e.g., give twice as much every other year and nothing in the intervening years to be able to get an advantage that would be lost by giving a regular amount each year.

Ironically, the easy one would be over immigration again. Fertility rate, tied to replacement, has sustainability right around 2.1. The US is below that, so without immigration, US population will begin to shrink. The next president could say it's a national crisis, without even worrying about Constitutional gun crisis, and like Ronald Reagan said to Mr. Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall."

Those things weighed a ton. I remember when we switched those things out for the 3180s. It was a modularized contraption that had four components to it and you could get them repaired pretty quickly without needing a repairman or any real knowledge about hardware. COBOL is my unemployment/retirement golden ticket. With the vast majority of COBOL programmers dying off and the vast number of systems that still are running it, I could always do a little COBOL consulting work if things ever get thin in retirement.

There is no one that is surprised. And if you still believe that he is, then there's not much to a discussion about this because it's pretty clear that this is about ego and not national security. The fact that his claims about drug implications don't fit with reality also indicates that he's not approaching it logically. Similarly, the fact that some 400 people just tunneled under a stretch of existing wall shows even more disconnect from reality. Should Trump ever get out of the courts to complete his wall, it's likely that it might be studied along with other ill-advised structures like the Maginot Line. As for the graph, correlation does not specifically mean causality. A much more likely explanation for decrease is tied to an increase in Mexico's economy, especially as more US jobs went further south, as well as a drop in Mexico's fertility rates which has it right above the sustainability level sans immigration. Less competition for jobs in Mexico, better jobs in Mexico, and a better economy in Mexico than in the 20th century are all contributing factors to a lowered rate. BTW, you do realize that a growing issue for illegal immigration isn't border crossings, but instead overstayed visas? In 2016-2017, almost two-thirds of undocumenteds came with a visa and overstayed while just a bit over a third came from border crossings. For the last seven years, overstays have outpaced illegal crossings.

What's going to be REALLY funny is when the Democrats force a vote on Trump's "national emergency" to give everybody a chance to go on record. Mitch will then have to, by himself, refuse to bring the vote to the Senate. He will get blowback from some of his colleagues who ABSOLUTELY want to go on record against an Executive Branch powergrab, but even worse, he's going to take away the potential for folks like Collins to be able to try to defend herself on record. He may well be jeopardizing a couple of Senate seats even if he may get to keep his own.

Two years refers to the time that Trump has been in office that apparently it wasn't enough of an emergency to act on. By the way, note that we are in pre-Reagan numbers when looking at apprehensions. In other words, comparatively, it's not an emergency.

To be fair, said "ramming" included some 309 GOP-offered amendments, 188 of which were adopted. plus an additional 20 bi-partisan amendments of which 17 were adopted. In addition, there were 79 committee hearings as well as a CBO scoring of the plan. The Senate Finance Committee spent more time in mark-up on that bill than any bill in the last 20 years. It took a full 8 months AFTER the bill left the House before the Senate voted on it. Another example, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held 14 bipartisan round-table meetings and 13 public hearings. Also, given the time gap just from the House vote to the Senate vote, and the fact that the summer break for Congress fell into that time zone, there were MANY townhalls conducted on both sides that allowed for several unsavory narratives to come into play such as death panels which helps to "expand the debate further." As for GOP ramming, or perhaps just Trump ramming, we're all about to get a peak at that ... most likely today ... when Congressional money gets re-appropriated for a wall that is unlikely to work. This is where the test of GOP stones will come into play. For all of the talk on the Constitution, etc. if Congress, especially the GOP Congressmen, let this go through without a fight, it may be the last of things that they stood for being let go along with balanced power, fiscal conservatism, free trade, strong US allies, and comprehensive immigration reform.

I thought @Coach Nowlin was allergic to horses. Lord, and @Coach Nowlin,I apologize for that.

The same folks calling it a coup are also the same folks that are going to be completely OK with calling a two-year event a national emergency to get around Congress. They will also be the ones cheering US intervention in Venezuela.

Coming to spring El Chapo!

More conjecture, or wishful thinking, than anything else. Mueller and his team have done an extraordinary job keeping their operations pretty much air-tight. As such, any current word, on either side of the coin, is pretty much conjecture. In my own conjecture, I think that collusion with regard to rigging an election, will not be what will be found and, consequently, will be the least of Trump's concerns. It's going to end up being financials. Similarly, I don't think Mueller's findings and release will be the end of things for Trump. SDNY and Virginia will be the problem areas for Trump and Trump Org. and those will continue on likely through the election and, the dangers for Trump and folks like Manafort, Gates, etc. is that presidential pardons don't extend to convictions or indictments in the state courts. Of course, the other potential problem for Trump is that, for all of his attempts, the GOP's attempts, and his fans' attempts to try to discredit Mueller, Americans have more confidence in Mueller than Trump and they also think that Mueller is handling the investigation better than Trump. They also are more likely to believe that his focus in on finding the truth vs. hurting Trump politically. https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/more-americans-trust-special-counsel-162706856.html

That thing is a wonder! Unfortunately, for my appendix surgery I got gutted and it took forever to recover. Had a guy in my office who had laparoscopic surgery at the same time for his appendix and was back in the office in two days. My wife had DaVinci and the recovery time and associated pain was so much less than traditional. Others that I know who have had DaVinci recount similar positive experiences.

One thing that I've started to notice with opioid scripts is the count is becoming much lower and the instructions from the doctors have become more "discouraging" in their use. In the past, they used to say stuff like, "If you need them, take these for pain." The tone of the messages that I'm hearing now is something along the lines of, if ibuprofen/acetaminophen aren't keeping the pain manageable, then you can take this. For my last urgent care visit and my wife's last surgery, we got roughly enough for about three days and a week respectively, with the ability to call the doctor for a refill. I'm wondering if this is a response from the doctors to avoid scrutiny as much or to perhaps put in a "roadblock" to additional usage by requiring that interaction with the doc earlier on and with the doc possibly asking more questions and possibly even asking for the patient to come by for additional observation.

Too bad that Mitch couldn't find time to bring up a single vote toward ending the shutdown. Really a shame that a man with a supposed 38% approval and a 47% disapproval rating in his state has such a likelihood of being re-elected.

I wouldn't necessarily lump all of those together. Trump never really pushed the wall until the very end of his first two years and, even then it was more because of mid-terms or reaction to mid-terms. Similarly, with healthcare, there wasn't really a plan with healthcare. Obama had been working on it throughout the first two years, but took too much of a traditional approach to doing it. Frankly, IMO Obama should have been the "dictator" that the GOP claimed he was and said screw it/do it. He tried to do it rationally early on with commissions/panels and that just got tangled up in mess after mess. Eventually, after losing the House, he was pretty much screwed at that point on this ... especially when the option necessary to make it work was turn them all lose, turn them over to foreign holding, or transfer them to mainland prisons. The last of those was killed off by Congress, the middle one was heavily impeded by Congress, including Democrats worried about attachments that had been added to the bills, and the first was never a real option. While not complete, the New Yorker had a really nice, fairly comprehensive piece on the slip-ups and issues at play: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/why-obama-has-failed-to-close-guantanamo. The Guardian also had a pretty good article on the missteps that Obama had that allowed folks who wanted to keep Gitmo open to be able to pushback and thwart the efforts to close it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/24/obama-guantanamo-bay-closure-republicans.

Obama signed the executive order to start the shutdown, which was supposed to happen within a year of the executive order, but it never officially ended up being closed down. Even when Obama left office, despite plenty of activity trying to transfer detainees out of Gitmo so that it could be effectively closed down, he still had 41 prisoners that were passed on to Trump who is dead-set against closing the facility. The biggest issue that stood in the way of closing Gitmo was Congressional action that forbid Gitmo detainees from being transferred to mainland prisons. https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/19/politics/obama-final-guantanamo-bay-transfer/index.html

Oh, he's learned already. What he's learned is that whatever he says is truth to roughly 35% of the electorate regardless of the science, facts, or direct visual evidence. Now all he has to do is get them to scream loud enough and offer up a Supreme Court nominee and he's pretty close. The bigger question, and probably more important is, "Will we ever learn?" BTW, while the meme accurately calls out the idea that Trump is lying on both fronts, and in a bigly way, the numbers at the bottom are clearly "played with" for additional effect. The EPFD stated that the arena where Trump held his rally has a capacity of 6,500. They guesstimated, with folks outside watching on screens, that the number might around 10,000 total although they specifically stated that they didn't count the people outside. MSNBC said that the total outside may have been as much as 10,000 - 12,000. NBC and other news sources put O'Rourke's rally at around 7,000 - 8,000; however, Bloomberg reported, based on an EPFD estimate, that O'Rourke's rally drew between 10,000 - 15,000 ... most likely thus the 12,500 number. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/12/trump-el-paso-rally-crowd-1164730 https://www.newsweek.com/beto-vs-trump-who-had-bigger-crowd-el-paso-1327514