mtutiger

Exactly. He's the POTUS, he's the one who campaigned on taking care of it and taking care of it quickly. Maybe when his administration gets done doing things like directing the Air Force not to teach about the Tuskegee Airman, they can get around with telling us how they plan to addressing high costs.

I mean, when I see the administration taking a loaded gun and and threatening to shoot ourselves in the foot on this particular issue... Yeah, I'm going to hold that against them.

Not threaten steep tariffs on other countries, for starters. I have yet to hear a compelling case that these are necessary

I'm out of likes, but totally understand Eddie's POV.

He also ran on these things... These were big pieces of his campaign message Promises Broken

I don't have Eddie's self restraint in tuning out (to my detriment probably), but I do think that part of why people are sort of tuned out (or at least not engaging as much with this stuff in online spaces) is because Trump won the popular vote and, at least in the context of how our elections are run (ie. EC), pretty decisively. (Note: I don't think it was all that decisive.... this was more 2004 than 1984) Ultimately because of this, there's a recognition that if we are to get out of this mess, it's going to have to be a longer game and that people are going to have to feel pain of touching the hot stove. Which, to be honest, still feels pretty underindexed.... I don't think a lot of what he's doing is going to be popular in practice. That doesn't mean that there aren't ways to engage, certainly donating money and time to organizations that push back against the excesses is a good start. But outside of being an outlet for catharsis, there isn't much that posting about this stuff here ultimately accomplishes.

Reports of Navajo people being detained in immigration sweeps sparks concern from tribal leaders

The reporting on WGN tonight is that the school employees understood that the person was with DHS. That became an assumption of ICE, but USSS is also under the umbrella of DHS as well. It looks like a misunderstanding. I think the story we are now getting is accurate, but it's not surprising with the way the incoming (now current) administration went out last weekend and specifically called out and targeted this city in the Wall Street Journal as being an epicenter for these raids. The end result is that residents are on edge and are distrustful of the feds. It goes to the larger point made earlier: this administration is singularly focused on immigration, but the impacts of this focus could very well have consequences for local law enforcement and other agencies in dealing with investigations of possible crimes.

I have a feeling that won't be the only tie that JV is gonna have to break

"While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young. Forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost." Ronald Reagan, 1989

FWIW, during and after the freeze in 2021, state politicians in Texas went a long way to publicly bash wind and solar as a means to defend O&G, or come up with an alternative explanation that wasn't the fact that LNG was freezing at various wellheads throughout West Texas (which was a major driver of the crisis and came after providers, after the 2011 winter storm, didn't do hardly anything in response). The effect of that is that wind energy popularity even in the largest wind producing state isn't what it used to be and is now, like many other things in our society, politically polarized for absolutely no reason at all. So no, I don't think this is about blue states or red states, this is that Donald Trump has always hated this stuff (for the same reasons that NIMBY coastal elitists types hate it) and that he and others have primed the base to hate this stuff. Even if there is economic benefit.

So bad on so many levels.

As far as the Big Tech guys are concerned, I've become more convinced that their latest heel turn is less about where they think public opinion is going and more about Trump promising them lots of cash for AI and other pursuits. The Stargate announcement was kinda revealing in particular.

Great post - this technology (along with the proliferation of bitcoin mining) is absolute bottomless suck of energy. There's no guarantee that it will be cost effective any time soon

If we want to be totally honest, Los Angeles finds itself in the predicament that it's in because (in large part) it's really not an area where a major metropolis should have been built. But that's the fault of the likes of Fred Eaton and Wililam Mulholland, not contemporary politicians. My guess is that Donald Trump probably has no idea who William Mulholland was nor understands anything about hydrology, and views this more using the tragedy of others for his own gain.

I didn't realize that being anti-harassment and in favor of safety and occupational health qualified for "woke" under this new administration

http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/ All this just makes the tech bros look more divorced from reality...

*crickets*

Going to a state recently ravaged by a Hurricane and then suggesting the elimination of FEMA is.... not what I would call looking like a real POTUS.

A lot of conservatives in high-output ag states like Illinois or Iowa see solar farms as a waste of productive agricultural land.... it's not entirely wrong, but on the other hand, farms are generally outputting way more product that can be marketed domestically and we export a massive amount of corn, grain, other commodities. And these farms, which on average (at least in Illinois) are around 50 acres, are generally smaller than subdivision and new housing, for which there's far less controversy when they overtake productive agricultural land.. The opposition to windmills, of which there's little footprint to speak of, is even more mystifying.

Him name-checking Florida in this is interesting....

The politics around wind and solar are still fairly polarized, but it also comes down to land rights as well. Farmers see a source of additional revenue, we all benefit from secondary sources of energy, it's hard to see the downside exactly. So yeah, Trump can speak for himself when he goes all "we don't want _____"

What's Trump's plans to combat low home sales and high interest rates?

He's also wrong in that Cubans have pretty much always been a GOP constituency going all the way back to the fall of Batista / rise of Castro