The New Coffee Room

It's fine to criticize Trump, if it's warranted. Around here, demonize is a more common modality.

Kindly spare us the melodrama of your personal thoughts regarding Trump’s victimhood. It has a particularly disingenuous odour surrounding it..

@Doctor-Phibes said in Trumpenomics:

@Jolly said in Trumpenomics:

When was the first time Trump proposed tariffs?

Forty years ago. Be he right, be he wrong, this is not new.

Having a bad idea for forty years doesn't make it any better. It just indicates an inability to listen and learn.

Forty years ago was around the time the Reagan Administration was floating the idea of a free trade agreement with Canada. By the end of 1987 negotiators reached an agreement and the Canada USA Free Trade Agreement was signed by Reagan and Mulroney the following year.

Forty years ago was when an immature Trump must have identified as a protectionist Democrat opposed to free trade. I think he has flipped party affiliations about five or six times in the past forty years.

The forty year excuse just doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. It is yet another lame attempt to throw in a distractor from the actual issue at hand. Namely, a bastard con masquerading as the mango Moses is determined to burn down the global economy of the last eighty years.

@Horace said in Trumpenomics:

And there's just no point to any of it. Our savings are being tanked, in order to initiate a process which will end up with higher prices on everything.

For factory jobs, I guess. More factory jobs.

Trump will have to take on and break the back of organised labour to accomplish that agenda item.

But then he did say he wanted to turn the clock back to 1913. He might just succeed and lead us all into a reprise of 1914.

I thought the markets closed before any announcements were to be made..

The carrot is of the Trump Administration's own making and imagination. It holds little, if any, credibility outside of a few minds in Washington and Budapest. The Kremlin however immensely enjoys the black humour of the tragicomedy theatre it offers.

@LuFins-Dad

I suspect you are right. My spouse works almost exclusively with head and neck cancer patients. After the surgeons carve them up they are sent for radiation treatments and ongoing rehab at her hospital. Death from aspiration pneumonia is always a possibility long after treatments and subsequent rehab are completed. That very well might have been Klimer’s fate.

@Jolly

Funny observation from a person that looks like an orangutan.

You tell ‘em, Flintstone.

I doubt very much the Kremlin will be willing to surrender any of its stated terms.

@Mik said in Taking off for Lisbon:

@taiwan_girl said in Taking off for Lisbon:

@jon-nyc hi neighbor.

Currently in Gibraltar so in the neighborhood. 555

Trying to negotiate a deal for the U.S. to buy (or take over) Gibraltar.

Hey, they both start with a G.

Glad to hear from you. Was afraid you were in Bangkok.

That makes two of us.

@Doctor-Phibes

So we’re being led to believe.

@jon-nyc

“There’s no place [in the U.S. plans] for our main demand today, which is resolving problems related to the root causes of this conflict,” he said.

Russian officials have repeatedly invoked the term “root causes,” which Putin said last June include Ukraine withdrawing from the partially Ukrainian regions and abandoning its NATO bid.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/01/russia-cannot-accept-us-ceasefire-proposal-in-ukraine-deputy-fm-says-a88564

Chronic? More like pathological.

Thanks Kluurs. Argerich remains my top favourite living pianist. I have yet to be disappointed by any of her solo recordings out there. Interesting what the article has to say about her relationship to Schumann’s music. I would have never thought that.

@Horace said in Biden lied. Imagine that ...:

It's a testament to the power of rhetoric that the threat of nuclear war - in a discussion about a proxy war between the world's two greatest nuclear powers - was never on the table in the mainstream discussion. It's all about what's morally just. When practical risks were considered, they began and ended with Russia continuing through all of Europe if they were "handed Ukraine".

US has been doing for Ukraine exactly what the Soviets did for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during the war in Vietnam. The extent of direct Soviet involvement too was treated as a big secret - although poorly kept and known to anyone in the West who was willing to dig around military and foreign policy academic periodicals, right up until the USSR was dissolved.

The NYT article really exposes nothing. The Trump camp loves it because it shoe horns nicely into the narrative of its own parallel reality.

The coordinated effort that led to the sinking of the Moskva is no revelation. I even sat in in an online Atlantic Council panel discussion that was chaired by Gen (ret.) Philip Breedlove, shortly after the ship was sunk in which the coordinated effort was discussed in detail. The NYT team and Taibbi, of all people, should know that very well. If they did not know - and I find that hard to believe - they are guilty of sloppy thinking derived from poor journalistic integrity. But we knew that along.

@Jolly

Geez, what a bunch of hair-trigger reactionaries..

There isn’t a bunch. Only two reactionaries on this forum and of those two, you are the grand wizard.

@Copper said in Canadian Tariff situation gets its own thread:

nice

Hey Copperhead, you 5 cent piece of passive aggressive troll excrement, I get the impression you actually like taking elbows to the head.

@Copper said in Trumpenomics:

disappointing

Copperhead.

Not surprised that Rand Paul put his name to it. I hope others will step up and show similar moral fibre.

Wait until it dawns on the old Fat One that he’s been Putin’s Muggins since before they even met in Helsinki back in 2018.