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The Divide

BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL! This is the new theme, for two years until the Wall is finished (under construction now), of the Republican Party. Use it and pray!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2019

Trumps parrots his theme as @realDonaldTrump. But he also claims that it is the theme of the Republican party. Due to the difficult relation between Trump and truth, you better check with @GOP how true that is.

 

@MarianKamensky1 explains the real objective of Donald Trump's toxic wall project: Divide the USA and rule.

Source: https://t.co/F217UgvZ6J

More: https://t.co/fFDEkQifmM pic.twitter.com/gZfniJL1Zp

— Goetz Kluge (@Bonnetmaker) January 24, 2019

In 2014, Trumps spin doctors chose “wall” as a mnemonic device designed to help Trump to polarize and divide US voters. Poisoning the discourse helps Trump and his party to avoid to give reason for their claims. Today Trump and the GOP play the media quite successfully with this toxic tool.

A strange interview shows how GOP communicators try to control the usage of language. The GOP communication seemingly doesn’t feel to comfortable with the term “wall” anymore. While Trump, the Republican President, is using “Wall” or “WALL” ad nauseam, Kellyanne Conway in an Orwellian attempt of speech control doesn’t want journalists to use that term.

An exchange between my colleague @abbydphillip and WH counselor Kellyanne Conway on whether to it’s okay to call the president’s wall a wall. It’s worth reading all the way through. pic.twitter.com/NORWvA7K6F

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 23, 2019


Trump’s Leverage:
Insensitivity to Human Suffering

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/trumps-leverage-government-shutdown-border-wall-pelosi-meeting-nihilism.html

2019-01-03
Trump’s Leverage in the Shutdown Fight: His Own Nihilism
By Eric Levitz

[…] Trump has repeatedly indicated that he sees his own insensitivity to human suffering as a vital source of leverage over Democrats. He explicitly framed his administration’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act as a strategy for forcing Democrats to cooperate with the law’s repeal and replacement. He has repeatedly suggested that he doesn’t want to make a deal on Dreamers while a court order protecting them from the threat of deportation remains in effect — because he believes he’ll be able to secure larger concessions once that population is thrown into peril. […]

In a nutshell: The man is evil. And seemingly the present US society is providing him with an environment in which being evil helps him.

How the Tories Failed

Sorry Edwina, it's the Tories that lost. You lost your majority. You lost your reputation as the party of business and fiscal prudence. You lost control of the country. As this plays out, you will lose control of the Union. You will lose any chance of ever being in power again.

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

Why? Because your flawed economic ideology led to the worst income disparity in Europe. You've persuaded a large number of UK employers that their future is better secured by moving to a different country. pic.twitter.com/rbvrSn9GoZ

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

You presided over a failure to invest in the education of our people and in automation, leaving the UK unable to maintain its position in the world. pic.twitter.com/HjVvjlbWeA

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

You have mortgaged our future to pay for our present lifestyle, knowing that this was unsustainable. You have ignored the fact that the UK is now a services economy inextricably linked to the EU, where 80% of employment is in services. pic.twitter.com/oiEROlagap

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

You did this to enrich the few, which impoverishes the rest of our people. Your leaders are mendacious, self-serving and have no understanding of the issues that the majority of the UK faces. You truly deserve the epithet "The Nasty Party". pic.twitter.com/aR4jqLkEiT

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

Now, to avoid facing the truth of your own inadequacies, you have decided to blame our friends in Europe for your failings. Your party leaders have deliberately lied to the UK and divided the country with a Brexit that will only bring more poverty, job losses and failure.

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

You presided over a referendum whose result was bought with foreign influence and money, and have failed to acknowledge this or hold the perpetrators to account for it.

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

You deliberately failed to consult Europeans that have called the UK home for decades and British living abroad who may now be forced to give up their lives in the EU. You pandered to your increasingly geriatric membership and enabled the UK's ignorant bigots.

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

I voted Tory from 1979 until Cameron. I will never vote Tory again. You have betrayed the faith that millions of businesspeople had in the Tories and lost your reason to exist.

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

You are ignoring the growing number that now understand that Brexit is an irreversible mistake. Once the truth about Brexit is revealed to the credulous that still believe it is good for the UK, the Tory party will never hold power again.

— QuantumChoices #FBPE #ABTV (@tfoale) January 22, 2019

Undocumented Immigrants Reduce Crime in the US

Perhaps you should open the borders for both legal and illegal immigrants? The have lower crime rate than native born americans. So you should focus on fighting crime inside us borders. Use $5.7B on that and you will see results.
The wall will not help! pic.twitter.com/O7jDVyWQiZ

— Dag Levkowetz (@zhell666) January 22, 2019

Washington Post:

Pre-Brexite Damage

One out of several valuable contributions by Edwin Hayward to writing the Brexit history:

Here are 180 factual, fully-sourced examples of the impact Brexit is already having on the UK. Jobs going, investment drying up, companies moving assets to the EU, or redomiciling. All happening as Government burns through £billions chasing a no deal Brexit it doesn't have to.

— Edwin Hayward (@uk_domain_names) January 22, 2019

 full thread

Borderline Miraculous

This Brexit business is a marvel. Genuinely. It’s borderline miraculous. Bear with me. 1/

— Richard Cable (@bozmack) January 16, 2019


 

Complete thread of Richard Cable’s tweet:

This Brexit business is a marvel. Genuinely. It’s borderline miraculous. Bear with me. 1/

As a culture, we focus on those finely balanced moments when, against all odds, the stars align perfectly and great things are achieved. You know, Miracle on the Hudson type stuff. 2/

We tend to ignore those equally rare moments when it goes completely the other way and events and people conspire perfectly to turn everything to utter shit. 3/

The conspiracy of circumstances that has led us to this moment is just so wildly improbable, you could probably live multiple lifetimes and never see something like it again. It’s a unicorn riding through a blue moon on Halley’s comet. 4/

The whole show is kicked off by a Conservative PM doing what Conservative PMs never do – take wild gambles. Clue is in the title. 5/

Followed by an exercise in direct democracy, which we hardly ever do, in which a nation collectively overcomes the insanely powerful status quo bias to vote leave. 6/

With a technically decisive margin of victory that is just small enough to be psychologically and emotionally anything but decisive. 7/

The person chosen to implement the deal didn’t actually vote for it. Instead, we get a deeply weird politician whose truncated imagination is only matched by her utter intransigence. When history called for a great conciliator it gave us Theresa May. 8/

Who then did what, until recently, Conservative PMs never do – took a wild gamble and threw away her majority, placing the whole nation in hock to the most reactionary, one-eyed, uncompromising headbangers in British politics, the DUP. 9/

Which simultaneously created an intractable problem over the Irish border that a British govt with a healthy majority would have breezed past, in that typically high-handed and dismissive way the English have always dealt with the Irish. I’m not saying this is a good thing. 10/

Meanwhile, across the chamber you have Corbyn, a leader of the opposition who refuses to lead the opposition, but can’t be removed because last time they tried they botched it so badly, they basically made him leader for life. 11/

As all this unfolds, the EU plays its hand with the same uncompromising, dead-eyed rigidity that helped precipitate Brexit in the first place. A classic and unequal clash of homegrown pragmatism and continental ideology. There’s a reason we don’t do written constitutions. 12/

As a sidebar, this simultaneously delegitimises any and all valid criticism of the EU, kicking any chance of desperately needed reform into the longest of long grass. Don’t worry, I’m sure this won’t come back to haunt us. 13/

So an isolated rump govt negotiates a deal that cannot pass and cannot be renegotiated, in the knowledge that they cannot be replaced because the only thing worse than the current calamity is Corbyn as PM 14/

And with Parliament almost perfectly deadlocked, we’ve blundered into a situation where we’re barrelling towards a choice between civil war, economic disaster and all points in between 15/

The upshot is that we have with two party leaders who command nobody’s confidence but can’t be removed, fighting over a deal that nobody wants but has to be made, against a deadline that nobody can meet but everyone is insisting upon. Like I said, it’s a bloody marvel. 16/

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