US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1050

On May 13 2014 06:38 kwizach wrote:

This sounds like you horribly misconstruing what was being said, which is exactly what you were just accused of. Let's hear it - what's your source?

On May 13 2014 15:18 Danglars wrote:
Fannie & Freddie (and their in-bed politicians. It gets inclusion for having the political backing and implicit support of the Fed), the treasury department, federal reserve (More Pumping please, business interests please), the IRS, departments of education and energy, EPA, BLM, NSA, postal service, etc on the other side. I'd error on the side of caution.

I don't really know where you're going with "not paid taxes on their guaranteed profits." Are you talking advertising revenue, or competition with limited availability? I'll agree with you on the applicable subsidies to from government to the companies. End them. It might come as no surprise to you that "outrageous sums of money" is of no concern to me. If you'll argue anti-competitive practices on a shared infrastructure, I'll hear that.

Now if you have the choice of laying up power and influence with an elected body not directly responsible for turning a profit or pleasing a customer, and one with both, I say that choice is clear. It's not like government isn't just people, or only corporations can be greedy. Even an elected democracy can turn into soft tyranny. It's with reason that I say their running/takeover it a bad idea on its face.

P.S. Even as a side note, Comcast and Time Warner are in geographically separate regions. They compete with satellite, and together with DirecTV & AT&T, compete with Internet TV like Netflix & Apple TV (maybe in future Google as well). As I look further into market share and subscriber numbers, it's hard to feel the forecasts of some Comcast-TWC and AT&T-DirecTV. The cable deal would only capture 30% of subscribers.

Changes between state and market production of public services can be analysed as 'pendulum' swings, reflecting political struggles. The extensive re-municipalisations in the water sector and France and the energy sector in Germany provide evidence on this question. This is not the result of a co-ordinated institutional initiative, but a reflection of common political and economic factors. The most important of these are the greater efficiency of public sector provision, and the greater degree of control over the effective achievement of public policy objectives. These are closely related to the historic factors driving public ownership in the 19th and 20th century. A distinctive feature of this 21st century tendency is the prominent role of green parties and environmental policies. The public sector paradigm has historically shown a remarkable resilience, underpinning the development of European public services for almost a century, compared to the three decades of domination by the market paradigm and its currently vacillating foundations.

“Everybody’s gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing,” Paul said. “I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.”
“Rand, what are you doing, man? What are you doing,” Glenn asked. “Who cares if it offends people? It’s right.”

On May 14 2014 02:32 ticklishmusic wrote:
http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/05/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-collapsing

But y'know, climate change isn't a thing that will really impact anyone in any meaningful way.

The difficulty with the argument is that the climate change scientists have the burden of proof. As long as nothing happens, the deniers can say "nothing is happening, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong." When something does happened, basically everyone is screwed and I for one will have little satisfaction in saying "I told you so". It's the exact opposite of the logic used to argue for God's existence, that we simply can't disprove it, which I think is an interesting sort of contrast.

There is evidence pointing towards climate change, but short of something dramatic as the Day After Tomorrow happening, deniers will keep denying.

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” Rubio said. “I think severe weather has been a fact of life on Earth since man started recording history.”

Those two sentences alone are a clinic in the art of the counter-factual, non-scientific dodge that can never be proven wrong because it says nothing at all. It opens with the obligatory hedge of belief—as when the heads of the major tobacco companies testified before Congress in 1994 that they did not believe nicotine was addictive, though it has been scientifically proven to be, because belief need not have anything to do with fact and, in the case of the tobacco boys, had the additional advantage of not leaving them open to perjury charges. Rubio adds the obligatory soupçon of contempt for the scientists—or “these scientists” he calls them, one of those rhetorical eyerolls that dismisses an entire community of professionals as little more than a faction of hacks. Finally, there is the faintly scientific sounding statement that is utterly irrelevant to the issue he is ostensibly addressing. Extreme weather has always been a fact of life on Earth, Rubio points out. Stipulated, as the lawyers would say. Now how about addressing how we’re exacerbating it?

But Rubio goes too far, as all climate deniers eventually do, inventing things scientists never, ever say, and then confidently refuting them. Take his assertion that climate investigators have “take[n] a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to human activities.”

OK, let’s put aside for a moment that “a few decades” of research is huge, a massive body of work with the most sophisticated tools and computer models ever available, which have exponentially increased our knowledge of how climate works. Still, even with that, climate scientists treat words like “directly and almost solely attributable” as nothing short of radioactive because that overstates what the research can show so far. Science is a cautious and highly incremental process, and scientists themselves treat it that way.

The same disingenuousness is true of Rubio’s statement to CNN that, “I think that it’s an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or a majority of them are attributable to human activity.” Again, it would indeed be a terrible stretch if scientists were saying such a thing—which is why they’re not. Indeed, it’s why they stress again and again that weather isn’t climate, that today’s heat wave in Arizona or flood in Colorado is nothing more than bad news for the people who live there, but that over time—say, over “a few decades of research”—trends emerge, patterns reveal themselves, and scientific theory becomes inescapable if still incomplete fact.

May 12 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans on Monday blocked an energy-efficiency bill backed by manufacturers and environmentalists, forfeiting a chance to vote on the long-delayed Keystone XL oil pipeline.

On a nearly party-line vote of 55-36, President Barack Obama's Democrats fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bipartisan energy bill supported by the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, had offered a vote on a separate bill to take the final decision on Keystone out of Obama's hands and give it to Congress if Republicans allowed passage of the energy bill.

But Republicans refused. They complained that Reid barred them from offering amendments to the bill, including one that would have reined in emissions-cutting regulations on coal-fired power plants, a top strategy in Obama's fight against climate change.

The blocked energy-efficiency bill would cut electricity use by imposing tough building codes and requiring federal data centers to find ways to consolidate and become more efficient.

In turn, the bill, sponsored by Senators Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, and Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, would help protect the environment, create nearly 200,000 jobs, and save consumers billions of dollars a year by 2030, backers said.

"Today's failure to move forward on a bipartisan energy efficiency bill is yet another disappointing example of Washington's dysfunction," Portman said.

"It's a sad day in the U.S. Senate when more than 270 organizations - from business to environmental groups - can get behind a good, bipartisan effort, but we can't get votes on a few amendments to pass it."

On May 14 2014 02:54 GreenHorizons wrote:


Marco Rubio is a good personification of this observation.



Whether the earth was created in 7 days or not is not 'one of the great mysteries'. I am so tired of politicians having to placate people who believe that total non-sense.



Disingenuous arguments seem to have found quite a comfortable home in the Republican party. The only hope is that reasonable Republicans take over their party and lead them away from the obviously disingenuous positions that have become so commonplace in the party.

On a nearly party-line vote of 55-36, President Barack Obama's Democrats fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bipartisan energy bill supported by the White House.

In the Senate, the bill is assigned to another committee and, if released, debated and voted on. Again, a simple majority (51 of 100) passes the bill.

On May 14 2014 03:13 Chocolate wrote:

If I were a conservative politician, I'd probably wobble around on the age of the universe too. It just makes sense. If you piss off too many of that kind of voter, you risk losing your job and your career. Sucks, but what can you do?

Most (not all, of course) politicians are pretty smart, but they know which side their bread is buttered on.

The Catholic Church: In a July, 2004 statement from the International Theological Commission (headed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, former Pope Benedict XVI), the Church proclaimed:
According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the 'Big Bang' and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5–4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution.

Televangelist Pat Robertson:the host of "The 700 Club" recently came out in defense of the science of the age of the Earth and the universe. He was quoted as saying,
"Look, I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop [James] Ussher wasn't inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years. It just didn't. You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas. They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible . . . If you fight science, you're going to lose your children, and I believe in telling it the way it was."

On May 14 2014 03:19 GreenHorizons wrote:


That sounds off....



http://www.house.gov/content/learn/legislative_process/

Wait... what?

Does this not strike the most ardent Constitutional defenders as a bit odd? Where reports have just gotten to the point where they just say "fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bipartisan energy bill" without bothering to mention why the 55 votes it got, isn't enough to meet the 'simple majority (51)' threshold bills are supposed to clear to be passed?

On May 14 2014 03:42 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

I'm more curious as to why a bi-partisan bill ended up as a party line vote.

On May 14 2014 03:59 Jormundr wrote:

It's yet another sign that we can get rid of all but one of the republicans in congress.

On May 14 2014 04:05 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Or all but one Democrat

On May 13 2014 16:58 IgnE wrote:


Monopolists have no incentive to please the customer. Saying that Comcast and TW are more consumer-oriented than a public utility accountable to the people is just wishful idealism. There's no real basis for saying that public utilities cannot compete with private ones, especially considering the corruption, subsidies, and tax breaks that near-monopolistic, public good providers get.

A lot of those organizations you listed are dominated by business/fiscal politics (treasury, federal reserve, IRS) or have grown very powerful in the wake of 9/11 (NSA) or just aren't run as badly as you make it out because you empathize with some old racist loon on public lands (BLM). I want to reform many of them just as much as you do, but let's not assume that the reasons some of these organizations don't work as intended is just because they don't have a "profit motive."

The linked paper below from 2002(!) illustrates how the conservative fetish for privatization is not really grounded in reality, especially when it comes to public goods provision.




http://gala.gre.ac.uk/9429/

On May 14 2014 03:42 JonnyBNoHo wrote:


I'm more curious as to why a bi-partisan bill ended up as a party line vote.

In California, the term for stalled infrastructure schemes and investment vehicles that hang around waiting for circumstances to change so they seem viable again is “zombie water projects.” With yesterday’s epic fail in the U.S. Senate, the proposed final leg of the Keystone XL pipeline can be seen as a cousin to California’s family tree of undead public works projects—a pipeline that has gone beyond wasting considerable time and energy in not getting approved or built. Now it’s inflicting collateral damage, such as by scuttling a perfectly good energy efficiency bill.

For weeks, it appeared that a constructive energy bill might make it through Congress—the first in seven years, the New York Times reports. Proposed by Rob Portman, a center-right Republican from Ohio, the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act (ESIC) had rare bipartisan support; the companion bill in the house was supported by such natural foes as Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), an alliance Welch likened to “a snowstorm in July in Vermont.” The common sense legislation focused on such things as water heaters with smart meters, ways to reduce home utility bills, and cheaper heating and cooling systems for office buildings—stuff of equal appeal to Grist-quoting millennials and survivors of the Great Depression.

None of us will benefit because as the law neared a vote in the Senate, a few Republicans and Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu added an amendment that would approve the controversial Keystone XL extension ahead of the president. (As we’ve noted previously, Obama has the final say, but oil and gas campaign donors, impatient with the president, have whipped various congressional reelection teams into action.) And so yesterday: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) refused to allow a vote on a Keystone pre-approval amendment to Portman’s bill, and the amendment’s supporters retaliated by blocking a vote on the main bill, thereby killing it.

On May 14 2014 04:24 Danglars wrote:
Calling these things "public goods" is rather disingenuous. If you want cable TV, or satellite TV, or just want to get your entertainment from the Internet, you pay for these from private companies. Private companies sell to the public. In yesteryear, they raised the money for switches and infrastructure from private investors.

It's a false choice narrative. We have no choice but to assume that ComcastTWC & AT&TDirecTV would be monopolistic. We have no choice but to assume that a department funded by the taxpayer accountable to their bureaucratic higher-ups and later to politicians would be efficient in this case. It really is beyond belief. Antitrust laws ignored, examples of agency waste and abuse ignored, even the basic case of the market encouraging industry innovation ignored. The accountability issue is still cloaked in the political games. Elect me and I'll vote to make 50 more channels be included in basic for this price! Who's responsible for repairing this line or service in your area? You don't know, but you sure can ask your representative next November to bring reform to the agency. It also doesn't get more uncompetitive than asking corporations who are responsible for profits and to shareholders to compete with an entity well accustomed to cost overruns and deficit spending. It is for these reasons that handing telecoms to government control is a bad idea.

Emergent monopolists still face competition from new competitors, in fields where barriers (particularly government barriers) don't restrict them. The very aspects that might make a monopoly harmful for the consumer give competition an selling edge. It's not a new argument, but it exists side by side with the current atmosphere of antitrust laws. I haven't heard you deem them insufficient, but if you still fear monopolies maybe that's your schtick.

My examples are open to interpretation of course. If you support big government and favor heavy redistribution of income, the examples of government overreach and control and lack of accountability are minimized in your eyes. IRS is just some wackos in one or two offices, the BLM's paramilitary-style swat teams were always still accountable and justified since the man was a loony.

Their relative insulation from reform is exactly why I take issue when you say "a public utility accountable to the people." What accountability? You argue for reform but any politician with a real desire to reform faces a powerful special interest preserving the size of the department and the job integrity of its employees in public sector unions and department spokespeople. They demonize the reformer and argue that their funding is insufficient or that reforms are already underway and will complete in the next 5 years. The failings of the public education system have repeatedly been blamed on underfunding since the 60s, and any politician stupid enough to claim an extra million dollars would fix it sees that number more than surpassed and the same metrics stale or dropping. The insulation of responsibility and accountability is precisely the evident results of handing industries to government.

I'm very glad some governments in Europe can run efficient industries, and I myself have been surprised how well places like Denmark and Sweden have done in satisfaction of government services and meeting funding targets (not always but in my own past research). Societies are different and I wouldn't advocate the import of the people running them any more than I would suggest swapping their populations. When it works, they deserve credit. I don't fully know the regulatory atmosphere that private companies were competing in prior to public takeover, so I can't fully comment on your cited case.

EX-IRA member to sue Boston College

A former member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) whose interview was part of a project documenting violence in Northern Ireland said Tuesday that he intends to sue the American college for breaking an understanding of confidentiality.

Richard O’Rawe is one of at least four ex-IRA members who plan to sue Boston College for releasing taped portions of the Belfast Project, an oral history chronicling the experience of paramilitaries, on both the loyalist and republican sides, during three decades of violent unrest known as “The Troubles.”

The interviews were granted on the ground that testimony would not be released until after the participant’s death.

But a legal battle involving police authorities in the U.K. and the U.S. Department of Justice eventually saw college officials hand over some of the tapes.

In his claim against the college, O’Rawe’s lawyer said his client had suffered “serious intimidation and distress together with reputational damage as is evidenced by recent widespread graffiti appearing in west Belfast,” according to a report by the U.K.’s Press Association.

“I entered into the project in good faith in order to contribute to an important historical narrative of the conflict,” he said Monday night according to the BBC.

The Belfast Project was directed by Irish journalist Ed Moloney and a former provisional IRA member turned journalist Anthony McIntyre in 2002.

On May 13 2014 16:42 kwizach wrote:

Unsurprisingly, you're not responding, Danglars. Good job at immediately going out of your way to prove right the poster who said "everything you post is so straw-man or absurd."

On May 14 2014 08:11 Danglars wrote:
I'm more interested about what Ballinwithstalin thinks about biologists and meteorologists in the report, since he is the one I responded to. If he has issues with the response, or thinks I have misconstrued anything he said, he can respond. What I'm not interested in is somebody partially quoting my response to another, different person and alleging the misconstrual of something he did not write. If you want to declare premature victory, at least have the dignity of quoting the response in full and explaining your reasons for thinking my interpretation was faulty.