US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9631

Former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s reported criticism of Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with the Russians is “absolutely ridiculous,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said today.

“I didn’t go to that meeting. And so I don’t know all of the details related to the meeting,” Scaramucci said on ABC News’ “Good Morning America.”

“But to say somebody is treasonous in doing something against the interests of the United States because they took a meeting is absolutely ridiculous."

Scaramucci added, "This is absolutely ridiculous he would make a statement like that if he made the statement.”

On January 05 2018 00:18 Nebuchad wrote:
He's about to get dumped isn't he.

Every time it rains, Ollie Williams gets the boats ready. She keeps a small fiberglass canoe tied to the bottom of her front steps, a metal flatboat tied to the side of the house, paddles and life jackets at the ready.

Williams and her husband, Daniel, already raised their double-wide trailer up on wooden stilts, 13 feet in the air, so the inside stays dry. But when it rains, the yard can fill quickly with several feet of water, lifting the canoe up the tall steps out front.

If the storm is bad enough, the family grabs go-bags full of documents and photos and paddles to higher ground, where they've hopefully remembered to move the cars beforehand. Then they call family or friends for help.

"This is where we wanted to be forever," says Ollie Williams. The couple grew up here near Slidell, east of New Orleans, and they say flooding didn't use to be this bad. "We wanted to build our home with our family, have memories."

But now she's fed up and thinks her family should move to a safer place.

For thousands of households where flooding is only expected to get worse, the state of Louisiana agrees. The state has even crafted a plan to buy out the most vulnerable homes along the coast, many of which are occupied by elderly and poor residents who stayed after Hurricane Katrina. But officials say there is no money to put that plan into action.

Louisiana is far from the only place struggling to cope with increased flooding and sea level rise, problems scientists say will only grow worse as the climate continues to warm. Hurricane Harvey's record rainfall in Houston last summer spurred calls to expand a home buyout program, but funding is an issue.

After Superstorm Sandy, New York offered a large-scale buyout program in hard-hit Staten Island, but some residents were reluctant to accept. For a decade, Alaska has been seeking help to relocate coastal communities where thawing permafrost and strong storms are severely eroding the land. And the beach town of Del Mar, Calif., recently dropped a proposal to tear down homes in a "managed retreat" from sea level rise, after residents worried that even considering the option would hurt their property values.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency encourages communities to make themselves more resilient to flooding, offering lower flood insurance rates in return. But the agency is struggling to update its flood maps, which generally don't take sea level rise into account. That has led Annapolis, Md., to start creating its own maps so property owners can know whether they're at risk.

Louisiana is losing land faster than just about anywhere else in the world. Since the 1930s, nearly 2,000 square miles — a land mass about the size of Delaware — have washed away into the Gulf of Mexico. The reasons include sinking land, rising sea levels, damage from the dredging of canals by oil companies and the brutal impact of storm surges and hurricanes. Coastal marshes act as a buffer for storms, so the less land there is, the bigger the threat to residents.

For a decade, the state has been working to build up its coast, re-creating barrier islands and planting new marshes. It created a coastal agency and a Coastal Master Plan, updated every five years. But in its latest plan, the 2017 Coastal Master Plan, officials admit they can't save all the land. They say people will have to move.

"I think it's important to note that this is really the first time we've had this level of discussion about this sensitive of a topic," says Bren Haase, a planner with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

When the last plan simply mentioned the possibility of buyouts, the agency head at the time, now-Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., says there were some "very upset people literally threatening us with our lives."

In its most recent report, the agency worked with the Rand Corp. and the state's new Water Institute of the Gulf to model the most vulnerable areas. Using data on elevation, sea level rise and storm surge, the CPRA calculates that 23,000 buildings near the coast would flood 3-12 feet during a hundred-year storm. (That's a storm with a 1 percent chance of happening any given year). The report says such homeowners should elevate their houses.

The agency says 2,400 households could flood more than 12 feet during a major storm, and it lays out a detailed program to buy them out. Under it, the state would pay fair market value for the homes, demolish them, then pay for new houses farther north. But the buyout program is on paper only. Planner Haase says it would cost $1.2 billion, money the state does not have.

Louisiana does have billions of dollars to restore its coast. That's mostly from a settlement with BP after its devastating oil spill in 2010. Officials also expect millions of dollars annually from the sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf. But Haase says most of these funds are restricted and cannot be used to buy people's homes and move them.

On January 05 2018 00:05 farvacola wrote:
I don't think an arbitrary age line makes too much sense; there are plenty of senior status federal judges still as sharp as ever and some are pushing 80. That said, we should be able to screen candidates more thoroughly.

On January 05 2018 00:27 Seuss wrote:


Yeah it’s not about “people over X age can’t be president” so much as people who are older need more thorough, possible third party, medical examination and regular exams to detect problems early.

On January 05 2018 00:30 brian wrote:

this’ll be interesting. i imagine it will force Congress’s hand to finally address pot

On January 05 2018 00:34 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:


And if the Democrats had any clue how to run a campaign would campaign hard and sweep.

On January 05 2018 00:30 brian wrote:

this’ll be interesting. i imagine it will force Congress’s hand to finally address pot

On January 03 2018 16:01 mozoku wrote:

Apologies for late reply. Busy work day.

You're making the exact mistake that I thought you would, and mistakenly attributing to the government that which is actually the result of technology-driven economic shifts.

First mistake: the middle class isn't simply deteriorating away into poverty. It's bifurcating into winners and losers, which is the expected outcome of the shift to the knowledge economy and globalization. The driver of inequality, therefore, isn't government policy but economic shifts. Unions are part of this story, as it's a global trend. While globalization has certainly hurt American laborers and benefited higher earners, it's also brought raised the living standards of untold millions, if not billions, in the developing world. You can make a valid argument that the US should be prioritizing its domestic workers ahead of foreigners, but liberals and leftists who believe the US government is out to screw the middle class almost invariably despise the nationalist/protectionist view so that isn't your ticket either.

Next mistake: blaming the US tax code. Granted the tax code just changed, but the previous tax regime had been the most progressive tax code among developed countries. However, the progressive tax revenue hasn't been redistributed to the middle- and lower- classes. I suspect that has to do with the fact that America subsidizes a large share of the world's defense--seeing as most of the developed world spends about a than a third of as much on defense as the US (as a share of GDP, which is already somewhat biased against the US). [1] [2]

There's one reason you listed that I haven't yet touched: social programs. The two that I commonly hear about are education and healthcare. US healthcare is a mess, but there's been highly publicized efforts from both sides to reform the system in the past decade. The system will likely look completely different in another 10 years.

The suggested education policies I've seen that focus on expanding college access are moronic, as I've explained in an earlier post.
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Despite all of the crying about lobbyists, campaign funding, Trump's profiting off the presidency, etc., there isn't much actual evidence that all of this has amounted to policies that have destroyed the middle class to line the pockets of the rich. The reality is that the shift in income in favor the upper and upper-middle class are economy and technology-driven, and that the government can't simply wave a magic wand to fix the problem.

Health care seems like the lowest hanging fruit, and unsurprisingly it's been the biggest political issue of the past two presidencies.

On January 05 2018 01:56 Mohdoo wrote:
So I've been going over worst case scenarios and here's what I've got:

Bannon/Wolff are using this as a way to show how damaging fake news can be. This entire thing is an elaborate ruse. Then they coordinate to have an intended streisand effect by pretending to try to prevent it from being published once lots of copies are already floating around. Then when the "book ban" doesn't work, Bannon makes bazillions of dollaz off of showing liberal fake news is just so fake.

I don't think that'll happen, but I am puckered in case it does.

On January 05 2018 01:56 Mohdoo wrote:
So I've been going over worst case scenarios and here's what I've got:

Bannon/Wolff are using this as a way to show how damaging fake news can be. This entire thing is an elaborate ruse. Then they coordinate to have an intended streisand effect by pretending to try to prevent it from being published once lots of copies are already floating around. Then when the "book ban" doesn't work, Bannon makes bazillions of dollaz off of showing liberal fake news is just so fake.

I don't think that'll happen, but I am puckered in case it does.

On January 05 2018 00:01 Seuss wrote:
The repetition angle is worrisome because that’s exactly the same thing that happened to my grandmother as her health declined.

I mean she always retread topics endlessly, but when she was healthy it was more riffs on the same idea than repetition. As she got older the variations gave way to repetiton, and the conversational cycles got shorter and shorter.

This just in, maybe we shouldn’t elect people age 70+ to the highest stress job in the country.

On January 05 2018 02:09 oBlade wrote:
I'm sorry to see Bannon and Trump breaking up as Bannon hates the GOP establishment and the Bushes and so on, but why on earth would he be going after the Trumps? Panicking that his party revolt is losing steam after Alabama?


It's not his optimum presidential age obviously, but isn't short-term memory what goes first?

Can you even imagine how many relationships and acquaintances and names he's been through? With that lifestyle and over that many years. How many people do we have in our contacts? Not hard to keep track of. If I were to hazard a guess I would imagine "old friends" was people bitter their relationship didn't mean the same to Trump as it meant to them.

On January 05 2018 02:09 oBlade wrote:
I'm sorry to see Bannon and Trump breaking up as Bannon hates the GOP establishment and the Bushes and so on, but why on earth would he be going after the Trumps? Panicking that his party revolt is losing steam after Alabama?

On January 05 2018 02:09 oBlade wrote:
I'm sorry to see Bannon and Trump breaking up as Bannon hates the GOP establishment and the Bushes and so on, but why on earth would he be going after the Trumps? Panicking that his party revolt is losing steam after Alabama?


It's not his optimum presidential age obviously, but isn't short-term memory what goes first?

Can you even imagine how many relationships and acquaintances and names he's been through? With that lifestyle and over that many years. How many people do we have in our contacts? Not hard to keep track of. If I were to hazard a guess I would imagine "old friends" was people bitter their relationship didn't mean the same to Trump as it meant to them.

On January 05 2018 02:13 Mohdoo wrote:


Nepotism isn't good for productivity or effectiveness. There's a lot of purging and change that needs to happen in the eyes of Bannon. Having a bunch of incompetent idiots with no experience doing this kinda thing just hurts the cause. The Trumps are a liability. Jared shouldn't be handling the middle east. People with 20 years of experience in middle eastern policy should. Ivanka shouldn't be talking to Japanese diplomats. People with 20 years of eastern asia diplomacy should be. I think it is easy to make the case that Trump could find people willing to do his bidding without them being his extremely inexperienced children.