US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1189

On July 23 2014 09:37 oneofthem wrote:
where's the causality link between marijuana and crime rate. come again?

On July 23 2014 10:37 oneofthem wrote:
marijuana legalization is a poor proxy for crime attitudes.

On July 23 2014 10:37 oneofthem wrote:
marijuana legalization is a poor proxy for crime attitudes.

Police were searching for at least one suspect who was wearing body armor and carrying a semi-automatic rifle after a Riverside County, Calif. sheriff's deputy was shot on Tuesday afternoon.

Sheriff's spokesman Albert Martinez said the deputy was responding to an assault with a deadly weapon call at a home in Moreno Valley, Calif. when he was shot, according to Los Angeles TV station KABC. The deputy was able to call for back-up, Martinez said, and a SWAT team had the home surrounded as of 11 p.m. local time.

Authorities were looking for one or two suspects who were wearing body armor and armed with an AR-15 rifle, according to KABC.

The news station reported that investigators believe two other crime scenes were connected to the deputy's shooting. A 74-year-old woman was found dead inside a bullet-riddled SUV at a gas station in Moreno Valley. Family members said the woman's son-in-law was also killed inside a second home.

The injured deputy had been transported to a local medical center with non-life threatening injuries and later released.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and his office stymied investigations into political allies and associates being undertaken by an independent commission that Cuomo created to stop public corruption, the New York Times reported on Wednesday after a three-month investigation by the newspaper.

The most obvious interference, according to the Times, came when the commission sent a subpoena to Buying Time, a media company through which Cuomo had spent $20 million on ads since 2002. The commission was looking into the company's relationship with the New York Democratic Party, and it did not know of the firm's ties to Cuomo when it issued the subpoena.

A top Cuomo aide, Lawrence Schwartz, quickly scuttled the order. "This is wrong," he told a commission chairman, according to the Times. "Pull it back."

The episode was, according to the newspaper's investigation, part of a broader pattern of behavior by the governor's office. Cuomo disbanded the commission a full eight months before it was supposed to finish its work, claiming a legislative reform package that many criticized as watered down was the culmination of its duties.

In a 13-page statement to the Times, Cuomo's office dismissed the premise of the newspaper's investigation as "legally, ethically and practically false."

"Your fundamental assertion is that the Commission was independent. It wasn't," the office wrote. The statement also said that many of the companies for which Cuomo's staff had reportedly interfered did eventually receive subpoenas. That included Buying Time, according to the Times.

The Times investigation lands as Cuomo is running for re-election and faces a federal inquiry into his decision to shutter the commission. For their part, some who worked with commission viewed its work, which Cuomo highlighted in re-election ads, as an obviously political exercise.

More than half of Americans believe that they or others are better off with Obamacare, a new poll shows.

The CNN poll released Wednesday found that 18 percent of respondents said they or their family had benefited from the health care law, while an additional 35 percent said while they may not be better off, the lives of others have improved.

Forty-four percent say no one has benefited from Obamacare.

On July 24 2014 08:57 Chewbacca. wrote:
I don't think anyone can honestly say that nobody benefited from Obamacare. But that poll is a little silly, it only asks about how many people benefited from it and not how many people were hurt by it.

On July 24 2014 08:57 Chewbacca. wrote:
I don't think anyone can honestly say that nobody benefited from Obamacare. But that poll is a little silly, it only asks about how many people benefited from it and not how many people were hurt by it.

An Arizona inmate gasped and snorted in an execution that lasted nearly two hours on Tuesday.

Lawyers for Joseph Wood had filed an emergency motion to abort the execution because their client was still alive more than an hour after receiving a lethal injection that was intended to kill him quickly and peacefully.

Their motion, filed in federal district court, failed to save Wood. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne announced that the 55-year-old convicted killer was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m.

Court papers said the execution started 117 minutes earlier.

"He has been gasping and snorting for more than an hour," Wood's lawyers wrote in their hurried attempt to call off the execution and force Arizona to provide Wood with life-saving care. "He is still alive."

A journalist from the Arizona Republic who witnessed the execution said Wood gasped for air 660 times after the drugs were introduced through intravenous tubes.

Wood was convicted of killing his girlfriend Debra Dietz and her father in 1989.

Federal authorities said Wednesday that they will conduct extensive tests on the health effects of MCHM, the chemical that spilled and tainted the public water supply of 300,000 West Virginians in January.

The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, will test the chemical – known for its licorice-like odor – on pregnant mice to see what it does to their young. In the weeks after the spill, authorities advised pregnant women against drinking the water, even after officials had lifted the ban for other people.

Scientists at NIH will also test the chemical on rats to see what it does to their livers, according to The Charleston Gazette. Experts will also expose fish and bugs to the coal processing fluid. The testing is expected to cost about $1 million and take about a year.

“After all these months, it's positive we are moving forward, particularly with developing independent studies which will give our citizens more confidence in their outcomes,” said Rahul Gupta, who is director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department and has pushed for further testing.

Environmental activists in the region hailed the move by federal authorities and state officials. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, helped bring it about.

“If only such testing had been done long before the chemical was placed in leaky tanks about a mile upstream from the tap water intake for 300,000 people!” said Robin Blakeman, an organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

“West Virginia regulators and elected officials need to learn a lesson from this, and should strongly support federal-level studies and long-term medical monitoring, as well as improved regulations that will preserve our remaining clean tap water sources, now and in the future,” he said.

A new state auditor general report has found that the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) lacks the funding, staff and technology to adequately protect the environment from the state’s booming natural gas industry.

The report was released Tuesday, the same day that the DEP told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that oil and gas operations polluted water at least 209 times since 2007 – the first time the department released information about water contamination from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and other oil and gas wells across the state.

The study is a no-holds-barred critique of a Department that Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said was caught off guard by the surge in natural gas drilling over the last decade.

The report found that DEP regulators often failed to issue official orders to fracking well operators who had polluted water. In the 15 cases of water pollution reviewed as part of the audit, the DEP was found to have issued only one order to remediate the pollution, the auditor general said.

“There are very dedicated hard-working people at DEP but they are being hampered in doing their jobs by lack of resources — including staff and a modern information technology system — and inconsistent or failed implementation of department policies, among other things,” DePasquale said in a statement.

“It is almost like firefighters trying to put out a five-alarm fire with a 20-foot garden hose. There is no question that DEP needs help and soon to protect clean water.”

DePasquale, a Democrat, campaigned on the promise to look into the state’s DEP. His review began in 2013, right after he assumed office.

On July 24 2014 10:38 xDaunt wrote:
I'd rather bring back the guillotine. No risk of error there.

Still, capital punishment will probably be largely abolished before long. Even people who are for it recognize how screwed up the legal system is such that it is prohibitively expensive to use.