US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1427

On November 13 2014 08:02 farvacola wrote:
Just a friendly reminder: Congress had an 11% approval rating at the time of the recent elections, and 96.4% of the House was re-elected. :D

Yay us.

Jack Blankenship was pinned facedown in the dirt, his neck, shoulder and back throbbing with pain.

He was alone on an errand, in a dark tunnel a mile underground at the Aracoma Alma coal mine in Logan County, W.Va., when a 300-pound slab of rock peeled away from the roof and slammed him to the ground. As his legs grew numb, he managed to free an arm and reach his radio. For two hours, he pressed the panic button that was supposed to bring help quickly.

"I couldn't hardly breathe," Blankenship remembered four years later. "I'd black out and come to. I was waiting to die. I'd already had my little talk with God."

Aracoma Alma and then-owner Massey Energy had a history of serious safety problems, including falling rock. In the two years before Blankenship's accident, the mine was cited by federal regulators more than 120 times for rock fall violations, according to records from federal regulators. That included inadequate roof support and deficient safety checks for loose rock.

Citations and the fines that go with them are key components of the federal law designed to protect miners. They are supposed to make violations expensive — costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most serious offenses — and create an incentive for mine owners to keep workers safe.

Yet on that December day in 2010, as Blankenship lay pinned and in pain, Aracoma Alma owed $200,000 in overdue mine safety fines, federal records show. The penalty system that is designed to discourage unsafe practices failed Blankenship, and his story is not unique.

A joint investigation by NPR and Mine Safety and Health News found that thousands of mine operators fail to pay safety penalties, even as they continue to manage dangerous — and sometimes deadly — mining operations. Most unpaid penalties are between two and 10 years overdue; some go back two decades. And federal regulators seem unable or unwilling to make mine owners pay.

On November 13 2014 08:13 Velr wrote:
To get the steam out of the european debate.

I'm from switzerland and here people are scared of being overflown by germans and french.




And thats actually not a joke.

On November 13 2014 08:04 xDaunt wrote:
Hey, we reelected Obama after a not-so-great first term and are now predictably getting a worse second term. Kinda hard to argue that we're not a bunch of idiots.

On November 13 2014 08:00 KwarK wrote:
but it did pass...

If Fox want to aggressively run with "The Left think the American people are idiots" line then isn't the subtext "and they're right"?

On November 13 2014 08:32 farvacola wrote:

I think what you're describing, that being the issue of unrestrained gerrymandering, is a symptom of a larger problem dealing with the Unifed States' collective inability to reconcile a rapidly changing socio-political landscape with its rule-based geography, namely state, district, county, municipal, and national lines. Given our unique federal structure coupled with relatively expansive territory, I think there is every reason to revisit the manner in which representative power is distributed and governed relative to its geographical boundaries. The legislative and judicial history backing the manner in which lines are drawn is fairly arbitrary and clearly in need of an update, and I'm of the opinion that the judiciary is likely the best branch of government with which to implement said update. There comes a point where unprecedented legislative inaction and cementation requires an unprecedented interference, and after seeing what that looks like coming from the executive, I think it's clear why the courts may be better suited to the task.

The Supreme Court's ruling on the Pennsylvania gerrymander effectively cemented the right of elected officials to select their constituents by eliminating most of the grounds for disenfranchised constituents to challenge gerrymandered lines.

On November 13 2014 08:56 Simberto wrote:
So, a two party system in which both parties are kind of bad is bad because it is only democratic in the very most basic sense. Yes, you do have a choice, but you can't really vote for what you want, only which of the two guys you hate less. And you can't really found a new party because it's a shitty two party system and you need to collect millions upon millions of dollars in bribes to be able to even compete as one of those two parties, let alone a third party. And the two parties would never change anything regarding the fact that it's a two party system because hey, they are one of the two parties.

On November 13 2014 09:08 Introvert wrote:
What has more of an impact than gerrymandering is the fact that the country/states/counties/districts/ are simply becoming more polarized. Gerrymandering is not the boogie man it is made out to be. I don't know how many times this idea had to be corrected. I'm on my phone, but here is just one peice thst talks about it. Nate Silver has also been saying similar things for a while now.

Edit: btw, Enten works for Slver at fivethirtyeight. A good website. Even if they are lefties, they're statiticians first. Lots of good stuff there.

"Justice Scalia, joined by The Chief Justice, Justice O’Connor, and Justice Thomas, concluded that political gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable because no judicially discernible and manageable standards for adjudicating such claims exist."

On November 13 2014 09:26 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Mining has been getting safer for decades (source). I have to give the Mine Safety and Health Administration the benefit of the doubt here, since what they do seems to be working.

The federal government is about to put $100 million behind a simple idea: doubling the value of SNAP benefits — what used to be called food stamps — when people use them to buy local fruits and vegetables.

This idea did not start on Capitol Hill. It began as a local innovation at a few farmers' markets. But it proved remarkably popular and spread across the country.

"It's so simple, but it has such profound effects both for SNAP recipients and for local farmers," says Mike Appell, a vegetable farmer who sells his produce at a market in Tulsa, Okla.

The idea first surfaced in 2005 among workers at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. They were starting a campaign to get people to eat more fresh produce.

"I think we were trying to confront the idea that healthy foods, [like] fresh fruits and vegetables, are not affordable," says Candace Young, who was director of the department's nutrition programming at the time. (Young now works for The Food Trust in Philadelphia.)

Young recalls that one of their workers pointed out that some SNAP recipients live near farmers markets "and we thought, how about we incentivize them to use their SNAP benefits at these farmers markets?"

The city made a few thousand dollars available for the program. So at a few markets in the South Bronx and Harlem, when someone spent $10 of SNAP benefits, he then received an additional $4 in the form of coupons called HealthBucks, which could be used to buy more local produce.

This desire to make farmers markets more food-stamp friendly seems to have been floating in the air at that time. A farmers market in Lynn, Mass., used a $500 donation to do something similar the very next year.

Then, in 2007, the idea mutated into a form that really caught on.

It happened with the birth of the Crossroads Farmers Market, on the boundary that divides the towns of Langley Park and Takoma Park, Md. The area, just outside Washington, D.C., is home to many immigrants.

On November 13 2014 10:05 GreenHorizons wrote:


Despite staunch opposition from the usual suspects, and with the help of federal regulations. Imagine that?

On November 13 2014 07:53 oneofthem wrote:
guy speaks like he's in school. not smart lol.

On November 13 2014 10:23 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Sure kid. Did you learn that from Scooby Doo?