President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Maybe it's not to remind everyone else in the room, but to remind Trump?

 

But most importantly, Be Best.

 

I think it's a little much to suggest that spending now to hamstring the next congress is a real plan, but there's no question the GOP is not talking about the deficit now, and I'd bet anything that it suddenly becomes a top-5 issue for them if the Democrats win control of anything in November.

 

Campaign ad voiceover: Donald Trump promised he'd fight for you. But how can he do that when he wastes so much time picking fights that don't help?


Trump reignites hurricane feud with Puerto Rican officials

 

And they'll agree to eliminate the tax cut for the very rich and cut defense spending by 20% to help bring spending back in line, because the deficit that mattered under Clinton, didn't matter under Bush, mattered under Obama and didn't matter under T-Rump is suddenly killing our country and hurting the job creators!

HA HA HA HA HA

 

House Republicans, well, some of them, have said that if they keep the majority, next year will see cuts to Medicaid. You can bet the same will go for Medicare and Social Security.

 

I don't doubt it, but that's unfortunately true of any election cycle. Democrats are making a big deal of it now (and IIRC did when Bush was president as well), whereas they were brushing it off while deficits were going up under Obama.

 

Just a reminder this election season:

Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades

 

I just have a hard time getting too worked up about it, because what is considered a Hundred Year Storm might not be that. Good, widespread, accurate record keeping of weather events is a fairly young science. Maybe 150 years in some cases, or as little as 60-70 years in some areas. We can accurately detect, monitor and chronicle an EF-5 tornado in rural Kansas in 2018 that might have gone undetected in 1918 because no one was there to witness it.

Hurricanes, especially, need to be graded on a sliding scale. They're usually strongest a day or two before they make landfall and storms that are actually Category 5 at landfall are exceptionally rare. There have been three this decade, all of them in the last three years. There were eight between 2003 and 2007, but none from 1998-2002 or 2008-16. Those peak intensities were likely recorded with instruments that were not available 100 years ago. Hell, a lot of the deaths and damage from 19th and early 20th century hurricanes occurred because people had no idea they were coming and got caught totally unprepared. Now we're tracking these things the moment they form and people can evacuate or at least prepare their homes and routines.
I guess what I'm saying is, the storms themselves aren't necessarily any stronger or more frequent than they've been for centuries. It's just that in the past century is when we've become a lot more aware of just how strong and frequent they are.

 

There's a lot in what you say, and there's the added factor that the areas where hurricanes strike are way more populated than they were even just 25 years ago, which magnifies the resulting destruction. But I think the warmer ocean waters also mean hurricane season lasts longer. I mean, Sandy hit New York and New Jersey the week of Halloween. If the season is longer, the number of storms will increase just because of that. Whether or not they're more severe, I sure don't know.

 

Tremendously tremendous, even!