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Originally posted by CCharger
In a choice between resignation or going to jail, I'm sure Trump would resign. I'm sure he would even try to spin it as a "victory" rather than failure.

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Originally posted by CCharger



Together, they have been on top of all the latest breaking news: Comey's firing, grand jury indictments, the FBI raid in Annapolis.

They seem to think that the FBI is building a RICO case against the GOP including the highest ranking members of the federal government. They claim that the GOP was accepting and laundering money - Russian money - in off shore accounts and that money was being used as "bribes" to do the bidding of Russian intelligence. According to them, Trump, Pence, Bannon, Preibus, McConnell, Sessions and Ryan are all on tapes discussing this and will be arrested and charged very soon.

Obviously, take all of this with a grain of salt. The idea of seven of our most powerful politicians doing the perp walk along Pennsylvania Avenue is the almost too much to believe, but they seem to know what they are talking about.

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Originally posted by CCharger
In a choice between resignation or going to jail, I'm sure Trump would resign. I'm sure he would even try to spin it as a "victory" rather than failure.

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Cooked chicken from birds grown and raised in China soon will be headed to America � in a trade deal that's really about beef.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Thursday night that the U.S. was greenlighting Chinese chicken imports and getting U.S. beef producers access to China's nearly 1.4 billion consumers. But the deal is raising concerns among critics who point to China's long history of food-safety scandals.

The Chinese appetite for beef is huge and growing, but American beef producers have been locked out of that market since a case of mad cow disease cropped up in the U.S. in 2003. In response, many countries, including South Korea, Japan, Mexico and China, banned imports of U.S. beef.

China was the only one of those nations to not eventually lift its ban � and that's a big deal.

"It's a very big market; it's at least a $2.5 billion market that's being opened up for U.S. beef," Ross said in announcing the trade deal.

Many people long had seen China's refusal to lift its ban on U.S. beef imports as a negotiating tactic, a tit for tat aimed at allowing Chinese chicken imports into the United States. The negotiations that led to the new trade deal have been going back and forth for more than a decade, stalled at one point by worries in Congress over China's food-safety practices.

American beef producers are rejoicing that the process has finally resulted in allowing them to send beef to China.

"After being locked out of the world's largest market for 13 years, we strongly welcome the announcement that an agreement has been made to restore U.S. beef exports to China," Craig Uden, president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said in a statement. "It's impossible to overstate how beneficial this will be for America's cattle producers, and the Trump administration deserves a lot of credit for getting this achieved."

The U.S. should be cleared to export beef to China by mid-July. That's also the deadline for the U.S. to finalize rules for the importation of cooked chicken products from China. Why cooked chicken instead of raw?

"For a country to be able to ship meat and poultry products into the U.S., they have to demonstrate that their food-safety inspection system is equivalent to the system here in the U.S.," explains Brian Ronholm, who served as deputy undersecretary for food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Obama administration.

"The equivalency determination process for China as it relates to processed [cooked] chicken products had been underway, and this deal expedites this process," he says. "China also is seeking equivalency for their inspection system for slaughter facilities, but that will be a longer process."

Given the many outbreaks of avian flu China has experienced, there are also worries that if raw Chinese poultry were processed in the U.S., it could potentially contaminate American plants or somehow spread to birds here in the States.

Tony Corbo, a senior lobbyist for the food campaign at Food & Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group, has been raising concerns about efforts to open the U.S. market to Chinese chicken imports for years. He questions the Chinese government's ability to enforce food-safety standards, given its poor track record.

That record includes rat meat being sold as lamb, oil recovered from drainage ditches in gutters being sold as cooking oil, and baby formula contaminated with melamine that sickened hundreds of thousands of babies and killed six. In 2014, a Shanghai food-processing factory that supplied international restaurant brands including McDonald's and KFC was caught selling stale meat, repackaged with new expiration dates.

Corbo points out that last December, China's own Food and Drug Administration reported it had uncovered as many as a half-million cases of food-safety violations just in the first three quarters of 2016.

That said, the USDA has gone to China to inspect plants that would process the chicken to be shipped to America. But Corbo finds little comfort in that. "You don't know from moment to moment how China is enforcing food-safety standards," Corbo says.

In recent months, a team from the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has traveled to China to train Chinese officials in meat safety.

One thing Thursday's trade deal did not address: U.S. poultry exports to China. The U.S. used to send a lot of chicken feet over to China, where they are a delicacy. But China banned U.S. chicken imports in 2015, after an outbreak of avian flu in the Midwest.

China "was a $750 million market just a few years ago, and now it's essentially zero. It was one of our most important markets," says Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.

But Sumner isn't worried about the new competition from Chinese chicken in the U.S. In fact, he welcomes it as an important step in reopening the Chinese market to U.S. poultry producers.

"Trade is a two-way street," he says.

It's not clear how soon after mid-July we can expect to see cooked chicken products from China in U.S. supermarkets. Sumner says he doesn't expect the product to overwhelm store shelves, because the economics of raising chickens in China and then shipping them to America still favors U.S. producers.

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Wakes up.
Checks Twitter.
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Uh...
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📈 Lookups fo...
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Regrets checking Twitter.
Goes back to bed.

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) May 31, 2017

"Covfefe, that's funny," Paul Ryan chuckled to himself, checking Twitter as he awoke in his bed crafted from uninsured children's bones.

— Ira Madison III (@ira) May 31, 2017

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Originally posted by CCharger
Also, I was reading the comments on this story on foxnews.com (don't do this) and the reaction from the rank and file Trump supporters is hilarious. Some claimed this was still a "nothingburger". Others said basically, "Well, Hillary was crooked too!" One guy even went so far as to call the special prosecutor Bob Meuller a "traitor"....WTF? Trump could literally go on national TV and confess to being a Russian spy and his supporters would still blame the "libturds" or the "lamestream media" or some combination of "Obummer/Killery/Crazy Bernie". Scary as shit...

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Originally posted by Quentil
due to the far left pissing off the Middle Class.

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Originally posted by Quentil
I'm not wrong, though. Trump won because he swung the white middle-class vote that usually voted for Democrats. He did this by playing on the fears in regards to a progressive agenda.

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Originally posted by Paddlefoot

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Originally posted by Quentil
I'm not wrong, though. Trump won because he swung the white middle-class vote that usually voted for Democrats. He did this by playing on the fears in regards to a progressive agenda.

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QFT. Things like those retarded SJW snowflake protests at Mizzou and Yale, and demanding that professor getting fired if they tell the students to lighten up, probably created a shit-load of Trump voters out of people who are centrists but simply can't support that kind of behaviour. They're the bane of the left, projecting the image that the Dems are fully and completely dedicated to placating whiners and complainers at the expense of the middle and working class, in the same way that the genuine dumbfuck rednecks have become the face of the GOP. Images like that can wipe out any sensible progressive policy designed to help as many people as possible when soothing the crybabies get successfully portrayed as what a political party or movement is all about.

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Originally posted by Quentil
I'm not wrong, though. Trump won because he swung the white middle-class vote that usually voted for Democrats. He did this by playing on the fears in regards to a progressive agenda.

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I think that's very debatable.

The argument could be made that those same white middle and working class voters who voted for Trump did so because of economic anxieties, not social ones.

These voters - mostly in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio - have seen factories close up and move out of the country and manufacturing jobs lost. This was due in no small part of neoliberal policies - including free trade - supported by both parties. This includes NAFTA which many of these folks lay right at the feet of the Clintons.

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Now, I will agree that the Dems spent far too much time talking about social issues rather than addressing the economic plight of Middle America. To paraphrase a Democratic leader from Ohio, Clinton spent too much time talking about who can and can't use a restroom rather when voters were concerned about health care and affording to send their kids to college.

Still, it was the social issues that were driving away the voters. It was these social issues were being spotlighted at the expense of economic ones. Trump was the only candidate (other than Sanders) who spoke to the concerns of the "losers of globalization". They saw Clinton as partly responsible for NAFTA, free trade, and the loss of good jobs overseas, and they saw Trump as the guy that would right that wrong.

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My point is: don't blame the election loss at the feet of the "far left". The "far left" (personified by Bernie Sanders) was busy talking about economic issues such as decrying unfettered free trade, wealth inequality, and reigning in Wall Street, and less about social issues. It was the center-right Dems - the establishment Dems - that were going on and on about transgender rights, women's rights, baking cakes for gay couples, etc. and barely acknowledging that Middle America is hurting economically.

To paraphrase that same Democratic leader: "Strong Together doesn't get anyone a job."

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