US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1704

On March 06 2015 13:54 xDaunt wrote:
I'm trying to figure out why we're talking about nigh-irrelevant oil spills and last year's news (Ferguson) instead of the possible political demise of Hillary.

The U.S. economy added 295,000 jobs in February, which crushed expectations. That beat the estimate from CNNMoney's survey of economists, who predicted 235,000 job gains.

February's job growth shows how far the economy has come in a year. It's the 12th straight month that the economy has gained over 200,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate fell to 5.5%.

That's the lowest unemployment rate since May 2008 -- before the financial crisis. Unemployment has come a long way from a year ago when it was 6.7%.

On March 06 2015 23:52 Ryuhou)aS( wrote:
Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Black people and White people.

This was a weird test. It felt like they were conditioning me what to think and not trying to find what i actually think. But then the results were what i felt my results would be based on what i think so i just donno.

edit: I would also like to add I'm so sick of all this black or white nonsense. We're all humans for goodness sake.

Sitting in a room on the fourth floor of the Cannon building, sipping soda and beer minutes after they helped defeat a three-week extension of Homeland Security funding, the roughly two dozen House conservatives who in January declared themselves the Freedom Caucus were looking to flex their muscles again.

They made the House Republican leaders an offer — a one-week funding bill, with the option for another two weeks if formal negotiations with the Senate were launched. After breaking for dinner, and scrolling through news on their iPhones and BlackBerrys, the group walked back to the House floor together to watch leadership’s machinations firsthand.

Ultimately, the House leaders rejected the offer from the Freedom Caucus and, in a further rebuke, eventually gave in to Democratic demands for a floor vote on a bill funding DHS through September. But that defeat looked almost like a victory to many members of the Freedom Caucus, who insist they have established themselves as a unified force. They didn’t try to oust Speaker John Boehner, as some in Boehner’s circle feared, but rather came away prepared to be a constant counterweight to the embattled speaker.

“While yesterday we might have lost a major battle, I think that tactically, our strength is growing very quickly,” Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) said. “The number of people who want to join our ranks is increasing every day.”

Salmon and other members of the Freedom Caucus made clear that their purpose isn’t simply endless debate. For years, the nucleus of conservative thought in the House has been the Republican Study Committee, which holds meetings that are large and ideologically diverse. The group has been risk-averse, hardly ever unifying behind a legislative strategy.

The Freedom Caucus was a response to that, and in the midst of their first legislative battle over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, they showed just how different they’d be. Since Republicans took the majority in 2011, the far right wing of the House Republican Conference has been a disparate bunch, unable to clearly articulate a unified set of demands to the leadership.

That all seems to have changed this week.
Although they clearly lost the fight over DHS funding, the Freedom Caucus is beginning to show that it is a force that requires leadership’s attention. They are showing legislative sophistication, defying the perception of a ragtag collection of demagogues many in the Capitol had them pegged as.

Members of the group, including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), were able to slow consideration of the Senate’s DHS bill using rarely employed floor tactics — a strategy born of consultations with parliamentary advisers that lasted more than a week, sources said. They successfully worked to whip up opposition to Republican leadership’s plans, dealing Boehner and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) an embarrassing defeat on the House floor.

With the backing of popular conservatives, they have changed the definition of what legislation meets conservative muster. Those new standards have grown the group’s reach beyond its approximately two dozen members. In the DHS fight, Republican leadership saw reliable allies siding with a different Ohioan than Boehner: Rep. Jim Jordan, who runs the Freedom Caucus.

On March 07 2015 00:52 Wolfstan wrote:
Careful now, I know you may have been raised to judge a man by his actions and character, not by the color of his skin. Apparently we have to learn only privileged white men have the luxury of believing color doesn't matter and all men are created equal.

On March 07 2015 01:26 xDaunt wrote:
I'll just leave this thought out there as it pertains to Hillary: there's a significant chunk of democrats that really don't want her to run for president. There's a reason why she was so easily torpedoed by Obama in 2008. I don't see why she'll do better this time around. Her quality as a politician is no where near the same as her husband's. She is not equipped to deal with her ever-growing baggage train, and many democrats know it, which is why the defense of Hillary on this email issue has been so tepid. Just watch and wait.

When Joyce Coltrin emails local customers of her wholesale garden nursery, she makes sure to keep her messages brief and doesn’t attach photos or documents. “I try not to write lengthy emails, because people here are using very expensive ways of reading them,” she says. With no reliable broadband service available, many residents of this small community in rural Bradley County, Tennessee, rely exclusively on 3G cellular networks for Internet access. “People are paying in the range of $300 a month using their cellphones,” she estimates, and service can be slow. “Students have to go all the way into town to a McDonald’s or Starbucks and use their Wi-Fi networks just to do schoolwork.”

Even more frustrating for Coltrin and her neighbors is that just down the road, in the same county, communities have access to a publicly owned fiber optic broadband network that delivers speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second. That network is financed and operated by EPB, a local electric utility that has been selling affordable high-speed broadband to residential and business customers since 2009.

EPB has a fiber optic line just half a mile from her office Coltrin, said, so she was surprised to learn that they can’t sell their service to her. That’s because a 1999 Tennessee law prohibits a public operator like EPB from expanding broadband services beyond its utilities footprint. EPB’s network may be offered only to its electricity customers.

Tennessee is hardly an outlier when it comes to limiting what’s known as municipal broadband, networks run by public entities or in public-private partnerships like Google Fiber. Nineteen states have laws significantly restricting or effectively banning municipal broadband. And each year new bills surface in statehouses across the country in attempts to increase that number. Supporters of these laws argue that capital-intensive projects like fiber broadband are too risky for local communities to pursue, given that taxpayers are left to foot the bill should a project fail.

A look at the legislative process in some of these states, however, reveals very close collaboration between the cable industry and lawmakers where the primary goal is simply to protect private companies from public competition.

In May 2011, North Carolina passed H129, a bill that effectively blocks new municipal broadband efforts with strict limits on financing methods and minimum retail pricing while requiring municipal broadband networks to pay state and local taxes as if they were for-profit businesses. The bill’s House sponsor was Rep. Marilyn Avila, R-40th District. In February of that year she arranged a meeting to bring opponents and proponents together for negotiation over the legislation. Avila, according to multiple people who attended that meeting, shocked opponents of the bill by quickly handing over the proceedings to Marcus Trathen, a lobbyist for Time Warner Cable whose law office also houses the North Carolina Cable Telecommunications Association, the industry’s trade group.

“Everybody on our side was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” says Catherine Rice, a community broadband advocate. “[Trathen] ran the meeting, asked what was in the bill that people didn’t like and justified all the different pieces of it that he thought were fine. He was doing this without even looking at the bill, reciting it from memory. So we knew he was deeply involved in it.”

A second person that attended the meeting corroborated Rice’s account, speaking on condition of anonymity.