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Muda69

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The Sad Cult of Esoteric Trumpism

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-sad-cult-of-esoteric-trumpism/

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With his poll numbers sagging in a campaign season circumscribed by the coronavirus, it’s easy to forget how intoxicating Donald Trump’s political rise was to certain people. In 2015 and 2016, Trump broke many of the unwritten rules about where and how a candidate campaigns, and what a candidate can say and do. Normal candidates and the bulk of the media, even the conservative media, treated his campaign as a joke every step of the way. 

 

As he continued to rise, he exposed the weakness of the norms that had built up around American presidential campaigns over decades. He proved that you could succeed while insulting the media and all the recent nominees and presidents of the party you were running to lead, attacking veterans and the war-wounded, and questioning a federal judge’s decision based on his ethnicity. He proved that you didn’t need a stump speech that had been worked on by 30 consultants; you could just riff and test slogans and catchphrases live on CNN. He defied the laws of political physics and paid no price for it. Depending on if you were a supporter or an opponent, he inspired excitement or dread that anything might happen next.

It’s no wonder than that Trump consistently attracted coalitions of people who felt excluded by the political status quo. Some of those people were just oddballs and cranks. Some of them were extremists or haters. They produced elaborate theories about why Trump’s movement was larger than one man, why it was a hinge moment in history. For those driven mad by America’s foreign policy and spying, Trump was an implacable foe of “the blob” and the Deep State. For people looking for a sign from heaven, Trump was a potential new Constantine. For others he was an escape from hundreds of years of misbegotten liberal theories of politics. For racists, he was a harbinger of white-identitarianism on the march worth a Sieg Heil or two.

These were the esoteric cases for Trumpism, and they’ve run aground on the beach of Trump’s actual presidency.

As he approaches the end of his first and maybe only term, Trump has changed very little about America’s foreign policy. He’s shifted some troops and materiel from NATO and domestic attitudes toward China have grown more hawkish on his watch. But the latter development was mostly a result of Chinese malfeasance and may have happened without him.

The racists no longer care about Trump. They wanted his campaign to be the beginning of larger and larger escalations of white hostility. But the demographic trajectory of the country is unchanged from before. Trump lost interest in a big beautiful wall, and his erstwhile white-nationalist fans now despise Trump. The religious dreamers have to contend with a Trumpified Supreme Court whose idea of textual interpretation holds out the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration as the champion of transgender rights in employment. They hoped Trump would be a tool of God who made the whole nation Christian; instead, he may very well make the Republican Party more secular.

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that anyone put their faith in a president as weak as Trump, who can’t even turn infrastructure week into infrastructure projects, to alter the course of history. And many of those who did have recognized as much, and moved on to other pursuits or grudges. But for those leftover, esoteric Trumpism has degenerated from the speculative and crankish to the outright quackery of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which in an odd way tackles the problem of Trump’s weakness head-on. The basic theory is that down is up, stupid is smart, and weakness is strength. The president may look like someone who doesn’t control his mouth or the White House, but QAnon have an answer for that: He’s actually deliberate, purposeful, even masterful in exposing and stopping the corrupt ring of pedophiles, Deep Staters, and other malefactors that controls the world.

I don’t want to make light of this, exactly. Though conspiracy theories are often pursued by their enthusiasts as a harmless distraction and escape from real life, they can be dangerous, occasionally addling minds in a way that leads a man to, say, take a rifle into a pizza shop. But there’s something sad about QAnon followers, too: Those who have clung to a stubborn faith in Trump look set to soon find that he has abandoned them in a world he hardly changed — a world said faith has led them to believe is run with impunity by an omnipotent, ultra-competent cabal of kiddie-diddlers.

Then again, that’s the pattern of cults, isn’t it? A revelation of truth from on high will set you free; a Gnostic secret, known only to adepts, will make the world into a prison.

 

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49 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

So the 3 question marks following that comment mean nothing?

I saw that and my first thought was he was baiting the democrats......I guess I was right........Now it has become "Trump is so stupid he thinks he has the authority to change the election date, SEE - he even said so!!"

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15 hours ago, swordfish said:

I saw that and my first thought was he was baiting the democrats......I guess I was right........

I am not a Democrat.  I haven't voted for a uni-party candidate in over three decades, and probably never will again.

That said, I also don't believe Mr. Trump is a good president, nor he is qualified to be POTUS for another term.

15 hours ago, swordfish said:

So the 3 question marks following that comment mean nothing?

No, they possibly mean Mr. Trump would support an effort to delay the 2020 presidential election until, in his words, " people can properly, securely, and safely vote". 

Would you support such an effort, swordfish?  Do you believe that currently people cannot properly, securely, and safely vote?

And if the election would miraculously somehow be delayed who would then make the call that the people can now "properly, securely, and safely" vote?  I bet Mr. Trump believes that decision resides in the executive branch of the federal government..............

 

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2 hours ago, Muda69 said:

I am not a Democrat.  I haven't voted for a uni-party candidate in over three decades, and probably never will again.  And that is your right. 

That said, I also don't believe Mr. Trump is a good president, nor he is qualified to be POTUS for another term.  In your opinion.

No, they possibly mean Mr. Trump would support an effort to delay the 2020 presidential election until, in his words, " people can properly, securely, and safely vote".  "Possibly?" = your opinion?

Would you support such an effort, swordfish?  Do you believe that currently people cannot properly, securely, and safely vote?

And if the election would miraculously somehow be delayed who would then make the call that the people can now "properly, securely, and safely" vote?  I bet Mr. Trump believes that decision resides in the executive branch of the federal government..............

 

NO.  And neither would the President.  (IMHO)  And there is no "effort" to do such a thing.  As I said - baiting the Dems who think it is so unsafe for the public to leave their homes.....  (IMHO)

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On 7/30/2020 at 4:33 PM, swordfish said:

So the 3 question marks following that comment mean nothing?

I saw that and my first thought was he was baiting the democrats......I guess I was right........Now it has become "Trump is so stupid he thinks he has the authority to change the election date, SEE - he even said so!!"

He is that stupid.

2 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Y'all got what you voted for. 

Yep. It's a cult and the ignorant folks like DE, TD and SF are caught like a fish. 

They totally would have been in love with Hitler in the early 30s. 

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On 8/1/2020 at 7:53 PM, TheStatGuy said:

He is that stupid.

Yep. It's a cult and the ignorant folks like DE, TD and SF are caught like a fish. 

They totally would have been in love with Hitler in the early 30s. 

In your humble opinion......

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23 minutes ago, swordfish said:

In your humble opinion......

Nope. If you were easily duped by a moron like Trump. You would have been head over heels about Hitler.  

Trade Jews with Muslims/Hispanics

Trade German gov before hitler rose to power and replace it with our government from 08-16.

Almost identical. Can't deny it. 

Strike 3. You are out. 

You are almost as easy as Temptation. 

 

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14 minutes ago, TheStatGuy said:

Nope. If you were easily duped by a moron like Trump. You would have been head over heels about Hitler.  

Trade Jews with Muslims/Hispanics

 

And you don't know the first rule about internet forum debate.  The first one to play the Hitler Card loses.  No exceptions.

Besides, can you please tell me where Mr. Trump has initiated a program to mass exterminate Muslims and Hispanics?

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

And you don't know the first rule about internet forum debate.  The first one to play the Hitler Card loses.  No exceptions.

Besides, can you please tell me where Mr. Trump has initiated a program to mass exterminate Muslims and Hispanics?

 

 

Don't hold your breath Muda......

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So will somebody PLEASE explain to the uninformed the difference between "Absentee Ballot" and "Mail-in Voting"......

An absentee ballot means that you (a registered voter) requests a ballot be mailed to you since you will not (for any reason out there, take your pick) be able to be at the ballot box the day of the election.

A "Mail-in Ballot" is sent to all names and addresses on the voter roles no matter the disposition of said voter (dead or alive, still living at the address or even not in the state) and the vote is returned with absolutely no oversight to the voter's validity.

Most conservatives have no problem with absentee voting, but have every reason to oppose the idea of "mail-in voting".

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15 minutes ago, swordfish said:

So will somebody PLEASE explain to the uninformed the difference between "Absentee Ballot" and "Mail-in Voting"......

An absentee ballot means that you (a registered voter) requests a ballot be mailed to you since you will not (for any reason out there, take your pick) be able to be at the ballot box the day of the election.

A "Mail-in Ballot" is sent to all names and addresses on the voter roles no matter the disposition of said voter (dead or alive, still living at the address or even not in the state) and the vote is returned with absolutely no oversight to the voter's validity.

Most conservatives have no problem with absentee voting, but have every reason to oppose the idea of "mail-in voting".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/09/difference-between-absentee-ballots-voting-by-mail/
 

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You may be wondering: What is the difference, exactly, between absentee ballots (a great way to vote) and mail-in voting (shouldn’t be allowed)? Wonder no longer!

An absentee ballot is sent in the mail, whereas a mail-in vote is mailed in. Sending ballots in the mail is famously secure, but mailing in votes is ripe for all kinds of fraud and confusion.

An absentee ballot is filled out in pen or pencil, whereas a mail-in vote is filled in with ink or graphite. Already you see how different the two are, and how much riper for fraud one is.

An absentee ballot is placed in an envelope, whereas a mail-in vote is enclosed in an envelope. The difference in security should be obvious.

An absentee ballot must be signed, whereas a mail-in vote requires a signature. An envelope containing an absentee ballot must be closed securely, while an envelope containing a mail-in vote must be sealed. On an absentee ballot, a voter marks their preferred candidates, but on a mail-in vote, a voter fills in the ballot to indicate the candidates of their choice.

An absentee ballot is cast by a Republican, whereas a mail-in vote is sent by a Democrat.

I guess as a libertarian I will be voting in person.

 

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https://www.statesman.com/news/20200803/fact-check-is-there-difference-between-absentee-mail-in-voting

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...

For this fact-check, we will explain why absentee and mail-in ballots are the same thing, and that, whatever term you use, the verification process is the same.

“There’s really no distinction,” said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Florida and an elections expert. “So, it’s basically a falsehood that’s been repeated over and over and over again.”

The coronavirus pandemic has raised concerns about voters’ safety as they wait in crowded polling places on Election Day — some may choose not to show up at all. Because of this, some states have encouraged the use of mail voting. (Five states had already run virtually all-mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.)

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring counties to send all active registered voters a mail-in ballot about a month before the Nov. 3 election, joining the all-mail election states plus Vermont and Washington D.C. Other states are allowing voters to request those ballots, either online or by mail.

In the states that allow broad use of mail ballots, there is no distinction in how a voter requests “absentee” ballots and other types of mail ballots. Trump may not like the policy of sending out ballots to all registered voters, but it is wrong to suggest that ballots cast that way are different from absentee ballots or that they aren’t subject to the same scrutiny.

Part of the linguistic confusion may be generational: Many states have phased out the use of the term “absentee,” including California and Florida.

In 2016, for instance, the Florida Legislature unanimously voted to change the phrase “absentee” to “vote-by-mail,” in order to ease confusion among voters who mistakenly believed that they had to be away from home to request a ballot by mail. Some election advocates now use the term “vote at home,” because ballots in some states can be dropped off in person at designated lockboxes rather than mailed.

So when Trump says he’s an absentee voter in Florida because he’s “at the White House,” that’s not accurate. It doesn’t matter where he is; Trump, like any other registered Florida voter, can cast a ballot without going to an in-person site.

 
 

No differential treatment

Regardless of the terminology, elections experts say there is no difference between how “absentee” and “mail-in ballots” are treated.

In 34 states and Washington, D.C., voters can use “no excuse” absentee voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Under no-excuse absentee voting, the voter does not need to attest that they will be out of the jurisdiction on Election Day, or that they cannot get to the polls because of an illness or disability.

There is no special process that absentee out-of-town voters go through that other mail-in voters do not, Hutchinson said.

The verification process actually begins well before any ballot is sent out. It starts with voter registration, a process which requires officials to determine if someone is eligible. Election offices also periodically update their registration lists, including removing inactive voters or those who have died. Many states are members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, which sends each member state reports showing voters who have moved within their state or out of state, have died or duplicate registrations.

Once a completed ballot is received by election officials, the identity of every voter is confirmed.

In California, for instance, county elections officials check every vote-by-mail ballot to see whether the voter has already cast a ballot elsewhere. All ballot envelopes have unique barcodes, and local jurisdictions use specific paper types and watermarks for their ballots. Officials then compare the voter’s signature against the signature on the voter’s registration record.

“Fundamentally, it’s the same thing,” said Amber McReynolds, Denver’s former director of elections and chief executive officer of the National Vote at Home Institute. “Ballots are handled exactly the same regardless of whether or not it’s an absentee ballot or a vote-by-mail ballot.”

States typically allow voters an opportunity to correct mistaken information they’ve filled in on their ballot, or if officials see too much of a discrepancy between the signature on file and the signature on the ballot. When voters are notified of any problems with their information on the envelope, they are able to fix the problem in time to have their ballot counted.

Procedures to help voters track their ballots also helps with the verification process. For example voters in Palm Beach County, where Trump is a registered voter at Mar-A-Lago, can use the county website to track when the ballot was mailed to the voter and when it was received by the elections office. In Denver, voters can sign up to get information via text about their ballot, including when it was approved to be counted.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said July 31 the increase of mail ballots is the problem this cycle. “Mass mail-out ballots are going to be more at risk of fraud,” she said, citing multiple news reports about delays in tabulating results or rejection of mail ballots, including those that arrived after the deadline.

There have been delays in counting mail-in ballots, including in New York, and other problems including voters who said their requested ballots never arrived. All of those problems raise concerns about how some states that are unaccustomed to widespread voting by mail will gear up for the Nov. 3 election.

However, that doesn’t mean that there is any difference in verifying these votes.

Our ruling

Trump said, “Absentee is different (from mail-in ballots). Absentee, you have to work. You have to send in for applications. You have to go through a whole procedure.”

There is no distinction between absentee voting and voting by mail. All mail ballots, regardless of how they are requested, are treated the same once they’re cast, and they require verification before being counted.

We rate this claim False.

 

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And then there's Nevada......

25 minutes ago, swordfish said:

A "Mail-in Ballot" is sent to all names and addresses on the voter roles no matter the disposition of said voter (dead or alive, still living at the address or even not in the state) and the vote is returned with absolutely no oversight to the voter's validity.

The legislation will allow election officials to send absentee ballots to every "active registered voter" in the state. It will also extend the deadline for when mail-in ballots can be counted after Election Day, so mailed-in ballots can still be counted if they arrive one week after November 3.
The legislation will also ease some restrictions for who can legally handle and submit other people's ballots -- a move that Republicans claimed could lead to voter fraud.

 

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7 minutes ago, swordfish said:

And then there's Nevada......

The legislation will allow election officials to send absentee ballots to every "active registered voter" in the state. It will also extend the deadline for when mail-in ballots can be counted after Election Day, so mailed-in ballots can still be counted if they arrive one week after November 3.
The legislation will also ease some restrictions for who can legally handle and submit other people's ballots -- a move that Republicans claimed could lead to voter fraud.

 

Key word "claimed".

Claimed <> proof.

 

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8 hours ago, swordfish said:

And then there's Nevada......

The legislation will also ease some restrictions for who can legally handle and submit other people's ballots -- a move that Republicans claimed could lead to voter fraud.

 

That is done, by and large, to benefit Reservations and rural areas. 

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The Trump administration's "economic nationalist" agenda is little more than a cronyist attempt at propping up domestic companies with taxpayer cash.

https://reason.com/2020/08/05/the-trump-administrations-765-million-kodak-deal-is-more-proof-that-economic-nationalism-is-a-scam/

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The Trump administration's latest "economic nationalism" scheme involves having taxpayers underwrite a $765 million loan to Eastman Kodak, the long-struggling camera company, in the hopes of transforming it into a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

If that sounds like a far-fetched idea, well, give some credit to the lobbyists who apparently made it happen.

The Daily Beast's Lachlan Markay reports that Kodak restarted its shuttered D.C. lobbying team in April of this year and proceeded to spend $870,000 on influence-peddling in the months leading up to last week's announcement by the White House. That's twice as much as the company had ever spent in a single quarter, according to lobbying disclosures, and it appears to have paid off.

When the White House announced the massive loan to Kodak last week, Trump lauded it as a "breakthrough in bringing pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States." Eastman Kodak will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, which are the chemical compounds used as the building blocks for many drugs. The loan to Eastman Kodak is supposed to be repaid within 25 years.

The White House is throwing all that taxpayer-backed cash at a company with no experience making pharmaceuticals as part of an overall effort to shift the global supply chains for pharmaceuticals. Some Republicans—including Peter Navarro, Trump's top trade advisor, and lawmakers like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.)—fear that America is too dependant on imported drugs and APIs manufactured in China.

In reality, however, there is little cause for concern. The global supply chains for pharmaceuticals are diverse and resilient. And even though China's share of the market has been growing in recent years, the United States imports far more pharmaceuticals from Ireland and other countries than it does from China. Only 13 percent of the facilities used to make APIs that go into America's drug supply are in China, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

But corporate lobbyists aren't letting the opportunity go to waste. The deal with Eastman Kodak follows on the heels of the Trump administration's announcement in May that it was handing a $350 million contract to a relatively unknown Virginia-based pharmaceutical company, Phlow Corp., to compete with drugmakers in China.

That deal happened despite the fact that Phlow Corp. doesn't have any history of mass-producing pharmaceutical drugs, and appears to have been founded earlier this year for the purpose of cashing in on Trump's protectionist politics. A Phlow spokesman told BioPharma Dive, a trade publication, that the company's leaders had been "communicating with government officials about the U.S. pharmaceutical supply for more than a year" and that Phlow's "stated mission" is "reducing the U.S.' dependence on foreign supply chains." And one of the company's board members has been making the rounds in media and congressional committee hearings to talk-up America's supposedly dangerous over-reliance on Chinese drugs.

The Phlow Corp. deal might have some red flags, but the Eastman Kodak loan stinks to high heaven. Shares of Kodak stock soared last week—before and after Trump announced the massive infusion of taxpayer money into the long-struggling New York-based company. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether some people might have been tipped off about the deal before it was publicly announced.

But insider trading is a petty charge compared to the most obviously odious parts of Trump's Kodak moment. The press release announcing the deal says the massive loan to Kodak will create 360 new jobs—that's more than $2.1 million per job.

That's a ton of money to do….what exactly? Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow and trade policy expert with the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that private companies are already reconfiguring their supply chains to account for lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. "The supply chain issue that Kodak and the Trump administration claim to have identified yesterday might not even exist by the time Kodak Pharmaceutical is operational," he writes.

And there are plenty of other questions. Even if you give the White House the benefit of the doubt on the question of whether America needs to invest in API production, why does it makes sense for a bankrupt camera company to be the government's champion? Will spending $765 million to boost Kodak stock and create 300 jobs materially shift the global supply chains for pharmaceutical drugs—a market that's worth well over $1 trillion annually?

The answers, of course, lead right back to Markay's reporting. Lobbyists have seized on the Trump administration's "economic nationalist" agenda because it is little more than a cronyist attempt at propping up domestic companies with taxpayer cash under the guise of geopolitics.

Spending $870,000 to make $765 million? Just call it the art of the deal.

Reduce the size, scope, and power of the federal government, including the Executive Branch, by at least 25% across the board and this kind of blatant cronyism goes away.

 

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Nice Video Streaming Business You Got There…

https://www.cato.org/blog/nice-video-streaming-business-you-got-there

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On Monday, Americans witnessed a stunningly brazen act of what can only be called political gangsterism. Speaking from the White House, Donald Trump declared that for “security reasons” the popular video sharing platform TikTok—which is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance—would be “shut down” in the United States on September 15, unless it were purchased by Microsoft or another American firm. Moreover, since the government was effectively forcing the sale by threatening to shutter TikTok, Trump expected the U.S. Treasury to get a piece of the action—though the exact legal mechanism by which the government would take payment for this “service” was left vague. It’s worth quoting Trump’s explanation at length:

I did say that if you buy it, whatever the price is, that goes to whoever owns it, because I guess it’s China, essentially, but more than anything else, I said a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States. Because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. Right now they don’t have any rights, unless we give it to ’em. So if we’re going to give them the rights, then it has to come into, it has to come into this country.

It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant [relationship]. Uh, without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So they pay what is called “key money” or they pay something. But the United States should be reimbursed, or should be paid a substantial amount of money because without the United States they don’t have anything, at least having to do with the 30%.

So, uh, I told him that. I think we are going to have, uh, maybe a deal is going to be made, it’s a great asset, it’s a great asset. But it’s not a great asset in the United States unless they have the approval of the United States. So it’ll close down on September 15th, unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it, and work out a deal, an appropriate deal, so the Treasury of the — really the Treasury, I suppose you would say, of the United States, gets a lot of money. A lot of money.

Let’s not mince words: This is the Mafia’s business model. “We’ll threaten your competitor, forcing them to sell the business cheap, but we expect our cut in return.” The national security powers of the executive branch are now officially muscle for hire.

But how—one might reasonably wonder—could an app best known for videos of teenagers dancing and lip-syncing pose a national security threat in the first place? A threat so dire it justifies the use of emergency powers to close down an expressive platform used by millions of Americans every day? Can a president even do that?

Let’s start with the supposed threat. Like many other apps, TikTok collects quite a bit of data about its users, some obvious (such as personal profile information), some less so (device configuration; location on videos that have been geotagged). That data is stored on U.S. servers (with backups in Singapore), and the American CEO of the company’s U.S. subsidiary says they would not share it with the Chinese government. But in theory, under China’s security laws, the parent company ByteDance could be ordered to produce that data to the Chinese government for some presumptively nefarious purpose.

As other analysts have noted, there is something very odd about singling out TikTok as a focus of panic on this front, as the type of personal data collected would be of relatively low intelligence value to China. (Contrast the recent compelled divestiture of the gay dating app Grindr by Chinese firm Kunlun, where there was at least an intelligible argument that the specific nature of the data collected made it uniquely useful for blackmail.) One can imagine how such information might be abused by a government interested in monitoring its own citizens, but it’s harder to articulate any coherent reason midwestern teens posting cat videos should be fearful that Maoists are scrutinizing their system settings or geotags. As long as we’re spinning hypotheticals, however, TikTok is hardly the only potential corporate source of data about Americans. The Chinese firm Lenovo is one of the largest hardware manufacturers in the world, and owns the U.S. smartphone maker Motorola Mobility. The Qingdao-based Haier Group owns GE Appliances, which sells Internet-enabled devices to the American market. Chinese gaming giant Tencent owns the company that makes League of Legends—one of the most popular games in the world for over a decade—and holds a large stake in Epic Games, developers of the more recent megahit Fortnite. It’s not clear why the data collected by TikTok, in particular, poses a greater security threat than the data collected by innumerable other Chinese-owned companies—or, for that matter, by American companies that make use of overseas call or data centers.

One might reasonably respond that we should be concerned about any foreign exfiltration of data on U.S. persons. But if so, the rational response is a generally applicable data framework guided by neutral rules and principles, not the arbitrary deployment of the most extreme possible policy response against individual companies that commit the sin of becoming too popular or prominent. The disproportionate panic over TikTok seems to be substantially driven by the fact that it’s the hot new thing—heavily used by teens, which helps trigger our protective instincts—and therefore attracts media attention more readily than denunciations of foreign-owned appliance makers.  And the message to foreign companies considering investing or doing business in the United States is: You may be expropriated virtually overnight, subject to the whims of the president, without having done anything wrong or violated any preexisting rule.    

It’s also worth noting that the argument being deployed against TikTok could just as easily be turned on the United States. Under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the U.S. government may demand warrantless access to foreign users’ information—including private communications—from American tech companies. In 2019, a stunning 204,968 foreign persons were targeted for “collection” under that single authority. Indeed, a data sharing agreement between the United States and the European Union was recently invalidated—and its future remains uncertain—in part because the E.U. high court deemed such authority inconsistent with the privacy rights of Europeans. The logic behind a ban on TikTok works equally well as a rationale for the rest of the world to ban Google and Facebook.

None of this is to deny that TikTok might present a legitimate security risk for some users. Notwithstanding the company’s assurances, democracy activists with plans to travel to China would probably be wise to avoid installing it, and government agencies that handle sensitive information would be amply justified in barring it (and many other apps) from employees’ phones. But government agencies already have and enforce their own elaborate device security policies. (Recent legislative proposals to specifically bar TikTok from government devices suggest some lawmakers mistakenly believe these agencies require granular security guidance from Congress, at the level of individual apps—an unsettling prospect, but fortunately untrue.) The government need not impose on every citizen the security measures appropriate for NSA analysts, or threaten to kick millions of Americans off an expressive platform in order to protect Naval Intelligence officers.

Others worry that TikTok could serve as a vehicle for Chinese propaganda and misinformation. But as the 2016 election should have made clear, foreign governments hardly need to operate their own media platforms to engage in such information operations, and there is no good reason to think that TikTok videos pose a bigger threat on this score—whether the platform is owned by Microsoft or ByteDance—than Facebook posts.

So can the president “ban” TikTok? There are a number of legal mechanisms available to the executive that might have that practical effect, though given the thin and almost entirely hypothetical nature of the “national security threat” posed, it would be a gross abuse of power to do so. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States can retroactively demand that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok. Trump could invoke the International Emergency Powers Act, declaring that the popularity of the video sharing app constitutes a “national emergency” and imposing sanctions on its parent company, which would force the Apple and Android app stores to delist the app. That would not remove it from the millions of phones on which it is already installed, however, and at least in theory the platform could continue to operate on overseas servers, both for existing users and those who access it via the Web rather than an app—a perverse result if the aim is to prevent Americans’ data from being exfiltrated to China. To truly prevent Americans from accessing a foreign platform would, ironically, require something akin to China’s “Great Firewall,” long considered an emblem of the country’s authoritarian repression of speech.

However effective such a ban might ultimately be in practice, the prospect ought to be appalling from a First Amendment perspective. Again, this is a platform for expression used daily by millions of Americans. While—as with most social media—much of the content is frivolous, it has also become a vehicle for political speech and organizing. Perhaps not coincidentally, online teens, organizing primarily via TikTok, successfully pranked a recent Trump rally in Tulsa, submitting bogus registrations and inflating attendance expectations, which likely contributed to the spectacle of conspicuously empty seats that is said to have infuriated the president. It is hard not to wonder whether now that the president has announced that, absent a deal with Microsoft, he intends to attempt to shutter the entire platform for “security reasons” less than two months before a presidential election—a drastic response that would radically disrupt the legitimate speech of citizens. There may be valid data privacy concerns about foreign-owned online services that could be addressed by an appropriately general legislative framework. But killing a massively popular venue for speech by executive fiat would be, as Trump is fond of saying, a “cure worse than the problem.”

In short, Trump’s threat is an egregious affront to American values on multiple levels. If Microsoft is unable to reach a deal with TikTok, the president has pledged to unilaterally use the powers of his office to destroy a vast platform for speech and expression whose users recently embarrassed him, invoking a vague and speculative “national security threat” ostensibly posed by a company that has not, as yet, been accused of any actual wrongdoing. If a deal is reached, Trump has announced that the coercion of foreign companies—coercion supposedly required by national security interests—is in fact a service to American corporations, for which the beneficiaries should pay a fee. It’s the sort of thing one might expect to see in China—not the United States.

Agreed. Leave TikTok alone.

 

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Ottawa plans to retaliate after Trump imposes tariffs on aluminum

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-president-trump-announces-10-per-cent-tariff-on-canadian-aluminum/

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U.S. President Donald Trump has started a new continental tariff war, reimposing tariffs of 10 per cent on most Canadian aluminum that Canada will match with tariffs of its own.

“In response to the American tariffs announced today, Canada will impose countermeasures that will include dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter on Thursday evening.

In a statement, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland described Mr. Trump’s move as “unwarranted and unacceptable.” She did not say if the retaliatory tariffs would affect only U.S. aluminum or would extend to other exports.

The U.S. tariffs take effect on Aug. 16 and apply to raw aluminum, which the White House says accounted for 59 per cent of Canadian exports of the metal to the U.S. over the past year. Mr. Trump is imposing them under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which allows the President to use tariffs for “national security” purposes.

”Canadian aluminum does not undermine U.S. national security,” Ms. Freeland said. “Canadian aluminum strengthens U.S. national security and has done so for decades through unparalleled co-operation between our two countries.”

The new trade battle comes during a difficult re-election campaign in the United States and as the economies of both countries struggle with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.'

...

Mr. Trump has built his political brand on blaming other countries for the hollowing out of the U.S. manufacturing industry and embracing protectionist measures. Less than three months from election day, he trails Democratic rival Joe Biden in the polls and has lost ground over the summer amid a mounting COVID-19 case count.

Century’s plant is in Kentucky, where Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is facing a strong Democratic challenge to his own re-election this fall.

Jean Simard, president and CEO of the Aluminum Association of Canada, said Canadian aluminum shipments into the United States have not surged, and the tariffs will do nothing to help the U.S. economy. “This is just increasing the cost of aluminum … which is not what is needed right now,” he said.

Just what we need, a trade war with Canada...............

 

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36 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Ottawa plans to retaliate after Trump imposes tariffs on aluminum

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-president-trump-announces-10-per-cent-tariff-on-canadian-aluminum/

Just what we need, a trade war with Canada...............

 

Try to buy some Canadian lumber.  That dispute has been going on for years, and now Trudeau has his panties in a bind since the last agreement expired in 2015 and he doesn't like our President who is tired of Canada subsidizing their lumber industry.  (Same as the aluminum industry)

 

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4 hours ago, swordfish said:

Try to buy some Canadian lumber.  That dispute has been going on for years, and now Trudeau has his panties in a bind since the last agreement expired in 2015 and he doesn't like our President who is tired of Canada subsidizing their lumber industry.  (Same as the aluminum industry)

 

Trump's New Tariffs on Canadian Aluminum Are Indefensible

https://reason.com/2020/08/07/trumps-new-tariffs-on-canadian-aluminum-are-indefensible/

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When President Donald Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs on imported aluminum in March 2018, it was (predictably) American aluminum-consuming companies that suffered the most.

Companies like Whirlpool Corp., for example. The appliance manufacturer—which had previously been a cheerleader for Trump's tariffs on imported washing machines—saw its sales and stock prices tumble in the months after Trump's aluminum tariffs took effect, as the import taxes added to the company's input costs. It takes a lot of aluminum to build a washing machine, after all.

That background is essential to understanding the weirdness that unfolded on Thursday evening when Trump announced—from the factory floor at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio—that he was reimposing 10 percent tariffs on aluminum imported from Canada.

Those tariffs had been lifted in 2019 as Trump sought to negotiate the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), which officially took effect last month. But with the new trade deal in place, Trump has quickly returned to his old tricks. "Canada was taking advantage of us, as usual," he said Thursday during a largely off-the-cuff speech at the plant. The new tariffs are slated to take effect on August 16.

Ostensibly, the justification for reimposing these tariffs is the claim that imports have increased dramatically in recent months. In reality, that's a bunch of nonsense. The Aluminium Association says the claims of a surge in aluminum imports "are grossly exaggerated." In fact, aluminum imports from Canada are below 2017 levels—the last year before Trump's first round of tariffs took effect.

And even if aluminum imports were increasing, that's not something to get upset about. The United States literally does not produce enough aluminum to meet its domestic needs, so imports are essential for supporting the 97 percent of American aluminum industry jobs that are in downstream production. And when more aluminum—or anything else—is traded back and forth between the United States and Canada, both countries benefit from the transaction. That's how trade works.

It's not exactly clear what Trump hopes the reinstated tariffs will accomplish, but the one thing that should be obvious is that American aluminum-consuming industries will once again be punished by the president's trade policies. The tariffs "will place greater financial hardship on U.S. vehicle parts manufacturers at a time when the industry is trying to recover from plant shutdowns and a declining economy," said Bill Long, president and CEO of the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association, in a statement issued Thursday.

In deciding to reimpose tariffs on Canadian aluminum, the Trump administration "failed to listen to the vast majority of domestic aluminum companies and users," said Tom Dobbins, president & CEO of the Aluminum Association, in a statement yesterday. And that's the reaction from the industry that Trump's measure is supposed to be helping.

In February, the heads of 15 of the world's largest aluminum companies sent a letter to the White House urging the president to resist calls for renewed tariffs on Canadian aluminum—an effort that came from just two companies, The New York Times reported at the time.

"The few companies that stand to benefit from reinstated 232 tariffs on aluminum have cherry-picked government data and omitted important context to build their case, which unfortunately won the day," said Dobbins.

Politically, tariffs on Canada don't make much sense either. At the very least, Thursday's announcement undermines one of Trump's biggest accomplishments on the trade front: the USMCA. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Twitter that his government would immediately retaliate.

In response to the American tariffs announced today, Canada will impose countermeasures that will include dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs. We will always stand up for our aluminum workers. We did so in 2018 and we will stand up for them again now. https://t.co/gYH0ziOVM4

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) August 6, 2020

 

More generally, the abrupt turn against a close ally and major trading partner with whom the U.S. had just signed a major trade deal signals to the rest of the world that Trump's deals aren't to be trusted.

"If the U.S. walks back on its trade commitments, how can it criticize China for doing the same?" The Wall Street Journal editorial board opined today. "The aluminum tariff is Mr. Trump at his policy worst: He hurts U.S. industry and consumers, while telling America's friends that his word on trade can't be trusted."

Indeed, it's difficult to find any logical explanation for why Trump would pursue a policy that will increase costs for American consumers and businesses in the middle of a major economic downturn.

"These tariffs will raise costs for American manufacturers, are opposed by most U.S. aluminum producers and will draw retaliation against U.S. exports—just as they did before," said Myron Brilliant, vice president and head of international affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a statement that sums up the bizarre and counterproductive déjà vu of Thursday's announcement.

Is it tone-deafness? Is it willful ignorance? Maybe a little of both, mixed with the fact that Trump is a one-trick pony who still believes—despite a two-year-long real-world experiment showing otherwise—that tariffs will fix America's economic ailments.

That he would announce this new policy while literally standing on the factory floor of a business that the policy will materially harm is the cherry on top of this nonsensical milkshake. It also might be the most perfectly apt metaphor for Trump's inept and incoherent trade policy: one that he thinks is helping American manufacturing while it actually does the exact opposite.

 

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Sen. Sasse Tells Trump ‘America Doesn’t Have Kings’ in Response to Recent Executive Orders

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/senator-ben-sasse-tells-president-trump-america-doesnt-have-kings-in-response-to-recent-executive-orders/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

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Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) doubled down on his criticism of President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders in a tweet on Monday afternoon, saying “no president” has the power to make such unilateral policy decisions.

“No president  whether named Obama or Trump or Biden or AOC  has unilateral power to rewrite immigration law or to cut taxes or to raise taxes,” Sasse said. “This is because America doesn’t have kings.

...

Sasse’s comment was the latest in a war of words between the pair that played out on Twitter after the senator called Trump’s executive orders “unconstitutional slop.” 

“The pen-and-phone theory of executive lawmaking is unconstitutional slop,” Sasse said earlier.

The orders, which Trump signed in response to legislative gridlock over additional Covid relief legislation, extended the expanded unemployment benefits Congress approved in March, deferred payroll taxes and extended rent and student loan payment assistance.

“President Obama did not have the power to unilaterally rewrite immigration law with DACA, and President Trump does not have the power to unilaterally rewrite the payroll tax law. Under the Constitution, that power belongs to the American people acting through their members of Congress,” he continued.

The president shot back at Sasse’s initial criticism, calling the senator a “Republican in Name Only” or RINO.

“RINO Ben Sasse, who needed my support and endorsement in order to get the Republican nomination for Senate from the GREAT State of Nebraska, has, now that he’s got it (Thank you President T), gone rogue, again. This foolishness plays right into the hands of the Radical Left Dems!” Trump wrote in a Monday morning tweet, branding Sasse as a “Republican in Name Only” or RINO.

In his latest response, Sasse accused the president of being “frustrated I didn’t join your re-election committee & that I ran a primary ad admitting to Nebraskans that we sometimes agree and sometimes disagree.”

“You also know I never asked for your endorsement nor did I use it in the campaign,” he added. 

“I have pleaded with you but for bigger things like better U.S. policy on the Chinese Communist Party  and on this, you’ve done a very good job.” 

Sasse then offered to “move the conversation back to a private channel” if Trump so desires.

 

The senator’s criticism of Trump’s executive action put him at odds with GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called the orders a necessary action.

“Struggling Americans need action now. Since Democrats have sabotaged backroom talks with absurd demands that would not help working people, I support President Trump exploring his options to get unemployment benefits and other relief to the people who need them the most,” McConnell said.

 

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