I agree there has been a F load of change in personnel. The real question is does this turnover occur in in business life?

If so then one could consider Trump as some kind of dickhead to work for .

If not then what is the reason for the difference?


I think there is much more going on behind the scenes. Why would one have a military General as your chief of staff?

With Obama's top level FBI as example --
Comey -- fired
McCabe- Fired
James Baker, general counsel -- Fired
James Rybicki Chief of staff -- Fired
Perter Strozk -- Fired
Lisa Page -- ???

If Hillary was elected not of their wrong doings would have come to light. All gunning to get Trump. Still that is just the FBI.


No wonder Trump is cleaning house so much. Some bad guys found? Some paranoia?
There isn't a day goes by without something big occurring.

There is still 3 big reports to come out.
Mullers findings.
The 2nd OIG report and Huber's findings

AG Jeff Sessions appointed John Huber will be the ‘top federal prosecutor’ who will be investigating FISA abuses . Huber's staff is over 400.


Also Guantanamo Bay, Cuba-- Expanding like mad...

$14 million to expand the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This is a "strategically critical time-sensitive expansion project". DOD justification states the "current trial support facilities are incapable of handling the large number of personnel .
https://insidedefense.com/insider/pentagon-expand-gitmo-after-trump-orders-it-remain-open

The place can hold some 2300 prisoners, currently Gitmo is currently holding 41 prisoners.. Also the 137th, 428th, and 514th was deployed this month to Gitmo for a year . Rotating people out - possible, but some 500 troops for 41 prisoners?

What is so time sensitive for to handle trial support facilities are incapable of handling the large number of personnel .-- Where are these people coming from? What is coming down the pike?

Like I said above:
I think there is much more going on behind the scenes. Why would one have a military General as your chief of staff?

from link:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/year-one-list-81-major-trump-achievements-11-obama-legacy-items-repealed/article/2644159

Below are the 12 categories and 81 wins cited by the White House.

Jobs and the economy

Passage of the tax reform bill providing $5.5 billion in cuts and repealing the Obamacare mandate.
Increase of the GDP above 3 percent.
Creation of 1.7 million new jobs, cutting unemployment to 4.1 percent.
Saw the Dow Jones reach record highs.
A rebound in economic confidence to a 17-year high.
A new executive order to boost apprenticeships.
A move to boost computer sciences in Education Department programs.
Prioritizing women-owned businesses for some $500 million in SBA loans.
Killing job-stifling regulations

Signed an Executive Order demanding that two regulations be killed for every new one creates. He beat that big and cut 16 rules and regulations for every one created, saving $8.1 billion.
Signed 15 congressional regulatory cuts.
Withdrew from the Obama-era Paris Climate Agreement, ending the threat of environmental regulations.
Signed an Executive Order cutting the time for infrastructure permit approvals.
Eliminated an Obama rule on streams that Trump felt unfairly targeted the coal industry.
Fair trade

Made good on his campaign promise to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Opened up the North American Free Trade Agreement for talks to better the deal for the U.S.
Worked to bring companies back to the U.S., and companies like Toyota, Mazda, Broadcom Limited, and Foxconn announced plans to open U.S. plants.
Worked to promote the sale of U.S products abroad.
Made enforcement of U.S. trade laws, especially those that involve national security, a priority.
Ended Obama’s deal with Cuba.
Boosting U.S. energy dominance

The Department of Interior, which has led the way in cutting regulations, opened plans to lease 77 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling.
Trump traveled the world to promote the sale and use of U.S. energy.
Expanded energy infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline snubbed by Obama.
Ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
EPA is reconsidering Obama rules on methane emissions.
Protecting the U.S. homeland

Laid out new principles for reforming immigration and announced plan to end "chain migration," which lets one legal immigrant to bring in dozens of family members.
Made progress to build the border wall with Mexico.
Ended the Obama-era “catch and release” of illegal immigrants.
Boosted the arrests of illegals inside the U.S.
Doubled the number of counties participating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement charged with deporting illegals.
Removed 36 percent more criminal gang members than in fiscal 2016.
Started the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program.
Ditto for other amnesty programs like Deferred Action for Parents of Americans.
Cracking down on some 300 sanctuary cities that defy ICE but still get federal dollars.
Added some 100 new immigration judges.
Protecting communities

Justice announced grants of $98 million to fund 802 new cops.
Justice worked with Central American nations to arrest and charge 4,000 MS-13 members.
Homeland rounded up nearly 800 MS-13 members, an 83 percent one-year increase.
Signed three executive orders aimed at cracking down on international criminal organizations.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions created new National Public Safety Partnership, a cooperative initiative with cities to reduce violent crimes.
Accountability

Trump has nominated 73 federal judges and won his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Ordered ethical standards including a lobbying ban.
Called for a comprehensive plan to reorganize the executive branch.
Ordered an overhaul to modernize the digital government.
Called for a full audit of the Pentagon and its spending.
Combatting opioids

First, the president declared a Nationwide Public Health Emergency on opioids.
His Council of Economic Advisors played a role in determining that overdoses are underreported by as much as 24 percent.
The Department of Health and Human Services laid out a new five-point strategy to fight the crisis.
Justice announced it was scheduling fentanyl substances as a drug class under the Controlled Substances Act.
Justice started a fraud crackdown, arresting more than 400.
The administration added $500 million to fight the crisis.
On National Drug Take Back Day, the Drug Enforcement Agency collected 456 tons.

Helping veterans

Signed the Veterans Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act to allow senior officials in the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire failing employees and establish safeguards to protect whistleblowers.
Signed the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act.
Signed the Harry W. Colmery Veterans Educational Assistance Act, to provide support.
Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017 to authorize $2.1 billion in additional funds for the Veterans Choice Program.
Created a VA hotline.
Had the VA launch an online “Access and Quality Tool,” providing veterans with a way to access wait time and quality of care data.
With VA Secretary Dr. David Shulkin, announced three initiatives to expand access to healthcare for veterans using telehealth technology.
Promoting peace through strength

Directed the rebuilding of the military and ordered a new national strategy and nuclear posture review.
Worked to increase defense spending.
Empowered military leaders to “seize the initiative and win,” reducing the need for a White House sign off on every mission.
Directed the revival of the National Space Council to develop space war strategies.
Elevated U.S. Cyber Command into a major warfighting command.
Withdrew from the U.N. Global Compact on Migration, which Trump saw as a threat to borders.
Imposed a travel ban on nations that lack border and anti-terrorism security.
Saw ISIS lose virtually all of its territory.
Pushed for strong action against global outlaw North Korea and its development of nuclear weapons.
Announced a new Afghanistan strategy that strengthens support for U.S. forces at war with terrorism.
NATO increased support for the war in Afghanistan.
Approved a new Iran strategy plan focused on neutralizing the country’s influence in the region.
Ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airbase used in a chemical weapons attack.
Prevented subsequent chemical attacks by announcing a plan to detect them better and warned of future strikes if they were used.
Ordered new sanctions on the dictatorship in Venezuela.
Restoring confidence in and respect for America

Trump won the release of Americans held abroad, often using his personal relationships with world leaders.
Made good on a campaign promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Conducted a historic 12-day trip through Asia, winning new cooperative deals. On the trip, he attended three regional summits to promote American interests.
He traveled to the Middle East and Europe to build new relationships with leaders.
Traveled to Poland and on to Germany for the G-20 meeting where he pushed again for funding of women entrepreneurs.


see link above for more complete

The USSR is gone. No one is trying to guard western industry against communist overthrow anymore. That time is long gone.




Imagine person A pushing person B, and person B pushes back, and the news runs around screaming that B pushed A. That's basically our simplistic news coverage about Ukraine.

Feel free to read about the 2014 coup : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_revolution
I take no issue with Ukrainians giving their old government a swift kick out the door (and for understandable reason - such as corruption). However, with that comes the usual scapegoating of the undesirables. Would it have been better that Russia let groups like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Sector ravage ethnic Russians just across their border?

Crimea has been Russia from 1779 till ~1990, when it happened to end up under Ukrainian control after the USSR broke up. People living there are also Russian citizens, born either while it was still Russia, or to Russian parents.
Take a look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea
Then ask yourself, considering the right wing neo nazi anti-ethnic-Russian shitstorm in Ukraine, where would the Crimeans rather be?

Russia isn't a saint. It's acting in self interest. It's also not a villain. Things happen for reasons.

The treaty you refer to is : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
The link explains how it can be read to fault either the U.S. (for coup involvement) or Russia (for subsequent conflict involvement).

Just to put things in perspective :
Imagine Russia getting involved in a coup in Mexico or Canada. Or imagine Russia placing missile launchers in Cuba. Do you think that we would be as cordial to Russia as Russia has been to us?
So Russia tries to help a candidate who prefers friendly relations, that's hardly the sign of a committed adversary.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I shouldn't think and analyze the situation from multiple perspectives with consideration for circumstance and motivation, and instead I should just accept what the news has on 24/7 repeat. /s





Collusion is not a crime because /literally/ it is not a crime. You will not find the word "collusion" mentioned as an offense in any criminal code. It's only on TV because people started using that phrase to assert that the campaign and Russia were acting independently (which is irrelevant, they don't need to coordinate to break the law).


-scheherazde

@JustSaying and @draebor --

I was aware of the ban on Nazi symbols / flags / etc. in Germany, and (wrongly) assumed that meant that the country was just kind of trying to "gloss over" that part of history; not talk about it in schools, etc. A sifter (can't remember who offhand) set me straight a few years ago.

However, this does remind me of a thought that I had then: what about piracy?

Any games featuring Nazis have to be heavily edited to get a legal German release. But are there any extra considerations for piracy, or even people that buy the original versions of such games outside of the country and them bring them in?

The internet is really ramping up the speed of globalization, and it seems like it would be essentially impossible to enforce the ban on Nazi imagery in the digital realm. The best a government can hope to control such things is to try to keep them out of the mainstream. But the world is full of examples of failures to control such things -- lots of cracks in the Great Firewall of China, El Paquete in Cuba, etc.

So I'm curious if Germany even makes any attempt to add any additional measure to try to prevent piracy of media containing those things, and/or circumventing region-blocked access to such things in legitimate distributors like Steam.

Careful, if @bobknight33 sees you saying that he'll respond with some pretty harsh criticism. I'll pull quotes from his profile to simulate what he would say.

"Cuba citizens live as long and pay less? That Communism is better? That Cubans live shit life's but have live as long? Sign me up for that stuff... Then I 'll build a boat out of trash bans and float 90miles to tot the USA for a worse life. Sign me up for that stuff.

Every group that a has money at stake are trying to influence the people / governments one way or another in their favor.

All those hard line [prices] are only starting negotiating positions.

Trump is punking the shit out of liberals. Too funny. No real evidence or facts. just "sources" for liberal media false hype to continue its 24/7 anti Trump narrative."

Not the *only* thing.

We also don't invade if you don't have anything we want, or if you can't be exploited as a pawn in a proxy war.

N. Korea doesn't have anything we want, so they would generally be safe on that account. On the other hand, the Korean War (particularly support from China, Russia, and the US) was very much tied into early and continuing Capitalism vs Communism proxy wars wherein those major players downplayed direct confrontation (why the Cold War was cold) but were quite happy to ramp things up indirectly.

Things frequently don't go real well for countries tied up in that history. We arm Afghanistan to indirectly prod the USSR, decades later that comes back to bite us and we hit them back with a rather disproportionate degree of destruction. The USSR sets Cuba up as a potential proxy Communist threat to the US, which pushes us pretty close to nuclear war. Fortunately we avoided that, but the fallout for Cuba in trade sanctions etc. persists to this day. And on and on.

So I concur, N. Korea has plenty of reasons to see the US as the bad guys. Personally, I think Obama's strategy of patience was probably the best. Either they are full of hot air and won't ever actually do anything, or they'll eventually do something so provocative that China will have no choice but to withdraw that lifeline. In the meantime, N. Korean people are the ones suffering the most. Not much to be done about that, because the US has an even worse track record when it comes to interfering "to save the people of {wherever} from their terrible leaders"...

My point, Cuba's health care system provides better results for 1/10 the cost, even though their patients are almost all living well below what we call the poverty level and with the constant stress of living under communism.

That is objective fact, not Michael Moore make believe.

The point that a nation full of poverty with hugely less spending...has a better life expectancy than you do?

Who cares about what they're doing with their lives, shithole or no. They still get to live longer than you do, who gives a shit how.

How can you not look at ANY American system (because the same results were there pre-obamacare, rest assured.) and not realize how flawed that is?

Lets even just say.. "You spend more, it should be better", capitalism at its finest... but it's not. That's the point. You're spending ten times as much on shit, but your result is the same if not worse. That means either you need to spend fucking less on that kinda shit (because obviously, if cuba can find the exact same drugs for less, I'm sure the place that makes them can find a way.) Or you need to start living until 102 to justify the price tag.

What exactly is your point?

You point about an article from 2014 ( obama care era) that the current system is shit?


That Cuba citizens live as long and pay less? That Communism is better? That Cubans live shit life's but have live as long? Sign me up for that stuff... Then I 'll build a boat out of trash bans and float 90miles to tot the USA for a worse life. Sign me up for that stuff.


What is you point because are not putting anything out but your straw man argument.

Look it up.

America was 50th out of 55 countries in 2014, according to a Bloomberg index that assesses life expectancy, health-care spending per capita and relative spending as a share of gross domestic product. Expenditures averaged $9,403 per person, about 17.1 percent of GDP, that year — the most recent for which data are available — and life expectancy was 78.9. Only Jordan, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Brazil and Russia ranked lower.

Cuba and the Czech Republic — with life expectancy closest to the U.S. at 79.4 and 78.3 years — paid much less on health care: $817 and $1,379 per capita. Switzerland and Norway, the only countries with higher spending than the U.S. — $9,674 and $9,522 — had longer life expectancy, averaging 82.3 years.

Less than 1/10 the cost for better results sure sounds better to me.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/u-s-health-care-system-ranks-as-one-of-the-least-efficient

1 week of round 1 and all the bitching. This is just the first draft.. I'm sure things will change.


@newtboy Cuba is better? You must really buy into Michael Moore leftest ideas.

Yep, better protect the wealthy, they've had it so bad lately, and the poor are just handed everything for doing nothing.
Also, better end family planning services, because we want more, more dangerous abortions to happen, but must be certain we don't pay a penny of public funds for them.
So far, their plan seems certain to raise costs for everyone while making about 10000000 people uninsured and returning to insane hospital costs to cover the uninsured who can't pay and 6+ hour emergency room wait times.
Doesn't anyone notice that tiny Cuba, with no money, has some of the best medical care in the world for free? If they can do it, why does the right think America is incapable? We aren't as smart as Cubans? We shouldn't be as healthy as Cubans? What?

re: Internet/totalitarianism/control of information, every single government tries to control information, the media, public opinion, and uses the internet as a tool for that goal (just like tv, radio, print, etc). The internet/access to information in and of itself does not guarantee greater accuracy/truth of that information, and unless the population is educated, respectful, and capable of critical thinking it can easily become little bubbles of echo chambers and a playground for griefers. What good did widespread internet availability do for the last US election? has the internet made americans more free, or more easily monitored and controlled? what good is it for cuba for cubans to have access to world of warcraft, so they can neglect their children who starve to death while they grind up to the next level? has the internet prevented mainstream media from fabricating news / pushing their agendas, or has it given more people a platform for fabricating news, anonymously? yeah, im not saying the internet is all bad, of course there are other very useful applications for it, but its not a magic "improve society" wand.

final thing i want to say, I have several friends who studied in cuba as exchange students in the late 90s, early 00s and yes, they had to make treks to specific places for access but they were able to send emails and such, so this piece is not factually accurate. If the cuban govt was so dead set on stopping people from communicating, im pretty sure they would identify network cables hanging in the middle of the street and easily follow them back to your apartment, not to mention detect wifi networks setup all over their tiny island.

As my fellow sifters would most likely say
that the originator of this TeleSUR Television network s multi-state funded, pan–Latin American television network sponsored by the Commie governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Bolivia that is headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela. and that this is no more than a hack job on our political process backed door-ed by Putin himself.

Podestia emails are private and reading them is illegal and and the validity can not be determined and hence this is just more BS so Putin can get Trump installed as POTUS. After all they are best friends.

Needs to be tagged a lies

Next we need Cuba: how to fail at international relations for a century or so.