Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSbgxChQAhQ

Undocumented immigrant is Not the proper definition. They came here illegally under their own free will. They broke the law and are NOT law abiding. Therefore, the proper term is illegal. Don't be stupid.

That's right. For plans for the future, being "correct" is asking a bit too much, but we should also have some good audits or at least good details on the plans. I believe that we are quite short on audits or details for Trump's plans for the US with him as POTUS.

I've been for Trump since last fall or so, but I know we don't have nearly enough good details. But what the heck am I to do? To me, the other candidates look much worse, on details and more.

Last fall I thought that I wanted the details, but as voting citizens we nearly never get those. Sometimes politicians deliver -- JFK said we'd put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth and did. Bush 41 said that Saddam's invasion of Kuwait "would not stand", put Schwarzkopf in charge, and, as at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKi3NwLFkX4

the results were brilliant.

Obama said he would "fundamentally transform" America, the US, or some such, but not in any way I'd want.

So, sometimes I like what politicians do, but usually I don't.

For unemployment rate, I was drawing partly from some Bureau of Labor Statistics material and discussion as at

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/lets-cut-the-crap-unempl...

There he has a big plot of labor force participation rate. We're talking 90+ million people who could, presumably in principle, be working but now out of the labor force. If you take his judgment seriously, then the situation, to be technical, sucks. He also mentions BLS data U-6 and U-7, and I have yet to look up those and I didn't see links to them. But I believe that the official 5% unemployment rate is lying with statistics, i.e., maybe is literally true for a particular definition that may at times be an okay definition but definitely is not now.

Net, on unemployment, I don't think that the real rate, with a reasonable definition, is 5% or anywhere near that. Maybe Trump's 20% is correct or even too low. So, one hope for the economy, deficit, standard of living, etc. is to get the "labor force participation rate" up, way up.

On Trump University (TU), good to know that in NYS he claimed to be operating a university without a NYS license. So there is a way to stop misuse of university.

For the point that there wasn't anything in the TU courses couldn't find in Trump books, okay. Quite generally there isn't much of any value in education not already in books. So, that situation about has to hold for TU also.

Your references have Trump claiming his instructors are "handpicked" by him personally. Right, that seems to be a lie. I did see a video of a few guys, 2, 3, maybe a few more, who claimed to have learned some valuable material TU about how to make money in real estate. Okay, maybe a few people did. Maybe there was some content in the courses.

To me, TU looks like an example of my guess about how Trump has done a lot of his smaller businesses: He has a broad, big picture idea, gets some people, and has them try to make the idea work. One of the keys to the idea is the Trump brand. Then the people Trump hired charge forward. If they make money, don't lose big law suits, and don't get too much bad publicity, then Trump regarded the project as successful. Call it business. For the customers, it's buyer beware. From what I've seen of the for-profit education industry out there, TU seems to fit right in. For the selling, sure, look at the famous movie scene from Glenn Garry Glenn Ross

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Lf8GtMe4M

So, selling in business is permitted to be just like that and sometimes is. So, maybe much of the selling of TU to students was like that.

A concern: One of your video clips has Trump selling TU and to me he looks and sounds very much the same as he did in his rallies and interviews during the primaries. He's good at sounding sincere: He sounded sincere for TU but said things, e.g., "handpicked", that conflict with what was in the deposition transcript you referenced. And during the primaries he sounded similarly sincere. That's a concern -- I need to upgrade my sincerity filter.

So, instead of Trump I should have backed one of the 16 Republican candidates he beat? I liked them less than Trump -- have no reason to trust them any more than Trump. I should vote for Hillary or Bernie? They can sound sincere, too, but to me the details, such as I can find them, look a lot worse than Trump's, and I agree that Hillary is a terrible crook and should go to jail for her violations of the rules and laws about handling classified information. So, maybe I should wait for Batman, Superman, Captain America, or John Wayne? Not promising, either.

So, one reason I have on my computer as primary sources what Trump said is to have, for later, means to write critical blog posts, with the primary sources and solid references, if Trump fails to deliver on his promises. Thin soup if Trump is lying. Not a lot of recourse.

Do I know that Trump's plans for jobs, the deficit, taxes, the wall, trade negotiations, negotiations with Iran, economic growth, protecting the US from radical Islam, rebuilding the US military, etc. are solid, doable, realistic, feasible? I wish I did, but I don't. And similarly for Jeb!, Cruz, Rubio, Carly, ....

What should I do about TU, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, etc.? It was business. If it was bad enough, then he'd be in jail.

Sure, I'd like a solid contract with a candidate for POTUS, but we don't have those yet. Lacking a solid contract, I'd like details. There are some, at a high level that don't guarantee much, at Trump's Web site. I'd like some examples of where our trade deals are bad, what good trade deals would look like, and the chances of getting good deals -- I don't have that. I'd like some really careful numbers, quarter by quarter, on the economy, budgets, taxes, revenue, deficits, interest rates, and inflation, but, again, I have no way to get those. Maybe the Fed staff can do some useful things with such macro economic modeling, but maybe they can't, either.

So, what can I do? What can any citizen or voter do? What did voters do for Ike, FDR, ..., Lincoln, ... Washington? Try to read character. And now we have what should be some advantages. Do I like our accuracy in reading character? HELL NO. Heck, I liked Romney, but recently I've concluded that he's a total turkey. How such a total turkey could have done that well in business and in MA politics I can't understand, but he looks like a turkey now.

For Trump: He's energetic. He's paying for nearly all of his campaign with his own money. Nearly any day in nearly any state, he can get 30,000 people to show up for one of his rallies -- i.e., he can build consensus and, e.g., thus get Congress to go along. He can get tens of millions of people to watch on TV and will likely do that again in the three or whatever debates with the Dem candidate -- again, he can get people to watch; he can build consensus. It appears that he wants the convention to add publcity and brand; if so, then that could help him get Congress to go along. I agree with him that the media is deliberately deceptive, disgusting, dangerous, and I'm pleased that he pushes back on them really hard -- and he's the only US high office candidate who does that. And, thus, maybe some of the newsies will actually dig into his details, plans, etc. to give us what we need but don't have now. He seems to be one heck of an effective manager: His small team did really well in the primaries. Think for a minute about the planning, details, contracts, arrangements, publicity, security, etc. for rallies for 10,000 -- 30,000 at a pop, all across the country. How the heck to do that, with a small, green staff?

Or, to me, Trump is the least bad, by a large margin, but, still, by a much larger margin, less than I wish we had and knew before we vote.

After all that, I've got my startup to work on.

Well, the biggie issues are (A) she had some super woop de do top, top, top secret info in some of those e-mails and (B) it appears that, via some sloppy password handling, etc. her e-mail server was easy to hack. And it may have been hackable otherwise. The combination of (A) and (B) could be much worse than awful: E.g., from the info in her e-mails, Russia, China, NK, Iran, etc. could ask "How the heck did the US know THAT? We have a leak, human intel, spies, electronics, something, and we need to discover what and plug it." If we had spies, then they could be killed or rendered useless. Supposedly some of the info in her e-mail traffic was really bad to let out.

One point you made is that for better vetting Trump, we should have seen him for some years in public service. With the generally low opinion of politicians, maybe we are not missing much, but you may be correct. E.g., in the eyes of the Republican party voters, Trump just totally knocked the socks off 16 politicians with histories of public service in politics. That is, the voters didn't think much of the records in public service of Jeb!, Rubio, Cruz, etc. Obama was an IL state senator and then a US senator -- hmm.

For an example of what you did suggest, I REALLY like my Congressman Dr. Chris Gibson, Colonel US Army, Retired, but he is resigning as he promised in his self-enforced term limits to teach. I want him for VP.

On sloppy management standards, you may have a point: Trump is promising to relax a lot of regulations, rules, etc. E.g., for the EPA, he says that he wants clean water and air. While I regard the EPA as infested with radical, OCD, earth-worship Greenie psycho, sicko, wackos, and maybe used by Obama for shakedowns, we've done a lot to clean up the environment beyond just water and air. If Trump is as sloppy managing government projects that might add dirt to the environment as he was managing TU, that could be bad. But, again, TU was business -- intended to be a profit making for-profit educational venture.

I don't know why the heck Hillary is in politics. Maybe as a college sophomore coed she wanted to save the world, but that was a long time ago. In some ways she's just really bright, but somehow it appears that still she's disconnected from reality, so much that she is unable to be effective and, instead, is just dangerous, from HillaryCare, ..., Benghazi, her speeches, Clinton Global Initiative, etc. Tough to believe that someone could be so bright in some respects but such a train wreck in others, and it took me a long time where I "paid full tuition" to understand that about humans, but it's fully true: It's fully believable and, sadly, not very surprising that she can be really bright but, still, in a lot of the rest of life, just a train wreck -- which to me it looks like she is.

I don't think that Trump is a racist, xenophobe, or misogynist, but you have raised some interesting respects for which Trump should be vetted. Sadly, the media won't do that.

For a recession, sure, the official definition is for the time on the way down, three quarters in a row of less GDP or some such. Then once the GDP quits falling, we say that the recession is over! Lying with statistics, or at least with a goofy definition. For the people, we are out of a recession when the GDP gets back where it was. With that definition, we are still in the recession of 2008, and that is serious because a lot of people are hurting. Also it's serious because 2008 was 8 years ago, and the Great Depression lasted only 12 years. Net, Obama hasn't known how the heck to get us out of the Great Recession.

My impression of the employment situation is that it sucks, that is, with some exceptions that apply to only a tiny fraction of the population, it's nearly impossible for a person to be hired, say, to support a family -- high school graduate, college graduate, professional school graduate, mid career middle class worker, etc. For another sign of a sick economy, the birth rate is too darned low -- literally we are going extinct. That is, family formation sucks. From all the data I've seen, the fraction of the work force that wants a job but can't find one is somewhere in 20-35%. That's a Great Depression number. The only reason we are not in a Second Great Depression is massive fiscal stimulus, massive monetary stimulus, and the social safety net.

E.g., GDP is hardly growing. But, there is more: We are now so afraid of the banking system blowing bubbles that the banking regulators have nearly put commercial banking out of business. In a sense, it appears that we are going for a cash instead of a credit economy. One thing Trump can do to get the economy going is to get banking regulations like they were before the more recent changes.

Here is some good news: Since Ike, we in the US have suffered terribly from a lot of really totally brain dead POTUS decisions: Viet Nam. Fumbling with the oil crisis. The inflation that caused the S&L crisis and the 22% interest rates. The bubble blowing of 2000 and 2008. If Trump is correct, the horrible trade deals, e.g., NAFTA, letting China into the WTO, and just playing pocket pool as our trade deficits soared, plants closed, etc. Then the Greenie nonsense. Then Gulf War II. Then ObamaCare. Sarbanes-Oxley and killing off our commercial banking system. The open borders nonsense.

We could be a LOT better off if we just quit being so just totally brain-dead stupid. All of that is well within what can be fixed with just Trump's common sense.

There is another way to get the economy going: Send everyone a check for $1000. Wait one quarter. If that wasn't enough, then do it again. Soon enough it will work.

To me, especially after Trump's speech this week on Clinton cash, Benghazi, e-mail, etc., it's Trump in the White House in January. Okay. Now maybe the thing to do is to vet the heck out of him and, starting in January, monitor the heck out of him. Too bad the mainstream media, even when they hate Trump for whatever reasons, can't write meaningful material on Trump. Your writing, since you do give some references, although not all of those references make solid cases, is much better than the MSM.

We put up with the disasters of Obama, W, and Clinton. We might do really well with Trump.

I don't believe Rubio ever talked about any such details of Trump's anatomy, and it would be really bizarre circumstance for him to have or claim any knowledge of the subject. It is Trump alone who brought attention to this subject, and the only reason I can see for it is because Trump thinks it contributes to his macho image.

> When he says, Obama has something else going on,

He means Obama is too soft on Islamic terrorism. It may be true or false but this is way separated from saying Obama is involved in actually organizing specific terror attack, which is batshit insane. The difference is like between saying intelligence mishaps and incompetence during Bush's administration that allowed 9/11 to happen are Bush's fault and saying Bush personally orchestrated events of 9/11.

> Trump doesn't, he doubles down.

That's his media strategy. There's no bad press. And the press falls for it hook, line and sinker, and on the way exaggerates and inflates everything Trump said by order of magnitude. This leads to two thinks: a) Trump's media coverage is overwhelming, and it costs literally nothing to him and b) it's no longer possible to distinguish which outrageous story about Trump is true and which is not, which numbs people to anything outrageous Trump may actually say. Plus, every time somebody calls Trump out on a real outrage, he can cite a fake outrage as a proof the press is out to get him, and thus blunt the effect of a real thing.

Trump has responsibility for it, but the press falling for it and helping him to perform this strategy - while thinking they are heroically fighting Trump - has equal, if not greater, responsibility - Trump is expected to behave selfishly, they are expected to be the counterbalance for such behavior, not the amplifier of it.