US US Politics General - Discussion of President Biden and other politicians

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Nihil Jung said:
On the L.A. firefighters radio channel about 10 minutes ago, since things are winding down for the moment, one of the firemen starting shitting on the mayor, talking about how she's out of town, and how three days ago she announced her intent to shut down one of their precincts. Two other people on the line kept yelling "open line!" Over and over again as he continued to amble on. Pretty entertaining.
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He's probably not going to have a job after this. How unfortunate.
 
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Nihil Jung said:
On the L.A. firefighters radio channel about 10 minutes ago, since things are winding down for the moment, one of the firemen starting shitting on the mayor, talking about how she's out of town, and how three days ago she announced her intent to shut down one of their precincts. Two other people on the line kept yelling "open line!" Over and over again as he continued to amble on. Pretty entertaining.
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Funny, I was just playing Robocop today and no matter how bad OCP is, Mayor Kuzak is just as slimy and incompetent as Karen Bass or Newsom, so I can't ever support him.
 
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Northern Blockhead said:
Major flaw with that logic is that this will likely push South and Central America to pursue much closer relations with China.
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Had a chat with some mexicann construction workers last time I visited cozumel who explained why this would never happen. "They treat us like niggers, they think we are dumb and poor instead of just poor."
 
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The Last Stand said:
I'm guessing the fires in CA are too out of control to where an intentional fire won't help snuff out the big fires?
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The time for controlled burns was months or years before an actual fire. Controlled burns control the build up of litter and brush, which for the purpose of California is just dry fucking carbon sitting in the sun.

Controlled burns and general forestry isn't that hard to get a grasp of. Here's a good way to visualize it:

If you took a lighter and held it up to a pair of jeans, it would not immediately catch on fire. Denim has a pretty low relative surface area, even if it's basically just dyed canvas. However, if you scrape your jeans with a pocket knife you'll get some fine lint and that burns exceptionally well. The reason is surface area. Imagine the lint as the brush that is just growing and drying between larger trees. It's just like the lint; high surface area low moisture, and basically just carbon. Once enough lint catches even the denim burns.
 
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So, about those tariffs. If this WaPo article is to be believed, Trump is already capitulating to his donor class and paring them back.

President-elect Donald Trump’s aides are exploring tariff plans that would be applied to every country but only cover critical imports, three people familiar with the matter said — a key shift from his plans during the 2024 presidential campaign.

If implemented, the emerging plans would pare back the most sweeping elements of Trump’s campaign plans but still would be likely to upend global trade and carry major consequences for the U.S. economy and consumers.

As a candidate, Trump called for “universal” tariffs of as high as 10 or 20 percent on everything imported into the United States. Many economists warned that such plans could cause price shocks, and many Republicans in Congress might have criticized them.

Two weeks before Trump takes office, his aides are still discussing plans to impose import duties on goods from every country, the people said. But rather than apply tariffs to all imports, the current discussions center on imposing them only on certain sectors deemed critical to national or economic security — a shift that would jettison a key aspect of Trump’s campaign pledge, at least for now, said the people, who cautioned that no decisions have been finalized and that planning remains in flux. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

The potential change reflects a recognition that Trump’s initial plans — which would have been immediately noticeable in the price of food imports and cheap consumer electronics — could prove politically unpopular and disruptive. But consideration of universal tariffs of some kind still reflects the Trump team’s determination to implement measures that can’t be easily circumvented by having products shipped via a third country.

Exactly which imports or industries would face tariffs was not immediately clear. Preliminary discussions have largely focused on several key sectors that the Trump team wants to bring back to the United States, the people said. Those include the defense industrial supply chain (through tariffs on steel, iron, aluminum and copper); critical medical supplies (syringes, needles, vials and pharmaceutical materials); and energy production (batteries, rare earth minerals and even solar panels), two of the people said.

It’s also unclear how these plans intersect with Trump’s stated intent to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada and an additional 10 percent tariff on China unless they take measures to reduce migration and drug trafficking. Many business leaders view those measures as unlikely to ever take effect, but some people familiar with the matter said they could be imposed along with universal tariffs on key sectors.

The narrower list of initial tariffs may also partially reflect growing fears about the persistence of inflation in the coming year. The Federal Reserve in December signaled that officials expect just two interest rate cuts for this year, as price increases remain stickier than initially forecast.
Among those leading the internal planning is Vince Haley, a top Trump campaign aide slated to run the White House Domestic Policy Council; Scott Bessent, tapped to be Trump’s treasury secretary; and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary pick, the people said.

“The sector-based universal tariff is a little bit easier for everybody to stomach out the gate. The thought is if you’re going to do universal tariffs, why not at least start with these targeted measures?” one of the people said. “And it would still give CEOs a massive incentive to start making their products here.”

After this story was published on Monday morning, Trump criticized The Washington Post’s reporting in a post on his Truth Social site and said his tariff policy would not be pared back.
“The story in the Washington Post, quoting so-called anonymous sources, which don’t exist, incorrectly states that my tariff policy will be pared back. That is wrong,” Trump wrote. “The Washington Post knows it’s wrong. It’s just another example of Fake News.”

Even the revamped plans are strikingly aggressive. The Trump team’s plans would, if put into effect, amount to one of the biggest challenges in decades to the global trade order. Trump’s advisers view this effort as necessary to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. economy, but it could invite retaliation from the rest of the world and drive prices up for consumers and businesses alike.

Before Trump’s Truth Social post, the transition team declined to comment on internal planning. Multiple people familiar with the discussions cautioned that Trump can change his mind quickly and that the tariff policies are not yet set.

“President Trump has promised tariff policies that protect the American manufacturers and working men and women from the unfair practices of foreign companies and foreign markets,” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump transition team, said in a statement. “As he did in his first term, he will implement economic and trade policies to make life affordable and more prosperous for our nation.”

Liberal and conservative critics say that even more-moderate versions of Trump’s campaign trade plans are still extreme, arguing that sweeping tariffs would drive up prices for U.S. consumers and manufacturers. Though Trump and protectionist allies say that these duties bolster domestic manufacturing by giving firms a financial incentive to invest here, economists of both parties say they can have the opposite effect by raising input costs.

“If you put tariffs on every country in the world, it’s not like we can import from Mars,” said Kimberly Clausing, who served as a top economist in President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department and is now at UCLA and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank. Clausing said that a majority of U.S. imports are for intermediate goods in firms’ supply chains, not for finished products. “So we’d be making it much more expensive for a U.S. firm to compete with anyone else in the world, because our firms would have to pay much more for imports.”
The emerging tariff plans bring into focus what is likely to be a key priority of the new administration.

During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on more than $360 billion worth of goods from China, particularly steel and aluminum. His trade threats were largely focused on Beijing, but they rattled global trade and sparked major tensions with America’s geopolitical allies.

Trump’s tariffs on China were followed by a boom in imports to the United States from countries such as Vietnam, as manufacturers rerouted goods to circumvent the duty. Both Biden and Trump advisers have also expressed concerns about the potential for China to use Mexico as a back door to U.S. markets.
Mexico accounts for more than 87 percent of certain U.S. steel imports, with the total level nearly 500 percent over its historic baseline, according to data compiled by the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a group that supports trade restrictions. The surge in Mexican steel into the United States has coincided with the closure of some U.S. factories, such as the Zekelman Industries plants in Chicago and California.

Charles Benoit, a trade attorney at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, said the U.S. government already collects sector-specific information on imports, which would make it relatively easy to add tariffs.

“Twenty percent across-the-board tariffs are great for revenue, but if they’re looking to tailor it a bit, that’s easy to do in the tariff schedule,” Benoit said. “There’s no additional compliance cost, no rulemaking — so it’s elegant.”
Trump in recent days has publicly reiterated his affinity for tariffs, which during the campaign he called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” On Wednesday, he posted on his social media platform Truth Social: “The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our Country … Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!”
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Sweeter and Savoury said:
The plebs? Well they can just suffer now can't they.
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Thing is, the fire has spread to the point that it hit Hollywood Hills. We're not talking plebs anymore, the incompetence is so bad that it's affecting the upper class.
Of course, it's not going to stop being a one-party state, Democrats will keep winning, but this is bad enough that I can imagine some powerful people are making calls right now.
 
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Funny how people are raging about others in red states comparing the situation in LA and the like to Sodom and Gomorrah, saying that they don’t have a right to say that when they opened they hearts and wallets to the red states who were afflicted by things such as hurricanes. Like, why critique and make parody posts about California when you Bible-thumpers are quick to defend your red states.

Wonder if the fact that they themselves have been doing the same thing from a Coastal elitist perspective has anything to do about it, and this is just them clapping back? Gee, hard to figure that out huh?
 
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RybenZ999 said:
About the H1-B fiasco, how much do normalfags care about this? Like I know a couple of news outlets talked about this, but most of the drama seems contained to the internet, so does the average joe know anything about this?
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There's not a normalfag out there who hasn't

1. had to deal with an Indian on the phone
2. had a phone call come in to them or a parent claiming to be "Bill from Microsoft" wanting to talk about their computer

Once people realize "H-1B means the Indian Faggots on the Phone" support for H-1B craters.
 
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BeffJezos said:
Simply appearing on podcasts didn't cause Trump to win. It was the fact that the Biden-Harris White House was totally ineffective and incompetent for 4 long, excruciating years.
  • Freeing a Russian international arms dealer, called The Merchant of Death, as a trade to free Britney Griner (WNBA player, who stupidly brought a THC vape pen to fucking Russia in her carry-on).
  • Afghanistan and the failed withdrawal, resulting in many losses of life which the media conveniently forgot about.
  • All the tranny shit, involving Biden's White House allowing photo ops and visibility and shoving it down the average Americans' throat for 4 years.
  • Literally doubling the amount of dollars in circulation, causing housing prices to double, then sending hundreds of billions of that money to Ukraine.
  • Biden's handlers not allowing him to go off-script, despite being the leader of the free world.
  • Allowing millions upon millions of unvetted illegals to enter the country, then paying them to be here (again, by diverting taxpayers dollars). Just straight-up stealing from American citizens to gain more blue voters.
  • Pardoning Hunter Biden, despite promising not to.
  • All the incidents of senility - falling on stairs, shitting himself in front of the Pope, calling the Ukrainian president "Putin," there's too many to remember.
This is just what I can remember, rapid-fire, off the top of my head. There are so many more. Then for the Harris-Walz campaign, they spent over $1bn. on celebrity appearances at a time when the average American is struggling to afford gas and groceries. Just a totally tonedeaf campaign. Spend all sorts of money to seem completely unrelatable to anybody who isn't a wealthy elite or brainrotted Always Vote Dem, No Matter What voter.

After ALL THAT, the Republican candidate literally just has to not be a complete fuck-up and seem like someone you could have a beer with. Biden or Harris could've easily won a second term if they weren't so incompetent the past 4 years.
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A lot of voters, especially younger ones weren't privy to most of that. I think you're downplaying the influence of his podcast rotation and talking on each one for 2-4 hours. I don't like Trump, but I had some respect that he was willing to go through that meat grinder and get a little uncomfortable, go way off script. I do think there is a lot of value in longform talks, doesn't make him amazing or anything but it let people know him way better then the fake personas Kamala was putting out there.

I think his zoomer son influenced him to do that, and it resonated with a lot of younger voters. As sad as it sounds just seeing Trump on "Thing I watch" was enough to get their vote. Its how its always been with young voters, even myself. I really didn't start caring about specific issues until my 30s, and even then Trump isn't the answer for most of it, just the classic lesser of 2 evils.

Definitely not disagreeing with your points, those were big issues and all we're talking about contributed, its just hard to make sweeping generalities with such a broad thing like this.
 
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