I loved this bit of gallows humor and comparison to the Ringling Bros circus.. although the Ringling Bros was sort of magical. Remember: "Ladies and Gentlemen and children of all ages"? This administration is what it is.. Don't expect it to settle down or improve. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...ircus-out-of-town_us_5927a63ce4b065b396c06bcf Kick Donald Trump’s Circus Out Of Town 05/26/2017 05:57 am ET | Updated 2 days ago I’m increasingly convinced that the real reason Ringling Bros. has gone out of business is that when it comes to circuses, the Trump White House was just too much competition. For sure, it’s a sordid extravaganza with a lot more than three rings. The high wire acts alone are worth the price of admission, and the clowns — one of whom is also the putative ringmaster — are unintentionally hilarious, if sinister, as clowns so often seem to be. To some. Not me. But as guiltily entertaining as current events may be for political wonks, nerds and sadomasochists, this whole mess of an administration, with a special emphasis on the Russia connection and Donald Trump’s clumsy, thuggish attempts at a cover-up, is deadly serious business. It’s crucial to get to the bottom of whether Trump’s campaign knew and approved the hacking of our elections, but also vitally important to remember that while we’re transfixed by that particular mayhem there’s a lot of other rotten stuff going on, too. Like that continued stinker of a health care reform bill which the Congressional Budget Office still says will cause the number of uninsured people to increase by more than 20 million over the next 10 years. Attention must be paid. Trump’s proposed budget released on Tuesday devastates just about everything but defense expenditures. (At bottom, when it comes to increasing employment, Trump’s exclamation of “jobs, jobs, jobs!” really comes down to “guns, guns, guns!” — manufacturing more and more weapons — which inevitably will have him itching for a war in which to use them.) Despite Trump’s campaign promises, Medicaid is under the knife for hundreds of billions, a move that will harm millions who voted for him. Food stamps are slashed by $190 billion, the earned income tax credit by $40 billion. Money for the State Department and other Cabinet-level departments is severely cut back, funding for the Environmental Protection Agency is reduced by 31 percent to $5.65 billion, including a 25 percent reduction in the Superfund charged with cleaning up toxic waste sites. But as The New Republic’s Alex Shephard points out, not only is this deeply immoral, “It’s also a brazen accounting scam,” claiming deficits created by the proposed budget will be offset by $2 trillion in economic growth — growth that already has been pegged to cover deficits created by proposed tax cuts. Shephard wrote: This reaffirms two things about Trump. The first is that, despite his campaign rhetoric, Trump is governing as a typical steal-from-the-poor-to-pay-the-rich Republican. The second is that this administration’s cynicism is only matched by its incompetence. Its Madoff-esque accounting tricks are so brazen that they would be laughable if they weren’t so horrific. As we’ve seen too often, the incompetent can cause irreparable damage, and this load of bull crashing through the White House china shop is taking maladroitness to new levels of pandemonium. True, once this budget proposal goes through the congressional wringer, the result will bear little semblance to what was released this week — many of the cuts will shrink or even disappear completely — but it’s close enough to the GOP wish list that the rich will continue getting richer and the lower end of the income inequality charts will feel a ton of pain. Mission accomplished.
Boy, Im rolling in the floor laughing @ the always zany Huffpo writers/clowns. Whatever works to keep you on the path, Margot.
