The Frankish Reich

Will they? His support had already cratered. He picked billiionairess/Google Gold Digger Nicole Shanahan as his VP, hoping she'd step in with big bucks to save him, but she knew enough not to do that. So now his endless craving for attention brings him to support the very type of person - a true red Climate Change Hoax guy - he characterized as the people who are literally destroying the earth. But hey, what's a little existential threat doing getting in the way of attention on me!

NEXT UP: Cheryl Hines files for divorce. "I thought I married a climate activist, but it turns out I married the third Kock brother."

https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Crisis-Causing-Fighting-Reverse/dp/1510760563 Single issue candidate running on the need to treat climate change as an existential threat throws his support to guy who says climate change is a hoax.

Who just so happened to be a tenant of Donald's father. And Donald told people for years after the fact that he was lucky with his lottery number, not that he had any kind of medical exemption. And weirdly never mentioned bone spurs bothering him. Not to this day. Didn't even bother to have Dr. Ronny mention them in his health report.

Same here. He talks about how he was such a great baseball player in high school, a natural athlete, never mentions any injuries. He talks for years and years about how a high draft lottery number kept him out of Vietnam. Then the NYT (mainstream media, doing actual reporting) goes digging, finds his Selective Service record. Refutes Trump's story; finds that he was exempted based on a medical condition (bone spurs). Does some more digging: bone spurs "diagnosed" by a podiatrist working out of a dump of an office in Queens - a tenant of Fred Trump, Donald's father. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/politics/trump-vietnam-draft-exemption.html

I'm sure he's worried about that. Or maybe she's a Daughter of the American Revolution. I don't think so. There's plenty in the historical record regarding Catholics (Maryland) at a minimum. Still: weird that you act like that would be a good thing, that only WASPs as we used to call them count as fully "American" Maybe you can revive the Whig Party

We may be seeing Trump's support cratering ...

Wow. That turned fast.

Geez, good thing he had those bone spurs taken care of before he started spending 200 days a year on the golf course. Did you know that podiatrists (like the Trump commercial tenant who wrote him the letter) can do that? https://www.gwapodiatry.com/blog/how-podiatrists-treat-bone-spurs-on-the-heel.cfm

When the Biden-Harris administration handed out too much money during Covid, an unpopular spike in inflation was the result. In response, Ms. Harris proposes to outlaw price increases. But price controls never work. Businesses facing higher input costs because of inflation can’t survive selling their wares at a loss. Venezuela illustrates how price controls drive the private sector into the ground and the general public into poverty. The good news is Ms. Harris may know better. Her vague proposal Friday appears to be designed to inoculate herself politically from her inflation problem. Yet it isn’t at all clear Ms. Harris believes in markets. She has railed against corporate profits, whether in healthcare, energy or financial services. If even the incredibly competitive market for groceries, with its minuscule profit margins, shouldn’t be left to market forces, what industry should? Her economic agenda is price controls, higher energy costs, record regulatory costs on the private sector, and an array of government handouts. Will this result in higher output? For his part, Donald Trump rejects core tenets of the free-market model such as the idea that voluntary exchange can benefit both the buyer and the seller. He promises to impose massive across-the-board tariffs. He wants to keep interest rates artificially low and devalue the dollar. His running mate JD Vance argues that the key to higher wages is reducing imports and immigration. How do any of these policies raise output? Mr. Trump’s emerging second-term agenda is dominated by populist themes and looks markedly less pro-growth than the first. Pandering by politicians is nothing new, but it’s clearly on the rise as both parties abandon sound economic principles. Both parties’ embracing the notion of excluding tips from taxes is a good example. There is no good policy reason why waiters should get to exempt a portion of their income from taxes while truck drivers, and everyone else, pay taxes on all their income. Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are in an arms race to buy votes with taxpayer funds. Both are promising they won’t reform the entitlement programs that are the main driver of our massive, growing deficits.

I've said that too ... it wasn't just that he "misspoke" when he said "I carried a weapon in war" instead of "I carried a weapon of war." He clearly dropped lines on a few occasions that would make anyone believe that he was deployed to Iraq. The rest of it strikes me as people just trying to make something out of nothing.

Thank you. I called it. You seem far too sane for it. Nothing wrong with a little poking around the weird corners of the internet.

Seems like a newbie. Most QAnons disavow Pizzagate because that one ended in a laughable (and nearly tragic) way. The real true believers follow the Fight Club rule, pretending there is no such thing or trying (and failing) to ridicule me when I point out the obvious ties to it.

From what I've seen, it looks like he had an inkling that they'd deploy, and no doubt that would've put a damper on his plans to run for Congress. So he put in his retirement and it was granted. (Didn't have to be) So it appears technically accurate to say "he retired knowing that his unit would likely be deployed to Iraq in the coming months." It is also technically accurate to say "he retired in order to launch his congressional run." I would suggest that the latter was the primary reason, as you can't very well run a congressional campaign from abroad, be it Italy or Iraq. But whatever. He put in his papers, they approved them.

I think you may be on to something there.

Thanks for the tip. I did look her up. And boy what I found knocked my socks off.

So here's that first Naturalization Law of 1790: Only "free white persons" who had lived in the U.S. for at least two years and demonstrated good character were eligible for citizenship. Obviously most free white persons at that time in the colonies were of British/Northern Irish ancestry. But not all. So a lot of persons of German ancestry were eligible, as were a lot of Spanish-descended persons. These people were all considered "white" but there was certainly no ethnic commonality between English Anglicans, Spanish and other Catholics, and German Lutherans. So really all you've got is "white." And there you have it. White nationalism.

And so what would that have to do with who is considered "American" in your sense of the word? I'll cut to the chase: you seem to be saying that the only true "Americans" in an non-purely legalistic sense are the descendants of white people who would have been able to naturalize under the first Naturalization Law of 1790. In other words, the rest of us are all kind of American citizens by law, but we're not, you know, really Americans.

Would you care to remind me of what the "history of the early laws of this country with respect to immigration" were? Could it be that there was no law at all with respect to immigration?

I can see what you're getting at with respect to what we would call ethno-nationalist states. You mention Japan. OK, let's go with Japan. You suggest there is something ethnically/racially/culturally/linguistically "Japanese" that is understood by the Japanese themselves, such that even the descendants of a white man from England who immigrated to Japan in 1890 would never qualify. Let's assume that's true. On some meaning of the term "Japanese," I suspect that most ethnically Japanese people would agree, even if that English family was otherwise fully acculturated. Where I must disagree is with America. This is the very idea of American exceptionalism. We are not an ethno-nationalist country. Indeed, probably the first non ethno-nationalist country in the world. There were empires composed of various conquered peoples, but those were understood to be agglomerations of different peoples/culture/ethnicities. That is simply not America. There is no "American-ness" akin to "Japanese-ness," no specific racial/cultural/ethnic identity to being American. You may argue that there is a linguistic (English) identity, but that's the one that changes most readily from generation to generation. So the question is this: who, in your definition, has the necessary "American national identity?" Only descendants of those English speaking white men in the colonies at the time of the revolution? Descendants of English speaking black slaves at that time? Descendants of English speaking black slaves at the time of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments? Descendants of Scottish and German 19th century immigrants like Trump? Descendants of Italians or Poles or Irish who immigrated in the early 1900s? Native Americans who do not live on a reservation? White Americans descended from colonists who have married Native Americans and who live in the sovereign Navajo Nation with their spouses? You posit a category that is hard and fast, but it seems to be "I know a true American when I see one." Maybe you can tell me exactly what you're seeing?

Because they are U.S. citizens by law. You may be a white man, descended from German stock, and living under the authority of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, just as you may be an American Indian man, of Navajo ancestry, living under the authority of the Navajo nation. Both Americans. Period. In disputes between a state government and the federal government or between two states, we often refer to these as "sister sovereign" matters.

True. It interests me only because it shows how stuck we are in the USA, thanks to historical inertia, with an extraordinarily complex, clumsy, and expensive system of raising government revenue. We section off (in theory, not in practice) social security and Medicaid from general revenues/expenditures. We rely only on the devices that have existed for a century or more: customs duties, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, progressive income taxes. We don't consider a VAT because everyone is scared to go there, and probably for good reason - I have to assume we'd never have a stand-alone VAT, but that it would be tacked onto existing taxes. We'll never mess with the fiction of the SS trust fund. So the ideas we're stuck with in this artificially limited debate are all bad ones, like those discussed here.

No, she believed a whole lot more than that. She took the QAnon bait hook, line, and sinker.

I don't think anyone is proposing that, since that would render 401ks and Roths essentially useless. Particularly Roths.