Frankly I’m a barely functioning mess, dragging down My Beloved whose escape is golf.
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Trump is a TV reality guy - his only thing during the campaign was to say what ever he needed to say to get the most attention and the biggest crowds.
He didn’t mean any of it. None. Nada.
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I think the implication is that like Forest Gump keeps popping up in all sorts of historical events over the course of the movie, Steve Mnuchin keeps popping up in all sorts of events related to the Financial Crisis.
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It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that Trump has a few people he wants to reward because they polished his ego in just the right way, but, mostly Pence is picking these people and presenting them to Trump with instructions to flatter him and complement him on his general tremendousness. Or have we already forgotten the part where, when he interviewed him, Trump made clear that he planned to turn most of that tedious governing stuff over to Pence and devote all of his tremendous, tremendous brain and tremendous talent to Making America Great Again.
This guy is one of the ones Trump is personally rewarding with a proconsulship in a particularly fat province to loot, but mostly, Pence is picking a Pence cabinet to initiate the full-on Koch Plundering Plutocrat agenda. The religious right’s agenda items will, I suspect, be accomplished by DeVos and the undersecretaries.
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The fact that 2 people on this thread have already asked about the Forrest Gump reference (and got 2 different answers) shows that this is not actually a very effective name for this guy. Dems need to dumb it way down and call him something like Stevie Hedgefund or the Foreclosure King. Dems are really terrible at this stuff.
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Absolutely true.
And the flip side of that is true as well. Meaning that, when the country starts burning (and it will), the media will turn to the Dems and say “Why didn’t they fight this if they knew this was going to happen? Aren’t they to blame as well as the Repubs for what’s happened”?
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From CNN business:
Steven Mnuchin says:
" “I think the United States is the greatest country in the world to invest in,” he said. He also promised corporate tax cuts to "bring huge amounts of jobs back to the United States."
For individuals, he said any reductions in upper-income taxes would be
"offset by less deductions that pay for it." He also said that a "big
middle income tax cut" would be another part of the reform plan, adding
that “taxes are way too complicated” and that people spend “way too much
time worrying about ways to get them lower.” "
…
How does this square with trump saying he’d spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure?
This gives me a headache…I’m gonna go do some gardening now…
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I wish all his shit would only hit his voters, which I’m sure it will, but man why do the rest of us have to suffer?
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The only thing it squares with is Bannon’s desire to bring about Schumpeter’s gale.
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Hands down, one of my favorite quotes from “Forrest Gump”, although there were many!
“Lieutenant Dan got me invested in some kind of fruit company. So then I got a call from him, saying we don’t have to worry about money no more. And I said, that’s good! One less thing.” -Forrest
Still an all-time favorite movie but I do agree with others that Mnuchin is inherently evil while Forrest was all good - and lucky!
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Mnuchin’s history of profiting off the victims of predatory lending
That suit he’s wearing…a human skin and silk blend.
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Didn’t you hear? The big infrastructure spend is going to be privatized.
Offset by less deductions - translation - there goes the mortgage interest deduction - but your tax rate will be lower!
Big middle income tax cut - translation - we are going to start imposing a flat rate (maybe on consumption).
Reductions in upper income taxes - translation - don’t worry all my richie rich friends, we got you
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“This isn’t draining the swamp – it’s stocking it with alligators,” Brown said.
Great line. After all, Trump is a guy whose business model was bankrupting businesses to gain great personal wealth at the expense of his contractors and hourly workers. Why wouldn’t he want a predatory lender to run the new Administration’s economic policy with power to redistribute wealth from the working “stiffs” to the idle rich on such a grand scale?
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The vulpine snout of Chunk Toad couldn’t possibly wedge itself further up The Golden Calf’s rear, could it?
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I hear you, littlegirlblue. I’ve taken to yelling at my kid over the littlest thing because I’m on edge all of the time. Now I live with a 16-year-old who keeps his headphones on all the time, even when I suspect he isn’t actually listening to anything.
Makes me feel rotten and guilty on top of being miserable most of the time…
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I’m doing the old man version with Christmas music…found a very 40s scat version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by Bing and Judy Garland that’s very period but very nice.
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I want to repeat this here, and I intend to say it over and over again, to the point of being annoying because this is critically important.
Trump has a really bad case of Narcissistic Personality Syndrome. The things that come out of the mouth of a person with NPS are utterly meaningless because they will say anything, anytime to anyone. It’s not even lying in the conventional understanding of the word because “truth” is just one of the many boundary-setting concepts that have no application to their lives. Talking is just one more thing you do to get you the things you feel entitled to at any given second. Many times, they will just say whatever they think the person they’re talking to wants to hear because that gives them positive feedback. Other times, they’ll say things specifically to hurt people because that serves different emotional needs and urges. At still other times, they’ll just say whatever they have to say to get money, sex, approval, attention, whatever it is they want at a given time. Because other people aren’t real to them. Other people are just two-dimensional cardboard cutouts who exist to give them the things they want or need.
The only, absolutely only, thing that matters is what they do. Not what they say they will do, or want to do, or think. Nothing that they say has any meaning because to them, talking, or even entering into contracts, is not an intrinsically consequential act beyond whatever is it they want at a given moment.
Listening to what they say, trying to make sense of it, thinking they can be held to it only makes you their tool, only draws you in to their madness. You just have to completely ignore it and pay attention to what they do and nothing else.
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That’s my thought - they are all atrocious and many completely devoid of any talent. The only positive could be that it reaches a critical mass of crappiness and self-immolates in a series of predictable scandals and fuck-ups.
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Another Goldman Sachs guy is up for a role: the fat man with thin skin is considering “Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn for a senior administration job, possibly as director of the Office of Management and Budget”–Political Wire…
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I’m back to vintage Dixie Chicks and the album they sing about Earl, the bad guy they gleefully kill. It’s hard not to remember how their careers were sunk because of a comment about another illegal president.
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