jrober38

I won't argue against any of this, but what's the solution? He's proposed zero immigration reform policy, which means the kids will continue coming, they'll remain in cages, and 2/3 will keep getting separated from their parents. Trump can talk tough, but it will be policy that helps solve the matter and he doesn't have any idea or plan on how to fix things because the vast majority of these people arrive at legal ports of entry and overstay their visas.

Sure, but Trump has no immigration plan. Neither side does. Trump gets his supporters fired up with buzz words, but there's never been any substance. The wall never materialized, Mexico never paid for anything, and he's never proposed meaningful immigration reform policy that has any hope of passing into legislation. Trump had two fulls years to tackle immigration, and he accomplished practically nothing on that front.

He doesn't do that though. He can't help himself from talking about immigration which excites his base but gets him no where with independents. When Trump is off script at rallies or in future debates, he always goes for the red meat. He's never been able to stay on message without a teleprompter.

Sure. But as Rhino said, Trumps approval rating has been stuck at about 42% for two years now. We're talking about hundreds of polls, calling different people and the favourable vs unfavourable ratings have more or less remained constant for two full years. They can't all be wrong.

I think the Dem candidates match up much better against Trump than they do against each other. The question becomes how much damage will they inflict upon each other to win the nomination? One on one, if any of the front runners can get up on a stage, and spar with Trump about policy, and "look Presidential" they've got a great shot. 2016 was hilarious in the sense that Hilary had no policies. She was a historically bad candidate with major baggage, and no policies. She tried to ride into office just because she was a woman, and the majority of independent voters couldn't stomach her and her past. Trump got by yielding a couple buzz words that fired up his base ("Build the wall", "Lock her up", etc) and the base ate it up. This time will be different. Whichever Democrat emerges from the pile will have real policies that will have got them to the top of the pile because they're popular policies among Democrats. This time, unless he figures out how to control the narrative, Trump is going to have to talk about detailed policy on the debate stage, which I don't think is his strength at all.

I think this applies for any President other than Trump. If this were true and applied to Trump his approval ratings would be significantly higher.

Independents view Donald Trump as a hold your nose situation as well. Like in 2016, neither candidate is going to be popular. Many people will choose who they believe to be the less worse option. Also, the Dems are all over the map on policy. There are 20+ candidates and few of them share policies. When it's all said and done their candidate will probably be someone just left of centre running for President against Trump.

You guys have no idea what socialism is. It's just a trendy buzzword that Republicans like to use to scare people. By your standards, the entire Western Developed World is socialist. High taxes, socialized medicine, lower drug costs, etc, yet no major wars for 70+ years. Sure. US foreign policy has been a disaster for 50 years. There's a reason a huge chunk of the world dislikes you. They meddled in too many elections, overthrew too many duly elected politicians and dropped too many bombs on civilians. But the fact remains. There's a reason almost everyone who shows up at the Southern Border now is coming from the Norther Triangle whereas 20 years ago they came from Mexico mostly. There's a mass drought there, the farms have dried up and the livestock has died. People are literally starving to death and instead of staying and accepting that, those people are willing to travel hundreds of miles north, risking their lives to try and survive. Hopefully you're right.

That's not really true of the beginning but it certainly is of the last 1.5-2 years. When he was elected, a lot of the independents who either elected him or didn't even bother voting are optimistic and want to give the President a chance. At the beginning his disapproval rating was around 42% for the first little while, before ballooning up to a high of 57% in the summer of 2017. His disapproval rating should worry him. If you're dissatisfied with the President, you're probably going to go vote. If half the electorate shows up on Election Day to vote against Trump, he's going to lose in a total landslide.

The Global Warming debate is one that I find very interesting. One side, if wrong, would be leading the world down a path that will likely lead to world war, and possibly nuclear war. The other, if wrong, will have spent an astronomical amount of money, but there's no outcome that results in mass warfare. The world is getting hotter. I was in Italy last summer and went on a couple wine tours. Each tour guide essentially said they won't be able to make wine in 25-50 years because the summers are too hot, and there's not enough rain. They expect it to keep getting worse. No one seems to notice that the reason there's a mass migration going on from Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala is because the farms have dried up and there's no food. People can't make a living in the country side because there's a massive drought, and as a result they've moved into the cities which have some of the highest murder rates in the world. Instead of staying and probably dying, they're leaving and risking their lives to head north, because the alternative is literally death and starvation. In India, their 5th largest city, Chennai, which has a population of over 7 million people, just ran out of water. If things continue, tens of millions of people are going to start leaving the places they live in search of water. If things continue, countries will eventually go to war as water becomes so scarce around the equator. I don't know what the solution is. I understand it's impossible to expect people and the global economy to completely change in a short amount of time. However, if climate change is real, and the earth continues warming and food and water that nourish the billions of people living along the equator becomes more scarce, the world as we know it probably won't exist in 100 years. As a father of two small kids that scares me.

I think it's way too early to say it's a sure thing, although I agree that all the Democrat Candidates are extremely weak. Most of the leading Dems are ahead of Trump in National Polls and his approval rating hasn't been able to stay above 42% nationally, while his disapproval rating has been over 50% for the last two years. You'll tell me the polls were wrong two years ago, and I guess they were. However Hillary did win the popular vote by 3,000,000 votes, which suggests the polls were actually right, they just couldn't account for the Electoral College and how it actually selects a President. Nancy Pelosi is the de facto head of the Democrat Party right now, and she's nowhere near as far left as "The Squad". She knows that they cannot defeat Trump with those type of policies, and that they will lose considerable trust by trying to impeach him. There's a reason she and people like AOC are feuding. Pelosi is very smart. She's a career politician who knows exactly what they need to do to beat him next year. They'll nominate someone left of centre who will run on raising taxes on the rich, and improving Obama Care, and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. My guess is it will be an incredibly close election, with the Dems winning the popular vote again, but possibly losing the Electoral College by a small margin (they'll flip a couple swing states like Pennsylvania or Michigan where candidates like Biden and Bernie are currently 10 pts ahead of Trump).

As I said in another post, Trump is brilliant. His base eats up everything he says, Democrats go ballistic and over react, and people in the middle who will decide the election have to think twice about who they'll vote for, and the whole narrative is changed temporarily.

He literally responded to the criticism by saying it was targeted at "4 progressive congresswomen" and then specifically labelled AOC in a following Tweet, and went on to post fake poll numbers for AOC and Omar. It was pretty clear who he was talking about.

Because he specifically mentioned "4 Congresswomen", and I believe he also referred to them as "The Squad", which has been the nickname attached to the group.

I don't buy it. Trump says if anyone doesn't like it, they can leave and go back where they came from. There's no reason Trump should only be singling out minorities with that take.

Why has Trump never told Bernie to go back to where he came from? He and AOC share all the same views, yet Trump has never attacked him the same way.

Ugh. Telling someone to "go back where they came from" insinuates they're not welcome, and that they're different. As I said, why has Trump never once told Bernie Sanders to "go back"? Why did he just focus on four female minorities? That's where the prejudice kicks in, which makes it a racism comment. If Trump told everyone who complained to go back where they came from, you might have a point, but the fact that his prejudices forced him to single out four minority women is why the comment IS racist. They look different, therefore I believe they must be from somewhere else (3 of the 4 were born in the US), therefore my comment is a racist remark. If you just focus a specific attack on minorities, and not people like Bernie who share their beliefs but look like you look, that's where the racism develops. Like I said, if I said that in my work place, I WOULD BE FIRED because the comment is racist. Everything you said about the women is true. Congressmen or women can get away with extreme views because they represent such a small population. Donald Trump is supposed to represent all 330 million Americans.

That's his best skill, IMO. He can take bad news, or no news, and create a narrative that caters to his base. The Dems respond by going off the deep end, and the independent voters who will ultimately decide the election are left having to reconsider voting for the Dems because their policies are too extreme. For weeks the narrative has been kids in cages and a crisis at the border. That's gone now, and now the Dems are left fighting each other over who is racist and who isn't and the bad news the President faced has been temporarily washed away.

It's so hypocritical. When Obama was President, Republicans couldn't stop crying about spending and the deficit. How Trump is President, and no one cares that spending and the deficit are completely out of control. When the economy slows down, the Federal Government is going to be in serious trouble financially.

They'd probably get fired eventually. That doesn't matter though. The comment was racist. The inference of it was, you don't belong here, so go back where you came from if you don't like it my way, with the way someone looks insinuating that they're "different". Bernie Sanders is an open socialist. Why does Trump never tell him to go back where he came from? Why did he only target 4 women who are visible minorities?

This is hyperbole. Trump knows exactly what he's doing. I don't know if Trump is a racist, but I believe his comments the other day were racist. There's no doubt in my mind that if I went into my office and told someone of colour to go back where they came from that I'd be fired on the spot. Trump's strategy was designed to illicit a reaction and once again it worked. The current rhetoric of concentration camps on the border and kids in cages is gone, and instead he makes a comment that borders on the line of inappropriate (like many he's made over the past three years) and it changes the narrative. Instead of talking about the border, and the disaster of a situation down there, the focus is now on 4 far left wing Congresswomen and their socialist policies. Trump is a master at controlling the narrative. He's seen nothing but bad press for a couple weeks now, and now he's changed the narrative to something he can fight head on on twitter. Mission accomplished for him.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/4/18168157/rashida-tlaib-trump-impeachment-***** AOC and these other Congresswomen are a gift for Trump. They're loud, the media loves them because they know if they give them a platform to attack Trump that he'll retaliate with comments that some will deem racist or misogynistic. Additionally their politics are way too far left for the American voting public and because they have a platform they're dragging the Democrat Party farther and farther left, which in turn allows Trump to harp on them as socialists.

"Odd man out" usually means cut in the NFL. I can't see the whole article so I was just going off what the tweet said. If Jones is the #4, I don't think he makes the team because he offers nothing on special teams which is essential from your #4 and #5 WRs. Maybe we can flip him for a 7th round pick next year but we'd probably need to trade him soon to realize that type of return.

Zay Jones gets cut before Foster.

If you look at the last 10 years, that's not what happened. Obama inherited a $1.4 trillion deficit from George Bush in the midst of an economic crash. When he left eight years later the deficit was under $600 billion (down about 60%). In two and a half years, Trump has ballooned it back up to $1.1 trillion despite the economy doing its best in 50 years. This is almost entirely due to tax breaks to high income earners and increases in military spending. When the economy inevitably slows down, like it always does because every capitalist economy is cyclical, the deficit will balloon even farther when less tax revenue comes in. At that point the federal government will either need to hike taxes, or drastically reduce spending to offset government spending. Like I said, 8 years ago the Tea Party formed to protest government spending. Where'd those people go?