Politics & Stuff

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Trump  has told around two million federal workers they can resign via email in exchange for a payout. 

The emails are headed 'Resign' or face a loyalty to Trump test.

Americans have taken a dim view of some of  Trump’s early moves, with his approval rating sitting at +7 – the lowest rating of any new president since the Second World War, with the exception of Mr Trump himself in 2017.

Reuters

Have a feeling there will be more assassination attempts....

[Fernando 6,502]

51 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Trump  has told around two million federal workers they can resign via email in exchange for a payout. 

The emails are headed 'Resign' or face a loyalty to Trump test.

Americans have taken a dim view of some of  Trump’s early moves, with his approval rating sitting at +7 – the lowest rating of any new president since the Second World War, with the exception of Mr Trump himself in 2017.

Reuters

Have a feeling there will be more assassination attempts....

Some obscure pastor when I was in Panama said he had a dream about Trump. 

This was before he became a president the first time. He said that Trump would serve two terms, and on his second term he would be killed in the middle. And shortly after that the Anti Christ will eventually come to power. 

Was not so sure about this when I first heard it, especially with him not serving a second term last term with Biden, but now he is.....

I will keep this on the backburner. 

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20 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Some obscure pastor when I was in Panama said he had a dream about Trump. 

This was before he became a president the first time. He said that Trump would serve two terms, and on his second term he would be killed in the middle. And shortly after that the Anti Christ will eventually come to power. 

Was not so sure about this when I first heard it, especially with him not serving a second term last term with Biden, but now he is.....

I will keep this on the backburner. 

 

''after that the Anti Christ will eventually come to power.'' so that is Vance then 😁 

 

 

Interesting..talking about assassination, Trump has released the papers on JFK and MLK. However it transpires there are plenty of documents on the assassinations that have been permanently redacted. 

Lee Harvey Oswald was killed before he could be interrogated, by Ruby - Jack Ruby had mob connections, and Israeli links (real name Rubinstein). (Kennedy had said he was going to stop weapons to Israel).

Also its odd that there has been hardly any info on Trumps would be assassin - motive, background etc. We will never know as hes dead but theres plenty of speculation that it was a set up. 

Conspiracy theories help CIA and Security Services all over the World as it masks what they are really up to

 

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Trump saying he will stop $50m worth of condoms to Gaza.

Factcheck -The US supplies worldwide $60.8m worth of contraceptives worldwide - none to the Middle East. 

Its worth remembering Steve Bannons words when he was Trumps Chief architect first time round...''Its not Democrats that are the enemy its the media. We have to flood it with shit, misinformation, disinformation, to disorientate people''

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Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

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To Pay for Trump Tax Cuts, House GOP Floats Plan to Slash Benefits for the Poor and Working Class

A menu of options being circulated by congressional Republicans also includes new tax cuts for corporations and the ultrawealthy.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tax-cuts-congress-republicans-plan-slash-benefits

One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a promise of sweeping tax cuts, for the rich, for working people and for companies alike.

Now congressional Republicans have the job of figuring out which of those cuts to propose into law. In order to pay for the cuts, they have started to eye some targets to raise money. Among them: cutting benefits for single mothers and poor people who rely on government health care.

The proposals are included in a menu of tax and spending cut options circulated this month by House Republicans. Whether or not Republicans enact any of the ideas remains to be seen. Some of the potential targets are popular tax breaks and cuts could be politically treacherous. And cutting taxes for the wealthy could risk damaging the populist image that Trump has cultivated.

For the ultrawealthy, the document floats eliminating the federal estate tax, at an estimated cost of $370 billion in revenue for the government over a decade. The tax, which charges a percentage of the value of a person’s fortune after they die, kicks in only for estates worth more than around $14 million.

Among those very few Americans who do get hit with the tax, nearly 30% of the tax is paid by the top 0.1% by income, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center think tank. (Many ultra-wealthy people already largely avoid the tax. Over the years, lawyers and accountants have devised ways to pass fortunes to heirs tax free, often by using complex trust structures, as ProPublica has previously reported.)

Another proposal aims to slash the top tax rate paid by corporations by almost a third.

Trump promised such a cut during the campaign. But Vice President JD Vance came out against it before Trump picked him as his running mate. “We’re sort of in line with the OECD right now,” he said in an interview last year, referring to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 38 wealthy developed nations. “I don’t think we need to be cutting the corporate tax rate further.”

In Trump’s first term, he brought the top corporate rate down from 35% to 21%, where it’s at now, taking the U.S. from a high rate compared to other OECD nations to about average. The proposed cut to 15% would make the United States’ rate among the lowest of such countries.

To pay for new tax cuts, the House Republicans’ proposal floats a series of potential overhauls of government programs. One major focus is possible cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for people with low incomes that is administered by the states. Medicaid expansion was a key tenet of the Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama. Many Republican governors initially chose not to take advantage of the new federal subsidies to expand the program. In the intervening years, several states reversed course, and the program has expanded the number of people enrolled in Medicaid by more than 20 million, as of last year.

The deep cuts to the program floated in the document include slashing reimbursements to the states. States would need to “raise new revenues or reduce Medicaid spending by eliminating coverage for some people, covering fewer services, and (or) cutting rates paid to physicians, hospitals, and nursing homes,” according to an analysis by KFF, a health policy organization.

Trump has been inconsistent in his position on Medicaid over the years. He sought to slash the program in his first term. But he has also made statements about protecting it over the years.

As recently as a 2023 campaign event, Trump promised that “we’re not going to play around with Medicare, Medicaid.” But it’s not clear whether the comment was a throwaway: While preserving Medicare, the program that covers health care for the elderly, has been a focus for Trump, maintaining Medicaid has not. The official GOP platform rolled out by Trump last year, for example, promised not to cut “one penny” from Medicare but was silent on Medicaid. In separate remarks during the campaign last year, Trump appeared to endorse cuts to "entitlements," after an interviewer asked about Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Other proposals would eliminate tax breaks for families with children.

Currently, parents can get a tax credit of up to $2,100 for child care expenses. The House Republican plan floats the elimination of that break. The cut is estimated to save $55 billion over a decade.

Vance, in particular, had promised economic policies that would lessen the load on parents. “It is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids,” he said last week. (He campaigned on a proposal to more than double the child tax credit.)

Another proposal in the list of options takes aim squarely at parents raising children on their own. The provision would eliminate the “head of household” filing status to collect almost $200 billion more in taxes over a decade from single parents and other adults caring for dependents on their own.

The “head of household” status was created in the 1950s under the rationale that single parents should have a lighter tax burden. Eliminating it would affect millions of Americans, largely women. (The after-tax pay of people with incomes between the 20th and 80th percentiles, those making between about $14,000 and $100,000, would fall by the highest percentage, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.)

Democrats have criticized the proposals as a gift to the wealthy at the expense of the working class. “Republicans are gearing up for a class war against everyday families in America,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to questions about the specifics in the House GOP document but said in an email that “This is an active negotiation and process one that the President and his team are working productively with congress. His visit to the House Retreat [Monday] was a sign that he wants to prioritize unity and a good deal for American that achieves his campaign promises.”

A spokesperson for the House Budget Committee declined to answer specific questions but said “this is a menu of policy options for authorizing committees to consider as members navigate the reconciliation process.”

Some of the proposals would fulfill Trump’s campaign promises geared toward the working class.

The document includes a plan to eliminate income taxes (but maintain payroll taxes) on tips, at a cost of $106 billion over a decade. The proposal is one Trump touted while campaigning in Las Vegas to win support from the city’s huge contingent of service workers. Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, later pledged to do the same. Economists have criticized the idea as one that unfairly benefits one group of working-class employees over others who get paid the same but work in other industries that don’t deal in tips.

Another Trump campaign promise included in the document is ending taxes on overtime pay, at a price of $750 billion over a decade. That proposal has also been criticized by tax experts as an inefficient way to provide relief for lower-paid workers who are eligible for overtime because they’re paid hourly and perform repetitive tasks. The provision, critics say, would invite gaming and further complicate tax reporting by creating new reporting requirements about the hours a taxpayer worked.

One of the biggest-ticket proposals to raise new revenue in the House Republicans’ document would hit a tax break cherished by upper-income Americans: eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. The document estimates $1 trillion in savings over 10 years by eliminating the break. Because of a complex interplay of different features of the tax code, an estimated 60% of the value of this deduction flows to Americans making over $200,000 per year, according to the Tax Foundation.

Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction would have an uneven geographic impact: analyses have found the tax break is more valuable to Americans in Democratic-dominated states such as California, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

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Elon Musk Tells Extremist AfD Party Rally That Germans Need to “Move On” from “Past Guilt”

“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” he said in a virtual visit.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/elon-musk-extremist-afd-party-rally-germany-past-guilt-holocaust-remigration/

https://archive.ph/2Er73

Because Elon Musk apparently did not create enough controversy for his liking this week, the tech billionaire also made a virtual appearance on Saturday at a rally for the extremist, right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party ahead of the country’s snap elections next month.

Musk told the crowd that he considers the party to be the “best hope” for Germany. The rally reportedly consisted of about 4,500 people, including the party leader, Alice Weidel, in the city of Halle.

“It’s okay to be proud to be German,” Musk said. “This is a very important principle. It’s okay, it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

He also said that the country needed to “move on” from “past guilt,” interpreted by many as referring to the Holocaust. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said. Confusingly, Musk—a South African tech billionaire—also lamented “too much control from, sort of, global elite” in German affairs, adding, “There should be more determination by individual countries.”

In addition to those hypocrisies, Musk also peddled at least one straight-up falsehood: He claimed Germany is “an ancient nation, [that] goes back thousands of years”—but the German Empire was founded in 1871.

He concluded by claiming “the future of civilization could hang on this election,” before leaving the cheering crowd with the three words Trump yelled after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight, fight, fight!”

Unsurprisingly, Musk’s latest comments led to widespread condemnation. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, said in a post on X: “Contrary to @elonmusk advice, the remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society. Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.” Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, said: “The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about “Great Germany” and “the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes” sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” referring to the 80th anniversary, which falls on Monday.

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told host Dana Bash, “What he said does bother me,” also referencing the upcoming anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation. “I’m worried that 80 years on, we’re rewriting history here,” Graham added. “I want every German child, every American child, to know what happened and that it’s true, not a lie, and we never do it again.”

 

As my colleague Alex Nguyen has written, AfD is controversial even among Europe’s nationalists:

In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitler’s paramilitary organization. 

The party is also, like Trump, a fan of mass deportations of immigrants, which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote about last year. (Weidel also used the word at the rally on Saturday.) As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us last month:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

 

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones. 

Musk’s virtual appearance at the Saturday rally is just his latest show of support for the party, which has also included publishing an op-ed in support of them in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers last month, as I wrote then. He also interviewed Weidel, the party leader, on X earlier this month.

The party is still polling in second place, at 20 percent. But the resistance to their rise is also strong: The Associated Press reported that tens of thousands of Germans protested the AfD in Berlin and other cities on Saturday.

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IN DEPTH

Labour asks if Keir Starmer is the problem as Reform closes in

The prime minister is facing claims that he is out of touch with voters but his party believes he can take on the populists by emphasising his working-class roots

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/labour-asks-if-keir-starmer-is-the-problem-as-reform-closes-in-m6vpjlp27

Until recently, the message emanating from No 10 has been that Reform poses the biggest threat to the Tories. That if Labour gets it right on delivery, the right will effectively eat itself.

That thinking is changing, with Sir Keir Starmer and his most senior ministers concerned about Nigel Farage and his nascent party. The question of who will be the real opposition come 2029 is being asked with increasing urgency in Downing Street.

“At the next election we will be the incumbent, and some version of the populist right will be the challenger,” is how Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, will put it in a speech next week. “In almost every developed country, a majority of voters think their country is heading in the wrong direction and want change.

“We cannot allow the battle to be between the disruptors of opposition and the disrupted of incumbency. We too have to be disruptors.”

 

With that in mind senior figures in No 10 have begun drawing up a detailed strategy for taking on Reform UK. It suggests that its voters — and those leaning towards it — are so disaffected that they have stopped listening to the main parties entirely.

No 10 acknowledges that there is no silver bullet. However, they point to the fact that the concerns of those backing Reform tally with the very problems Labour is attempting to address — the cost of living, the state of the NHS, immigration and a general state of decline.

The ultimate strategy is to “govern away” those concerns.

But Labour also wants to go for the jugular with Farage. It is planning a three-pronged approach — depicting Farage as a “cheerleader” for President Putin, highlighting his support for Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget and bringing up previous comments about the role of the private sector in the NHS. Labour has created several attack adverts based on this theme.

Labour MPs will also be told to use their “incumbency bias” to become champions for their constituents in an effort to stave off the threat posed by Reform. However, there are increasing concerns in Labour that the man in No 10 himself may be part of the problem, with voters looking to Reform in part because they dislike Starmer so much.

One senior Labour source said that there was evidence that the “two-tier Keir” attack by Farage and Elon Musk — a reference to claims that far-right protesters are treated more harshly than minority groups — has stuck with some voters. Others suggest he is seen as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary voters.

Starmer is already the least popular political leader in Britain, with YouGov polling giving him a net favourability rating of minus 41 earlier last month, lower than Farage. Among those who support Reform, 96 per cent have formed an unfavourable view of Starmer, and 93 per cent of those who intend to vote Tory have an unfavourable opinion. A fifth of Labour voters have formed an unfavourable view of him.

This is rejected by other senior figures in Labour, who believe the prime minister can take on the populists by emphasising his working-class roots. They say that far from being a liability he will lead the attack.

What is undeniable is that Reform is drawing strength from disaffection with the main parties, which polling shows is a bigger draw for voters than immigration. YouGov found that 19 per cent of those thinking of voting Reform put “it’s not Labour or the Conservatives” or “another party needs a go” as their main reason. Farage is cited by only 4 per cent of possible Reform voters.

Farage welcomes Labour’s attacks: “We take the view that they are all the same. They’ve all got a record of failure on mass migration, on illegal migration, on net zero. If they think they can govern away their problems they are wrong.” He says he wants the NHS to remain free at point of use but is “open-minded” about how it should be funded. “They can take selective quotes but it’s not going to help them,” he said.

The turbulence of Starmer’s first six months in government did not help, with confusion about core messaging and purpose of the new administration.

This week represented an attempt to change that, with Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, leading the charge. She gave a speech which, in contrast to the doom and gloom that dominated Labour’s first six months in power, was almost relentlessly positive.

Labour, she said, will pursue growth at all costs. She made a flurry of announcements, including on expanding Heathrow, relaxing planning rules and effectively a declaration of war on newts and bats. She used an interview with The Times to suggest that there could be as many as six interest rate cuts by the middle of next year. The Bank of England is widely expected to cut interest rates next week to stimulate the economy.

But just as Reeves makes her damascene conversion to full-blooded boosterism, what is to come looks grim. Economic growth remains anaemic and on March 26 she is expected to have to announce a deep round of spending cuts in response to downgrades in official forecasts. Reeves notably refuses to say whether people will be better off by the end of the year, in part because she cannot — it is too dependent on external factors. The hangover from the budget, with its huge package of tax rises, shows no sign of fading.

The decision by AstraZeneca to pull a proposed £450 million investment in Merseyside — just days after Reeves hailed it as one of Britain’s great companies — has not helped.

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, told a conference in London last weekend that Labour needed to do ­better. “Politics is the art of competitive storytelling because it’s stories that connect with people emotionally, not statistics and not strategies,” he said. “So we have to tell a story about Britain, about what it can become, and show people their place in it, and their ­community’s place and their family’s place in it. Now we need to get that story right.

“We need to get it better than it has been over the last six months. But you know, we’ve all been very, very distracted for the right reasons, moving into departments, setting these strategies in place, starting to make that change happen. We need to remember we have to communicate it well.”

People in Labour, he said, had a habit of talking about “grand strategies” but did not focus enough on what it meant for people. For a government that has announced six milestones, five missions, three foundations and six first steps the confusion is perhaps unsurprising. “We won’t do it if we talk to people about what we’re achieving in ways that go over their head,” Reed said.

“Language matters… It’s not just doing the right things, it’s talking about it in language people understand. For me, that’s the language you’d use across a coffee shop table or the kitchen table or the pub with your mates. It’s not some of the language that all of us fall into when we’re giving political speeches.”

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