US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1344

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts harshly criticized President Obama and his economic advisers during a long interview with Salon that focuses on economic issues. At one point, the interviewer, Thomas Frank, mentions how he and his friends “are pretty disappointed” with Obama’s track record on protecting the little guy from moneyed interests. Warren said she “understands” the frustration, making it clear she feels the same way.

“He picked his economic team and when the going got tough, his economic team picked Wall Street,” Warren said. Frank answers that it seems the economic team “just about ever time” sided with Wall Street.” Warren agrees:

That’s right. They protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over.

At the same time, Warren does have some praise for Obama, saying she’s convinced that if he hadn’t been president “we would not have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” because “he was the one who refused to throw the agency under the bus and made sure that his team kept the agency alive and on the table.”

Global warming is changing the way the US trains for and goes to war – affecting war games, weapons systems, training exercises, and military installations – according to the Pentagon.

The defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, will tell a high-level meeting of military leaders on Monday that the Pentagon is undertaking sweeping changes to operation systems and installations to keep up with a growing threat of rising seas, droughts, and natural disasters caused by climate change.

“A changing climate will have real impacts on our military and the way it executes its missions,” Hagel wrote in his introduction to a Pentagon report out today. “We are considering the impacts of climate change in our war games and defence planning scenarios.”

The Pentagon’s strategic planners have for years viewed climate change as a “threat multiplier”– worsening old conflicts and potentially provoking new clashes over migration and shortages of food and water in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and opening up new military challenges in a melting Arctic.

Scientists Think They Know What's Causing a Big Cloud of Methane Over the Southwest

For years, satellites have detected unusually high concentrations of the noxious gas in the Four Corners region.

Methane is an extremely baleful greenhouse gas, with more than 20 times the pound-for-pound impact on global warming as CO2. So imagine the alarm scientists felt when they noticed a big ol' cloud of it, pouring out of the Southwest like noxious vapors from a volcano.

The plume measured half the size of Connecticut and represented the annual release of about 0.59 million metric tons of methane. You can see it floating above the Four Corners region in the above image, which shows how much emissions varied from average background concentrations from 2003 to 2009. While areas with less methane are shown in darker colors, the plume's intense reds and oranges indicate the discharge of more than three times the amount of gas than what had been recorded on the ground.

Scientists initially couldn't believe so much methane was rushing out of the dirt. "We didn't focus on it because we weren't sure if it was a true signal or an instrument error," says NASA's Christian Frankenberg, who first picked up on the gaseous aberration in European satellite data. But experts from the Department of Energy and the University of Michigan verified the widespread leaking, and the guessing game began on where it was coming from.

On October 13 2014 22:30 xDaunt wrote:

Whether a group is "protected" is a question of statute, not case law and precedent. Until Congress plugs in sexual orientation as one of the protected classes in Title VII (and related statutes), homosexuals won't be "protected" at a federal level. But yes, when you're talking about these court decisions striking down anti-gay marriage laws, the legal reasoning is a bit wanting, which is why it would appear at first glance that homosexuals are now "protected."

EDIT: Just to underscore this point, I went back and reviewed the Windsor decision and some of it progeny. It's a mess of a decision and lower courts aren't even in agreement regarding what the actual reasoning was. The only thing that's clear is the result.

On October 14 2014 07:15 farvacola wrote:

The Supreme Court has found that federal statutes that legally define marriage enumerate specific rights and obligations that are then withheld from a particular group without any sort of meaningful justification. The intention behind the legislation is mostly immaterial; the resulting inequality in legal status controls the application of laws like those that govern taxes, housing, SS, and trial rights among others; it isn't exactly difficult to see how such applications might conflict with due process or equal protection under the law, and are thus unconstitutional.

On October 14 2014 17:57 IgnE wrote:
Nationalization is an option. Saying it's not realistic because of "culture to politics [...]" is an assertion without bite: it's not plausible because it is not something we did; if it were plausible we might have done it. When you limit your options like that you can start saying things like, "the only option we had was to bail out the banks the way we did, because culture, politics, and the scale of the problem required it."

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) accused Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) of misleading Kentuckians about Obamacare when the Senate Republican leader said on Monday night he wants to repeal the law but believes it's "fine" to keep the state's Obamacare exchange, Kynect.

"Tonight, Mitch McConnell looked into the camera and misled Kentucky about his plan to take Kynect from more than 500,000 Kentuckians who have gained health care in the last year," the governor said in a statement. "Mitch told Kentuckians he'd keep the website up, while pulling the plug on federal funding, tax credits, and tearing down a marketplace that has made Kentucky a model of success for the nation — all to advance his partisan political agenda that has Washington in gridlock to the point of paralysis."

Kynect, the state's portal for Obamacare, has funneled federal subsidies to cover some 500,000 Kentuckians on the private insurance market or Medicaid.

During Monday night's Senate debate, McConnell called Obamacare "the worst piece of legislation in the last half-century" and said it should be repealed "root and branch." When pressed on the impacts of scrapping the law, McConnell said it's "fine" to keep the Kynect website, though he didn't address whether he would take away the subsidies if Obamacare is repealed, or whether he would fund them a different way.

You know inequality is getting bad when it's making a Swiss bank uncomfortable.

The ratio of wealth to household income in the U.S., a measure of inequality, is the highest it has been since just before the Great Depression, Credit Suisse noted in a 64-page report on global wealth released on Monday. The bank also warned that this was not good news for the health of the economy:

"This is a worrying signal given that abnormally high wealth income ratios have always signaled recession in the past," the bank wrote.

Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent in the world own 48 percent of all the world's wealth, according to Credit Suisse -- a worrying signal for the global economy.

The U.S. Army's top officer spoke in his strongest terms yet about the harmful effects of automatic budget cuts on the military.

In comments that seemed directed more at lawmakers than soldiers, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno said the service faces significant long-term challenges because of across-the-board spending reductions known as sequestration.

"Frankly, as I stand here, military risk is accumulating exponentially," he said during a speech on Tuesday at an annual conference in Washington, D.C., organized by the Association of the United States Army.

"We are reducing the size of our ground forces, we are not fully resourcing required readiness, and we are slashing our modernization and procurement programs," Odierno told a crowd of mostly military members and defense industry officials. "In my opinion, this is a time we should be increasing those investments. We should be reinvesting in order to rebuild and sustain a force capable of conducting the full range of operations."

Defense reductions will account for about half of the $1.2 trillion in decade-long spending cuts mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act. While Congress agreed to undo some of those reductions in fiscal 2014 and 2015, the cuts are set to return in full in fiscal 2016.

After growing in size to 570,000 soldiers in 2008 at the height of the war in Iraq, the Army has about 510,000 soldiers today, according to Pentagon figures, and is on pace to shrink to 490,000 soldiers in fiscal 2015. It's bracing for even further contraction driven by sequestration and an end to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where some 9,800 American troops will be serving by year's end.

The service's end strength is slated to decrease to 440,000-450,000 soldiers by 2017. If automatic budget cuts remain in effect, the number may fall to as low as 420,000 soldiers -- tens of thousands less than what Odierno has said is needed to adequately respond to conflicts around the world.
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On October 15 2014 08:17 JudicatorHammurabi wrote:
Odierno Warns Budget Cuts Puts Army Readiness at Risk

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/10/14/odierno-warns-budget-cuts-puts-army-readiness-at-risk.html