Faced with the President’s demand that the Republic of Korea (ROK) increase their cost sharing of the basing and sustainment of US military and civilian personnel in the Republic of Korea to $5 billion, the ROK’s leadership was not amused and very concerned. Especially, as this would mean not just a four to five time increase, but that the ROK would be covering the entire cost, rather than sharing it. Earlier today, things took a turn for the worst.
In a rare public display of disagreement in the alliance, US negotiators abruptly walked out of today's talks with South Korea after the 66-year ally balked at President Trump's price tag for funding 28,500 American troops in the country.https://t.co/utKjCvauvU
— Min Joo Kim (@Min_Joo_Kim_) November 19, 2019
The United States broke off talks with South Korea on Tuesday over how to share the cost of the two nations’ military alliance, injecting fresh tension into the relationship over Washington’s demands that Seoul pay sharply more.
The top U.S. negotiator, James DeHart, said the U.S. side decided to cut short the negotiations on Tuesday morning, the second of two days of planned talks. In a rare public show of disunity between the allies, he blamed South Korea for making proposals that “were not responsive to our request for fair and equitable burden sharing.”
“As a result we cut short our participation in the talks today in order to give the Korea side time to reconsider,” he said in a statement. “We look forward to resuming our negotiations when the Korean side is ready to work on the basis of partnership, on the basis of mutual trust.”
This year, South Korea agreed to pay about $890 million toward the cost of stationing U.S. troops in the country, a little more than 40 percent of the day-to-day expenses. It also provides land for bases rent-free, paid more than 90 percent of the $10.7 billion cost of moving the main U.S. base out of Seoul, and buys significant amounts of U.S. military equipment.
But Trump insists that South Korea, as a “very wealthy nation,” needs to pay more. His demand for up to $5 billion would imply South Korea was effectively not only being asked to cover local costs but also the entire wage bill for the U.S. troops.
The defense ministers of South Korea and China have agreed to develop their security ties to ensure stability in northeast Asia, the latest indication that Washington’s longstanding alliances in the region are fraying.
Mission accomplished!
Open thread!
Questions for Gordon Sondland
FelonyGovt
It’s all a development deal in Queens to him. What a way to run foreign policy.
Roger Moore
Can we please add treason to the list of impeachment charges?
joel hanes
I am so tired of this sort of winning.
Spanky
@Roger Moore: Very soon. Very soon.
Adam L Silverman
I think I have the video embed fixed. Please let me know if anyone can see it. I can’t. I just get a big empty space and the formatting of the page messed up.
Rommie
Why would the South Koreans think the US could abandon an ally to an aggressive adversary? Un-possible!
This is fine. (smoke billows in)
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
The page is still messed up for me.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: I’m going to pull the video out and see if that solves the problem.
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: Removing the video embed code fixed the problem.
?BillinGlendaleCA
The reaction by the ROK was entirely predictable. The Korean public has long been divided on our presence.
NotMax
Mom, Adam broke the blog!
;)
TaMara (HFG)
So nice to see all our allies being flushed down the toilet equally.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: The blog was broken the minute this rebuild was begun.
CaseyL
OK, maybe I’m missing something, but isn’ t China North Korea’s main/only ally and sponsor? How does it protect South Korea from its own client state?
rikyrah
Thanks for the information, Silverman. Really appreciate it.
The traitorous Orange Clown.
Cacti
@CaseyL: China and North Korea have a mutual defense treaty.
gene108
Seems fucking up US standing abroad is SOP for 21st century Republican Presidents.
Trump is just more aggressive about it.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m not seeing any video, but the swatch of raw code before the Yahoo text at the end is gone, though. (Android phone, Samsung browser.)
donnah
“Pay our demands or we withdraw aid” has a familiar extortiony ring to it.
Some negotiator. Trump’s deal-making skills seem to exist only in his fevered little brain.
gene108
@donnah:
His negotiating strategy is based entirely on “I won, you lose”.
The idea of a a mutually beneficial “win-win” negotiating strategy is alien to him.
gvg
Some GOP Congress person said recently that we can’t impeach someone for being stupid. I don’t see why not. The Constitution doesn’t rule that out. Trump idiocy (if he isn’t a traitor but it wastes my time to try to parse that out) is a threat to Americans in several different ways including causing a spiraling out of control series of events that could lead to nuclear war. He needs to have no power. Now.
MomSense
This is fine.
Sigh.
Anyone else wish they could fart in the faces of every idiot who voted for Trump to shake things up? WTF
This is no way to run a superpower. With only 8 years between W, who broke the world, and King Minus I don’t think we just waltz back in to the good graces of our allies.
Adam L Silverman
@Steeplejack (phone): I don’t even know how that got in there, but I deleted it as well. When I originally embedded the video, that’s what showed up after I hit publish on the post. How an “iframe” embed code could convert itself to that or be converted to that, is beyond my expertise. So when I went in and tried to redo the embed code for the video, I deleted all of that. Ultimately, I just deleted the video embed code too. This is just not worth the effort any more.
p.a.
Gonna start charging Blue States for their defense presences also. 19% of the vote in New York? West Point… Know how much it costs to run that place?
RP
It reminds me of orange shitgibbon’s idea for the START negotiations with the USSR. He said US negotiators should poke a finger into the chest of the USSR negotiator, tell him “FUCK YOU”, and walk out of the room. That *act* would supposedly make the USSR crumple up and offer the U.S. huge concessions.
What an effin’ maroon.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/for-trump-diplomacy-is-quite-literally-a-four-letter-word
joel hanes
@Adam L Silverman:
All non-trivial software is broken.
The degree to which the defects are visible to the user varies.
p.a.
wvng
@RP: It reminds me of McCain’s infamous suggestion of how to fix things in Iraq, by walking into a room and telling the Iraqis to “Stop the BullS.”
germy
Eric U.
“mission accomplished” — this is the kind of thing that led Putin to back Trump.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Adam L Silverman:
I got nothing. Maybe check with someone in the front-pagers’ green room.
Visual mode is trying to give me an empty bullet list with one dot.
Timurid
Is this how Trump planned his Korea policy from the start, or is he making it clear that he will break things until the Democrats back off? Or just break things out of spite if the thinks he doesn’t have much time left? This comes right after the big and disruptive change on Israel and West Bank settlements…
bluehill
Wonder what kind of side deal Trump has with Kim Jong-un?
Mike in DC
If 45 gets a second term, he’ll pull us out of NATO. The only question is whether that’s the last straw for the GOP natsec establishment or not. Certainly it is Putin’s wet dream.
Adam L Silverman
@Steeplejack (phone): I wasn’t expecting you to provide answers. It is what it is and it will remain what it is.
Variaga
Losing the Korean War to own the libs.
germy
Jay
@CaseyL:
The NORK’s have support from Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela,
China however is the main economic, military and political backer of North Korea.
As such, by fostering good relations with China, South Korea can get China to moderate North Korean actions somewhat.
China does not want the unfinished Korean War to turn “hot”. It would be bad news for China.
South Korea, like many other long term US Allies, are realizing that the US cannot be relied on as a defender of peace, security and international norms, and so, is entering into agreements and conditions with more trustworthy nations, like China.
The Moar You Know
I did a lot of business in South Korea back in the 1990s. Hilariously enough, this is a negotiations model that any Korean businessman would be very familiar with, and I guarantee that they’re far better at it than Americans, because they do it all the fucking time. I was very familiar with it because my parents were alcoholics who fought like rabid cats. You just wait for the screaming to stop and then carry on like nothing has happened. I was good at my job…but I found it utterly exhausting. I’ve had enough screaming and drama for ten lifetimes.
As far as shoving S. Korea into China’s orbit of influence, that’s been a long time coming. The Koreans have been far less vocal about their disapproval of America’s presence on their soil than the Japanese have been, but quite a few of them don’t approve of our presence there and would like to see us gone.
The new Chinese hegemony is at hand. So now Putin can go to HIS master (guess who that is) and tell him he did his job. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Adam L Silverman
@Timurid: As I posted about here in May of 2016 with my first Trump Doctrine post, the President has held two positions that have never wavered over his entire adult life. The first is his racism including anti-Semitism, homophobia, and xenophobia. The second is his belief that the US’s allies are ripping us off and that they should be told to pay up or hit the bricks. Both of these were central reasons behind why Putin chose to back him and do everything to ensure he was elected president. By doing so he created the opportunity for the President to turn his racist beliefs into domestic policies and strategies that would enflame Americans across cleavage lines and rip American civil society apart. He also created the opportunity for the President to stress, strain, and ultimately break the US’s foreign alliances and partnerships, as well as the global system we put into place with them post WW II and post Cold War. By doing so Putin created the opening to accomplish his own strategic goals.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike in DC: I expect he’ll do so before the election in November 2020. I also think that he’s been caught discussing this on signals intercepts (SIGINT), which is why Macron made the remarks he did last week about NATO.
Kelly
Thread needs a kitten picture
https://imgur.com/Hy6LuhZ
mad citizen
Back at the end of W, I thought to myself, “It will take us 20 to 25 years to get things back as a country”. Now I’m just hoping we survive, let alone thrive
I watched a good bit of the hearing today–first time I’ve had a chance to watch any. I hate the pandering members–on both sides–it’s just a waste of time. I can sorta understand the R’s not asking questions–they have no case. I don’t need to hear D members heaping praise on whoever for their service.
CaseyL
One could make a case that the US has not been a force for peace throughout most of the post-war period, so there could be benefits to the US losing its status as a superpower.
The trouble is, neither are the states which are replacing the US as global hegemons. I can’t imagine that the world will be better for their controlling it.
germy
cmorenc
In four short years Trump will have destroyed or badly damaged all foreign policy alliances, relations, and accomplishments of every predecessor Administration going back to FDR and WW2, as well as corrupting and badly damaging our State Department, Intelligence Services, and FBI. Even the arrogant, colossal military & policy blunders by the Bush, Jr administration were committed without any design on deliberately sabotaging our alliances, state department, and intelligence services, even while sometimes bypassing the latter when they didn’t tell Bush what he wanted to hear.
germy
chopper
SK should agree to pay the full cost of quartering american troops in exchange for charging rent to the US for the land the bases are on, the rent just happening to be the exact same.
CaseyL
@cmorenc: He couldn’t have done it without the assistance, connivance, and protection of the GOP in the House and Senate.
This destruction was a long-term project by many groups and people, spearheaded by people infuriated by civil rights gains by “untermenschen.”
Jay
Even the NORK’s have realized that Orangemandius has made the US geopolitically irrelevant.
jl
So, Trump says China is the big threat, but we make outrages financial demands and insulting and stupid negotiating tactics that drive them towards China?
Really hard to tell whether Trump is a total flunky coherently following Putin’s (and Saudi Arabia’s and Israel’s and Turkey’s(?), and …. ??? demands. Or reflexively following his impulses from years of stupid ignorant bigotry on nearly everything, debt to oligarchs… or admiration of authoritarians. Or just incoherent chaotic stupidity, ignorance, and total lack of impulse control. Or some random and ever shifting mix of all three, or four, or whatever.
sherparick
All the winning!! NOT!!! Also, the stupidity, it burns, it burns.
I am not exactly happy about this, because I find Biden so problematical as a candidate and president (his age, his fondness for telling stories that have very tenuous relationship with the truth where he is the hero, a general lack of discipline, and poor attention to details (how, given that the Democratic moneybags loathe the idea of a Warren or Sanders candidacy is he not swimming in money???). But, much like Bill Clinton in 1992, Biden may do relatively poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, but will likely to crush the other candidates starting in South Carolina through super-Tuesday in the South because of the African American vote. And then he will be o his way to winning the nomination. And so it goes. From the latest Quinnipac poll
Peale
@jl: My guess? He’s mad that there are Koreans now who are actually wealthy and aren’t gardeners and nail salon workers. He assumes they’ve cheated to get there.
Jay
@chopper:
South Korea is just going to tell you to leave.
The money is better spent on the South Korean Armed Forces, and the former US Military bases will be far more valuable as commercial ports, industrial estates and cargo airports.
NotMax
@germy
Rescripting the “all the W keys were stolen from the keyboards” lie.
Raven
@Jay: My old “compound” has been gone for almost 45 years. Prime real estate overlooking the Imjin.
Jay
@CaseyL:
With China or Russia, if you are the least bit informed, you know exactly what you are dealing with, year after year.
With the US, it now alternates between semi sane and batshit crazy.
germy
@NotMax:
If Obama’s team had done anything like that, the trumpers would have taken a ton of photos and the NYTimes would have front paged them.
rikyrah
@Kelly:
thanks :)
Sphouch
The tripwire troop concept seems entirely lost on this president.
I haven’t spoken with any of my fellow former linguists (old AF korling), and I have been out of the game for nearly 2 decades, but my first instinct is that this is politically uneducated, militarily reckless, and strategically feckless. I don’t see an upside to this posturing. At best, the U.S. gets what the president has demanded, but at the cost of damaged relationships and a more disgruntled host country.
Kay
You have to pay when you make a bad hire and the US made a bad hire. The only question is how much it will cost us – my assumption going in was “a lot” but obviously the full cost is TBD and will only come clear after he’s down the road.
Mediocre hires can get better but bad hires only get worse, and this one has, so every day he stays adds to the cost.
The part that kills me is they really didn’t have to do anything. They went in with a strong economy and a foreign policy that could have chugged along without them. It would have run essentially on auto-pilot for a 4 year span and they’d probably be in better shape for re-election than they are now. All for naught.
bemused
@germy:
Reminds me of rightwingers claiming/lying Clinton staffers trashed offices after GW Bush inauguration.
Nothing changes with these people except to get increasingly more nasty.
germy
germy
@bemused:
Nothing changes with these people except to get increasingly more nasty.
bemused
@germy:
It feels like daily to me.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Roger Moore: Wasn’t the argument for chopping of both Charles 1st of England and Louis XVII of France was they were both so incompetent at ruling as to constituent an act of treason?
Gin & Tonic
@germy: Mom!!? MOM!! How come germy can embed Tweets like a front-pager and we can’t? This is so unfair, it’s the worst thing EVER!
Kay
Here’s the alternate version of the Trump Administration. Don’t try too hard. Pass a couple of easily achievable and popular bills- infrastructure, prescription drugs. They don’t even have to be good! They just have to exist. Stay the course on everything else – hire normal competent people who just do their work and let the President grab the limelight he loves to fill the huge sucking void where a person should be. He can golf and hold rallies and opine on whatever’s trending on Twitter. Easy.
That would be a mediocre hire. Compare to a bad one, like Trump. Much, much worse.
germy
@Gin & Tonic:
I bought a box of candy for the frontpagers.
But look how I messed up my comment #64
John Revolta
@Sphouch: the U.S. gets what the president has demanded, but at the cost of damaged relationships
“But, I repeat myself.”
Martin
@Kay: Having worked with bad hires, one of their key attributes is that if they have hiring authority, they hire even worse people in an effort to make sure nobody reveals their incompetence, and if they accidentally hire a good one, they get rid of them ASAP.
Sound familiar? I’ve had the unfortunate task of removing some of these people after they were entrenched for a decade or more. It’s rough. It’s basically a burn everything and start over activity because there’s nothing of value you can build on.
The upside here for the US is that we have a regular process of dumping everyone and restarting every 4 or 8 years. So long as enough career professionals like Vindman have gutted through, it’ll be okay. They know what to put in the garbage and how to rebuild it, and they’ll do it well. We just need to elect people smart enough to listen to them.
Boris, Rasputin's Evil Twin
@jl: You left out dementia and/or tertiary syphilis, but you’ve done a fine job here.
Mnemosyne
@bemused:
Apparently HW Bush’s Staff left a few pranks behind when Clinton came into office because it was a bit of a friendly tradition.
Of course, since W and his staffers were insecure assholes, they had to be frickin’ crybabies about that tradition.
lgerard
I love how trump continually states that he doesn’t know this guy, that guy or the other guy.
Maybe if he showed up to work once in a while he might recognize some of the others who also work there.
germy
@Mnemosyne:
God knows what the trumpers will leave behind.
Jay
@Sphouch:
Not gonna happen. South Korea has already signed a deal with China, and will simply tell the US to take a long hike on a short pier, if the US doesn’t back down from “teh stupid”.
Martin
@germy: Oh, did that revert? I could embed a few days ago but not yesterday.
germy
@Martin: I have no idea what’s going on with embedding.
Sphouch
@John Revolta: touche. Example 478 of “I will be treated ‘fairly’ or else.”
NotMax
@germy
I expect they’ll grab everything they can get their grubby hands on, down to and including the doorknobs.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Peale: Oddly enough, when Trump stays in Los Angeles, he stays at a hotel in the Wilshire Grand building which is owned by Korean Air.
germy
@NotMax: They’ll try to steal the light switches but won’t be able to locate them.
Mnemosyne
@germy:
I’m hoping that being hauled off in handcuffs will leave fewer opportunities for mischief.
Kay
@Martin:
It’s like moral hazard, right? If we don’t pay dearly for this error we’re more likely to repeat it.
His interview was terrible. Remember that? How he knew nothing about anything and Hillary Clinton was the only person who ever asked him anything real?
I still long for a series of questions on basic definitions. “What is NATO?” “Describe SCHIP, in your own words” “You’ve said you oppose the Iran deal. What’s in the Iran deal? List the terms”.
The assumption was you don’t have to ask that but any one of them would have stumped him. It might be worthwhile to add an entry round to debates. They have to describe what exists. 80% or better or no further.
Jay
@Martin:
sadly, since Reagan, it’s been a 9 steps backwards, with every Rethug, one step forwards with every Democratic President sort of thing, such to the point that a lot of the progressive progress since 1890 has been irretrievably lost.
Dolt 45 is simply building on the damage Dolt 43 did.
polyorchnid octopunch
@MomSense: One of the truths I got to tell someone on twitter a while back about this entire imbroglio:
Them: “But Trump is an aberration”
Me: Sorry, not so. GWB was an aberration. Trump is a pattern.
SFAW
@joel hanes:
And the response from the
keypunchersprogrammerssoftware engineer(s) is typically “It’ll take me/us about two weeks to fix it.”Gravenstone
@Timurid: I await the post mortem of this presidency, when we discover how much of this international carnage was by Putin’s direct edict, versus how much was just whispered ‘suggestions’ keyed to play off Trump’s insecurity and absurdly heightened sense of self regard. I recognize that other nations have a role in adversely influencing Trump, but Putin has had the broadest and most aggressive portfolio in that regard worldwide for many years now.
SFAW
@Mnemosyne:
Unpossible! We were told that “the adults are back in charge” when Preznits Bush and Cheney entered the White House.
germy
Jay
germy
“Darling” is the new “Sir”
robmassing
@bluehill:
This. Trump foreign policy in three words: “I prefer dictators.”
sukabi
Before the malignant turd is dragged out of office he’ll have reduced our alliances to zero and made China and Russia numbers 1 and 2 world powers.
JaySinWA
@germy: I expect they will leave behind shit, literal and figurative shit. In great piles and smeared on the walls like an homage to Assange
ETA exiting White House hangers on I mean, added so you don’t have to back track comments.
And yes, I expect them to be light fingering anything they haven’t befouled.
Jay
@Gravenstone:
all the current ReThugs are all in on the Administrations actions, so it ain’t just Dolt 45 and Putin.
Roger Moore
@Peale:
Most fundamentally, Trump has a zero sum worldview. He doesn’t believe in mutually beneficial relationships. That means if Korea isn’t paying the full freight for US troops stationed there, they are taking advantage of us. If they’re doing better than they were 60 years ago, it must be because the US is doing worse. And we’re fundamentally a bunch of suckers for letting them get away with it. That’s the lens through which Trump views the world, and everything he does shows it.
bemused
@Mnemosyne:
Yup, insecure assholes are always crybabies. We’ve all had unpleasant encounters with them in our lives and learn to avoid them but I never thought we’d be held captive suffering under a mob of president, WH, GOP assholes.
Kay
It is just amazing what is happening in the south. I know GA isn’t a swing state but something is happening here and one hopes Democrats have noticed. It isn’t just Virginia.
Jay
@polyorchnid octopunch:
McCarthy/Nixon was the abberation, since then every ReThug has followed the pattern, +1.
Dolt 45 cranked it up to +11, not +1.
mrmoshpotato
Martin
Hey Ohio, what the fuck?!
bemused
@germy:
My guess is he had a doozy of a panic attack.
Raoul
This is such a massive foreign policy failure. But the GOP is 100% in thrall to a moron, so no one will speak up about it.
Three years ago I started saying that the election of Trump was a clear signal that this would be China’s century of geopolitical dominance. I am so sadly seeming to be correct (not that I claim a special view, but it just was so clear that he’d squander our role).
Jay
@Martin:
Since Obamacare was passed, the US “Medical System” just isn’t murdering enough Americans annually, so voila, a quick fix.
eclare
@Kelly: Awww, yes with everything going on, kitten pics are necessary.
bemused
@Martin:
Oh, here we go again with this nonsense. They don’t care if it’s not possible or dumb enough to believe it is. Is this the same state that tried this kind of bill before or a different state?
Mnemosyne
If Jordan is Boomhauer, I guess that means that Nunes is Dale Gribble since he spends his time spouting incoherent conspiracy theories that don’t make sense to anyone else.
eclare
@Kelly: Aww, so cute.
Hoodie
@Kay: Lazy hires can be a waste of space but are typically innocuous if they stay out of the way. The worst type of hire is the one who doesn’t comprehend his/her own limitations and insists on being the center of attention. I was talking to a colleague the other day about that fact that Trump is the epitome of the guy who could fuck up a ham sandwich. How does a guy inherit an economy recovering from a historic recession, 4% unemployment and a rising stock market and put himself into a position where 50% or more of the population detests him and is about to be impeached? All he had to do was claim credit and do nothing. But no, he had to make it all about him and his petty resentment of a guy who was no longer president.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@bluehill: There’s an unfinished hotel in Pyongyang.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think a key characteristic of really bad people is that they can’t stand to have anyone around who’s better than they are. A good boss is eager to hire people who are better than they are because they understand they get credit for their subordinates’ successes. A bad boss is afraid that competent subordinates will show them up before the world, and they refuse to hire anyone who might possible be able to replace them.
The net result is that a good boss has a strong foundation under them. They may not be able to hire people who are better than they are for every position, but they at least manage to hire staffs that are good in the aggregate. But a bad boss will only hire bad subordinates, and they’ll hire people who are even worse than they are, all the way down. The net result is an organization that gets worse the further down you go.
mad citizen
I hope we can at least keep our strategic alliance with Norway. You know, for the forest raking knowledge exchange.
Jay
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Saw that poll cited on Twitter just a few minutes ago, seemingly used as evidence that the Dems should go with Biden because they evidently aren’t clamoring for massive change. My takeaway was more along the lines of: DAMN, Warren is tied with a Republican in GEORGIA?!?
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Trump has righteously pissed off educated whites. That’s killing him in the kinds of prosperous suburbs that have long been the Republican strongholds in more urban states. That’s why places like Georgia and Texas are looking shaky for the Republicans, and it should terrify them.
Marcopolo
And we’re off for the afternoon hearing…maybe time for a new thread?
Jay
@mad citizen:
that’s Finland, not Norway,
and they are not officially an ally.
Steeplejack
@germy:
Check your email for one from WaterGirl.
StringOnAStick
@bemused: My coworker almost died 2 months ago from an ectopic pregnancy. She’s still having issues that I suspect are due to “hormone storm” and scar tissue.
Gravenstone
@Martin: Sure, let’s add yet another horribly invasive and completely ineffectual process onto the backs of women who have just suffered the terrible insult of a lost pregnancy due to ectopic implantation. Keep courting that women’s vote, folks.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: Georgia was the next state on the pickup list for Obama after 2008.
In the case of states like GA and SC, we tend to only think of the cracker vote because holy shit if that isn’t all they send to Congress, but there’s both a large black vote and a growing northern liberal snowbird vote, as [cough] your home state’s reputation keeps growing and they look for less crazy places to live
[edit] I should add, NC blued up due to university and tech industry growth. GA hasn’t seen that kind of growth, but it’s doing okay. GaTech is a serious fucking tech school with a good halo.
Raoul
@MomSense: We were likely not to remain the worlds only superpower no matter what. But our precipitous decline has been shocking.
When in a couple of years we hear nonstop ‘surrender monkey!’ claims about whoever from the Dem stage wins the presidency, I may just splinter apart in utter rage.
mad citizen
@Jay: I had that sneaky suspicion I was getting it wrong–thanks for correcting.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Jay: Aye, but… they were evil but not incompetent. Same for the Reagan administration, and GHW Bush. Since the turn of the century though it’s been evil AND incompetent.
Mike in NC
Just another attempted shakedown from the Mobster-in-Chief. Yesterday Ukraine, today South Korea.
bluehill
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Really?!? Nothing should surprise me anymore.
Mandalay
@Kay:
In one of the Republican debates Hugh Hewitt asked Trump about “the three legs of the [nuclear] triad”. Of course Trump had no clue, and just bullshitted. Rubio then knocked the question out of the park like a brown nosed schoolboy, but my recollection was that he seemed weak because he was afraid to criticize Trump for not knowing.
So despite being able to answer a question that Trump didn’t even understand, Rubio (to me) ended up looking like the doofus. Go figure.
Bill Arnold
Jeffrey Epstein continues to stir up trouble, both here and abroad (Prince Andrew, exposing, among other things, the Royals-protection proclivities of the UK press):
Feds file criminal charges against jail guards responsible for watching Jeffrey Epstein (Julie K. Brown, Daniel Chang, November 19, 2019)
Also, I haven’t found a transcript but this is interesting:
Prisons chief: FBI investigating whether ‘criminal enterprise’ played role in Epstein death (Marty Johnson, 11/19/19)
Note that conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death are rampant on the lunatic right so this could be a play involving one or more of those theories. With some additional cynicism/paranoia, one might suspect that it is a diversion from the Real Conspiracy, somehow directly involving the POTUS and his henchmen.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Germy should not have that ability, and won’t for long. :-)
just wait til dad gets home!
dopey-o
@bluehill: what kind of side deal has Trump got with KJU? Try this:
Trump raises ROK bill.
ROK balks, refuses.
Trump removes US forces, including nukes.
NK junks nukes, peninsula is now “denuclearized”
Peace treaty signed, Trump awarded Nobel Peace prize.
NO marches south, occupies ROK.mar
StringOnAStick
@Bill Arnold: My late BIL worked as a CO in a state low security prison; this shit is incredibly common. One long term CO spent all of his shifts on Craig’s List, making my BIL go get his lunch tray for him. All the new guys like my BIL were made quite aware of what happens to anyone who rats out a senior CO for this crap; being left naked and beaten many miles from town figured prominently. It drove my BIL nuts.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Me too :)
It is interesting though. In a way it would be great. It would really boost AA political power, too, nationally, because they make up a larger share of the D base in those states. So delightful if the most racist President of the modern era boosted AA political power just on the sheer horribleness of himself as a human being.
On accident. As the kids say.
Dev Null
@SFAW:
<blockquote><blockquote>All non-trivial software is broken.</blockquote>
And the response from the
keypunchersprogrammerssoftware engineer(s) is typically “It’ll take me/us about two weeks to fix it.”</blockquote>
One hundred bugs in the code;
One hundred bugs in the code;
Take one out, compile it again;
One hundred and one bugs in the code!
E2A: well, clearly I don’t know how to nest blockquotes. Has anyone intuited the magic?
Sab
@Martin: In Ohio, we don’t believe in science anymore.
This is interesting, in an awful way. I have right-to-life nieces who have toned down their positions a lot since they got out of high school, got pregnant, and have discovered that biology in real life is often cruel, painful and morally ambiguous.
And one who is completely and utterly apolitical, but after a bunch of miscarriages, this kind of talk makes her ballistic. She will be voting from now on. She promised me.
Jay
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Starting with McCarthy/ Nixon, evil, antiAmerican, treasonous,
starting with Reagan, various levels of incompetence, plus evil, antiAmerican, treasonous,
Bush 1, more incompetence,
Dubya, Dubya Me Too, now with more incompetence and Daddy Issues Too,
Notice the trend,……
Ladyraxterinok
@Kay: I think the problem is media presents candidate smarter than they are. See esp Gore. And their dislike of Obama. And even worse—he’s black!
Roger Moore
@polyorchnid octopunch:
My personal theory is that the Republican Party has been taken over by true believers. Reagan and his people sold the country a bunch of lies because it was a way of winning elections, but they knew they were lying about stuff like the Laffer Curve. But today’s Republicans grew up believing that stuff. They don’t recognize it’s a bunch of BS intended to sell stuff to suckers; they are the suckers. The net result is a party that’s nothing but suckers and a handful of predators who feed on them.
sukabi
@Gravenstone: they should require that the removed embryo be implanted in the abdomen of the men advocating for this procedure and to keep those men
incarceratedhospitalized until they give birth.Nevermind that that procedure also doesn’t exist either.
John Revolta
@Roger Moore: I remember a quote from Trump way back during the campaign to the effect that he “doesn’t like to hire anybody smarter than him”. Makes you wonder if everyone he hires has to purposely act stupid to get the gig
But today’s Republicans grew up believing that stuff. They don’t recognize it’s a bunch of BS intended to sell stuff to suckers; they are the suckers
You can thank FOX for this.
Jay
@dopey-o:
NK is not going to junk their nukes, ever.
NK is only going to march south as a last option.
Dolt45 is making a peaceful Korean Unification more possible because North Korea is now a more consistent and reliable partner than the United States.
karen marie
@The Moar You Know: Not well versed in the details of foreign affairs, I have no idea who you’re talking about. Who are you talking about?
Jay
@sukabi:
it’s do-able as an operation, but it does not lead to a successful term or birth.
still, it’s worth trying over and over until the surgery is viable.
Bill Arnold
This stupid move seems like a strong incentive for a ROK nuclear weapons program, and a Japanese nuclear weapons program, and etc. At least a threshold capability, plus enough uncertainty about whether they’ve constructed a weapon to be a deterrent.
Lovely.
Somebody please tell me that this isn’t because the Korean War was a Democrat [sic] war.
(I know the armistice agreement was signed under Eisenhower.)
Sab
@Ladyraxterinok: “presents”. Did you mean ‘ resents candidates’ or ‘presents candidates as’ smarter than they are? I am guessing resents.
Dev Null
Early in my career I worked for a Really Big Company. The joke about management – among the grunts, anyway – was “they’ve been hiring incompetents for so long, they can’t tell the difference.”
That Really Big Company went belly-up a couple of decades ago. TBF, they found themselves competing with a company which, had it been in another sector, would have been named Enron.
Even earlier, as a grad student, I was in attendance† when a professor from a Very High-Profile University (not mine) was asked “how has Very High-Profile University’s Dept of … managed to stay at the top of the heap for going-on 50 years?”
His answer: “We at the Very High-Profile University’s Dept of … know that hacks breed hacks, so we make sure that we don’t hire hacks.”
† So I seem to remember, but the memory is fuzzy, so it’s possible I heard the story second-hand.
Jay
@karen marie:
Putin has a side bet going that China will become the next political/military/economic hedgemon, and has/is positioning Russia in many areas to profit off of China’s rise.
Ladyraxterinok
@Martin: Never forget MAJOR problem of VOTER SUPPRESSION.
We can have as many GOTV programs as we can fit in—but if people are blocked from voting we still lose! !!
Ladyraxterinok
@Sab: You’re absolutely right!
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
both Japan and South Korea are at “threshold” capacity for nuclear weapons. Any country with an indigenous nuclear power program and a full fuel cycle is at threshold capacity.
Peale
@polyorchnid octopunch: The thing I remember about Reagan was eventually there were lots of indictments against pretty much everyone except Reagan, and not just related to Iran Contra. Abject failures to regulate banking. Making sure HUD funds and Superfund Funds were pilfered. Carter ran a clean post-watergate presidency. So actually did Clinton and Obama. None of the Republicans have done that, except maybe Bush I a little. Unfortunately, its taken the press 50+ years to catch on that the Democrats aren’t Tammany Hall ward heelers any longer. Those people all flocked to the GOP…I wonder why?
Frankensteinbeck
@Jay:
I doubt it. It’s not that Putin isn’t smart enough or that China’s rise is unlikely. By the time China has a tight enough hold to make a big difference in the Western areas Putin cares about, that will be a post-Putin era. All signs are that Putin doesn’t care about Russia, or the world, once he’s gone.
Jay
@Frankensteinbeck:
Putin’s betting that the One Road and the North East Passage will allow Russia to profit off of Siberia and that the SCO will stabilize Russia’s Southern Borders, with China doing the heavy economic lifting, Russia supplying the arms and training.
Wagner is already pivoting off of decades old Chinese agreements in Africa.
Bill Arnold
@Jay:
This is Cheryl’s territory (especially the reprocessing), but you made me look, so … yes for Japan, no for ROK (including, if i read correctly, plutonium):
Nuclear Power in South Korea – South Korea has always had an open fuel cycle, without enrichment or reprocessing, due to the terms of its 1973 nuclear cooperation agreement with the USA. This agreement was renewed in June 2015 (see section below on Korea-US Atomic Energy Agreement).
Japan’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jay:
@Frankensteinbeck:
And honestly how long is China’s rise going to last anyway before climate change causes our civilization’s collapse?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Test
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Jay:
What difference will that make when billions are displaced due to climate change and much of the world is rendered uninhabitable? By mid-century China’s rise will likely be cut short and they’ll succumb to the effects of global temperature rise like pretty much everyone else.
Nobody’s actually doing anything to seriously address this. Neither Putin or Xi. The world is being run by mad men
Jay
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Putin’s not aiming for 50 years down the road, he’s aiming for 10 years down the road.
Xi is aiming for 50 years down the road, hoping that technology, infrastructure and geopolitical positioning will allow China to survive better than others and in some sectors thrive. One of the reason’s China imports millions of tons of topsoil from the US every year.
Jeffro
@Kay: Sort of like the fortune he inherited from Fred trumpov…he’d have done better if he had just let it ride.
But his essential Shit Midas-ness just had to WEIGH IN
WaterGirl
@germy: Sorry, Germy! Those were both very cute! :-)
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency
Jeffro
@Martin: Seconded on that college-town growth. It sure kicked VA into blue territory a decade ago and it’s only gotten more blue since
Sab
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Chinese leaders are technocrats, not politicians. They very much are aware of climate change and other stuff, and are preparing for its consequences.
I wouldn’t want to live there, but their leadership is not clueless.
Bill Arnold
@Jay:
The key is that, despite a few experiments in the 2000s, the ROK has no enrichment facilities, so they would need to build them, not just repurpose an existing facility (perhaps covertly) using LEU feedstock; much of the separation work has been already been done to get to LEU.
Citizen Alan
@Peale:
In the summer of ’92, Molly Ivins was predicting that if Bush Sr. won, he’d probably be impeached in his second term. I think it was over the BCCI banking scandal, which sounds almost quaint after what’s happened in the intervening 26 years.
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
the general rule of thumb for “threshold” is, do you have the knowledge and can you build the infrastructure to the point of building a bomb, 6 months to a year after withdrawing from the NPT,
by that standard, South Korea is a threshold Nuclear Power.
Will South Korea and or Japan go nuclear given the US’s retreat into isolationism and insanity?
probably not. The same amount of money and effort spent on conventional forces and weapons, produces a useable, flexible deterrent.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Jay: Trump is making Korean unification more possible under DPRK’s terms which are the only terms acceptable to the DPRK’s leadership.
Jay
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
South Korea has agency, y’know. I know, who’d a thunk it. Countries other than the USA have agency.
the Koreas are not going to unify on the Norks terms. Period.
Millions of South Koreans didn’t struggle and suffer for decades to create a democracy, despite the best efforts of the US to prevent it, to abandon it now or any time in the future.
Tenar Arha
@Kelly: Now ded from cuteness. Thanks!
prostratedragon
@Dev Null:
Your code works. Just make sure you’re in text mode (click on the “Text” tab) when you enter it.
J R in WV
@The Moar You Know:
Now you got my attention. Who is Putin’s Master??? Please?
J R in WV
deleted, dunno how to make a comment go away…
Jay
@J R in WV:
Xi
mardam422
Who lost South Korea?
J R in WV
I suspect that Trump’s only real achievement in foreign affairs is to provoke multiple nations to covertly develop a nuclear capacity. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Singapore, most all affluent states with sufficient technical expertise. Of course India is already there, Pakistan also — how many other wealthy nations are more sophisticated than the Pakistanis?
South Africa went there, successfully detonated a test weapon that was detected by orbital devices. Are they more advanced than Japan, S Korea, the Republic of China? Nope!
The current nuclear family of the US, UK, Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan will soon double in my somewhat informed uppa hollow bot well read opinion. What then? Will conventional warfare become obsolete? What will a few nuclear missiles do to a multiple-billion-dollar Carrier Task Force? Ugly~!!~
sorry to be so bleak. Kitty and German Shepherd were SO CUTE!