Trump / Musk (other than DOGE) Omnibus Thread

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If you think we’ve addressed improper nutrition, we’ll have to agree to disagree. By many measures, America is less healthy now than it’s ever been. Poor diet, poor exercise are the main two culprits.
That’s what freedom’s all about. You’re free to eat healthy or not—there are plenty of options, particularly for those with the money to pay for organic foods. And you’re free to exercise as much or as little as you’d like.

If you’re suggesting we need governmental intervention to promote healthy eating options and exercise, or that we need to somehow limit people’s freedom of choice—well, that seems a bit hypocritical coming from someone on the right, doesn’t it?
 
That’s what freedom’s all about. You’re free to eat healthy or not—there are plenty of options, particularly for those with the money to pay for organic foods. And you’re free to exercise as much or as little as you’d like.

If you’re suggesting we need governmental intervention to promote healthy eating options and exercise, or that we need to somehow limit people’s freedom of choice—well, that seems a bit hypocritical coming from someone on the right, doesn’t it?
“Rules for thee” is seemingly undefeated.
 
Take a bunch of people who are currently working and contributing to the economy, and instead lock them up in detention facilities where the government has to pay for their food, clothing, shelter, and people to guard them.

Brilliant! Checkmate libs!
Except those are the people who help us get the food to our tables. When food becomes sparse, the first who will be cut off will be those immigrants.

Could be a humanitarian disaster waiting to happen.
 
If you think we’ve addressed improper nutrition, we’ll have to agree to disagree. By many measures, America is less healthy now than it’s ever been. Poor diet, poor exercise are the main two culprits.
First of all, the middle sentence there is obviously laughable hyperbole. There is no metric by which one could claim that we are less healthy now than we've ever been. US life expectancy now is at least a decade longer than it was after WW2, and more than three decades longer than it was in the Reconstruction era. We may have a bigger obesity problem than we used to, but overall health is far superior than it used to be, in basically every way you want to measure it.

Second of all, it is absolutely right that poor diet and poor exercise are the main culprits in our unhealthiness, but those things are very difficult to fix because they are subject to personal choice. The government can do its best to keep particularly unhealthy things out of our food - and already does a lot of that! - but you can't stop people from choosing cheaper, calorie-dense carbs over fresh fruit and vegetables and lean meats (which tend to be more expensive). Rest assured RFK's desire to remove niche food additives will do absolutely nothing to make us healthier on the whole; contrary to what many gullible people believe, there is not some "poison" being added to our food to make us unhealthy (unless you want to count sugar and sodium, both of which are harmful in the amounts in which we consume them, which is not what RFK has been talking about).

As for exercise, you do what you can to promote healthy choices - make cities more walkable, tax gasoline and disincentivize automobile use, build parks and greenways and trails and lots of free, easily accessible spaces. But you can't force people to use those things. And, of course, that all costs tax money.
 
Agreed @rodoheel. Removing niche additives from our processed foods to address the obesity epidemic is putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. There is almost an infinite number of better ways to improve health and nutrition in our country before reaching the "crazy anti-vax guy with radically insane views on health and nutrition should help make the government even bigger in choosing what you can and can't eat" stage of problem-solving.

In a vacuum I have absolutely zero issue whatsoever with saying that we should make a more concerted effort collectively to improve nutritional standards in our country. No issue whatsoever. Where I have an issue is that Republicans always, *always*, seem to have this magical ability to 1. identify a problem and 2. do literally the very exact thing that will do nothing to actually solve the problem. We see it with guns: they think the way to curb the gun violence epidemic is to....make sure more people have more guns, and with fewer and fewer restrictions on how they can buy them and who is allowed to buy them.

If we want to make a significant difference in improving health and nutritional outcomes in our country, let's do it, by all means! But it's going to require a ton of heavy lifting- and *gasp* expenditure of taxable resources!- to get it done, which means it is a complete non-starter on the right hand side of the political aisle.
 
and the beat goes on...

I believe that this is a main reason the IC shut down the Politics board.
 
With the Laken Riley trial starting, illegal immigration is going to be a big topic. The fact that Laken's killer sneaked into the country, committed multiple crimes, wasn't deported and eventually committed murder, is a problem, IMO. People who go to the ports of entry, and follow the correct process, should be on a short leash. People who sneak in should be on an even shorter leash. He should have been returned to Venezuela before he had a chance to kill Laken.
 
With the Laken Riley trial starting, illegal immigration is going to be a big topic. The fact that Laken's killer sneaked into the country, committed multiple crimes, wasn't deported and eventually committed murder, is a problem, IMO. People who go to the ports of entry, and follow the correct process, should be on a short leash. People who sneak in should be on an even shorter leash. He should have been returned to Venezuela before he had a chance to kill Laken.
I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details of the case but from what I am reading he had been previously arrested by both federal and state officials in multiple jurisdictions. Cannot understand how he was still around to be able to commit the murder of Laken Riley.
 
I believe that this is a main reason the IC shut down the Politics board.
If I read the FCC section in P2025 correctly (unlikely), it seems that they want to change Section 230 to prevent social media platforms from censoring protected speech. That’s quite a can of worms and would seem to invite the potential return of political speech to IC.
 
What is the plans for the almost half the illegal immigrants that overstay their visas? Border security doesn't address that.
Same plan as all the others who don't get deported: Trump will lie and say he fixed it and half the country will believe him.
 
There is some kind of fallacy inherent in the arguments that immigrants are committing crimes but I don’t know if it is a recognized one or has a name.

It is a valid argument to say that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the population at large. The response is always that so and so would be alive today if we didn’t have immigrants and while true that seems fallacious considering the crime rate disparity. (I am not using Laken Riley as an example as her perpetrator had previous legal problems which makes that story a bit different.)

IMO that argument boils down to an argument that if we have more people we will have more crime - not necessarily at a higher rate but more in absolute numbers. And of course that is true.

Their argument makes no more sense than saying that we should get rid of people from Burlington because someone in Burlington went to Chapel Hill and committed a crime, a crime that would not have happened had we removed all the people from Burlington 100 miles a way.

Someone needs to develop that thought, maybe wrap it in a mathematical framework, and give it a name.
 
I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details of the case but from what I am reading he had been previously arrested by both federal and state officials in multiple jurisdictions. Cannot understand how he was still around to be able to commit the murder of Laken Riley.
Confusing to me as well. Situations like this only fuel anti-immigration fire.

I am very sympathetic for the people who come here, want to be good "citizens" and work to send money back to their families in Mexico or wherever.
 
The problem is the hate and ignorance that started the fire. As long as that drives an essentially minor issue, we're not coming to a solution.

Face it. We need the people. We need the labor pool. Let's accept it, start a guest worker program and separate drug enforcement from immigration. They are only tangentially related and distract from a solution to either because of that.
 
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