US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2270

On September 06 2015 08:11 zlefin wrote:
A skilled politician should be able to come up with answers that bend around the situation well enough to satisfy multiple groups. It doesn't seem like it should be so hard to find a way to address the Iraq war without being against his brother.

On September 06 2015 08:17 Mohdoo wrote:


Journalists have been pretty good at getting a good answer, even directly saying: "Iraq: Good idea or bad idea?"

There's no way around that.

On September 06 2015 08:17 Mohdoo wrote:


Journalists have been pretty good at getting a good answer, even directly saying: "Iraq: Good idea or bad idea?"

There's no way around that.

On September 06 2015 06:40 Mohdoo wrote:


Jeb has really not done the best job of appearing intelligent. He's a poor speaker, not very articulate, and never seems to actually have confidence in anything he's saying. He always just looks like he's nervously trying to convey ideas his staffers tell him to.

On September 06 2015 00:41 cLutZ wrote:

We actually have no evidence that Hillary is skilled in the ways you say. Her main initiative as first lady failed, she was a backbencher with no real accomplishments in the Senate, and her Secretary of State term contains no significant deals.

On September 06 2015 08:17 Mohdoo wrote:


Journalists have been pretty good at getting a good answer, even directly saying: "Iraq: Good idea or bad idea?"

There's no way around that.

A government-controlled industry group targeted popular food bloggers, major publications and a celebrity chef as part of its sweeping effort to combat a perceived threat from an egg-replacement startup backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, the Guardian can reveal.

The lobbyists’ media counterattack, in possible violation of US department of agriculture rules, was coordinated by a marketing arm of the egg industry called the American Egg Board (AEB). It arose after AEB chief executive Joanne Ivy identified the fledgling technology startup Hampton Creek as a “crisis and major threat to the future” of the $5.5bn-a-year egg market.

A detailed review of emails, sent from inside the AEB and obtained by the Guardian, shows that the lobbyist’s anti-Hampton Creek campaign sought to:

• Pay food bloggers as much as $2,500 a post to write online recipes and stories about the virtue of eggs that repeated the egg lobby group’s “key messages”
  
  
• Confront Andrew Zimmern, who had featured Hampton Creek on his popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods and praised the company in a blog post characterized by top egg board executives as a “love letter”
  
  
• Target publications including Forbes and Buzzfeed that had written broadly positive articles about a Silicon Valley darling
  Unsuccessfully tried to recruit both the animal rights and autism activist Temple Grandin and the bestselling author and blogger Ree Drummond to publicly support the egg industry
  
  
• Buy Google advertisements to show AEB-sponsored content when people searched for Hampton Creek or its founder Josh Tetrick
  

The scale of the campaign – dubbed “Beyond Eggs” after Hampton Creek’s original company name – shows the lengths to which a federally-appointed, industry-funded marketing group will go to squash a relatively small Silicon Valley startup, from enlisting a high-powered public relations firm to buying off unwitting bloggers.

More recently, Hampton Creek has in fact faced its own PR woes with allegations of suspect science and hazardous work environments. And last month the US Food and Drug Administration warned the California startup that the name of its flagship product, Just Mayo, was misleading and and should be renamed, insisting an egg-less product should not be described as mayonnaise.

In 2013, Google bought ads against Hampton Creek’s name and other search terms including Tetrick’s name and his chief product, Just Mayo, so that links to egg board-sponsored talking points about industrial farming would pop up alongside links to Hampton Creek.

On September 06 2015 23:36 JinDesu wrote:


Jeb Bush got hit with that I think. His response was, repeatedly, "Based on the information at the time, it was a good idea. Based on the information now, it wasn't."

Well the question the journalist asked him was, "Would you invade Iraq?", but the gist is the same.

Like literally, no matter how the reporter rephrased the question, that was his answer over and over.

On September 07 2015 01:31 coverpunch wrote:

I will point out that hypotheticals rehashing history are loaded questions. Any answer you give can only upset people or it can lead to impossible follow-up questions. There's no correct answer that satisfies people and that's by design.

Bernie Sanders has a solid lead over Hillary Clinton among New Hampshire Democrats five months ahead of the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary, and the Vermont senator is also gaining on Clinton in Iowa, according to NBC News/Marist polls released on Sunday.

In New Hampshire, Sanders had the support of 49 percent of Democrats when Joe Biden's name was not included as a choice, with Clinton in second with 38 percent support.

Sanders maintained his lead when Biden was included as a choice, with 41 percent picking Sanders, 32 percent choosing Clinton and 16 percent picking Biden, who is still weighing whether or not to enter the race.

None of the other Democratic candidates — former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb — attracted more than 1 percent support in the poll.

On the Republican side, Donald Trump leads at 28 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has focused his campaign on New Hampshire, took second with 12 percent support, with Ben Carson in third with 11 percent support.

On September 07 2015 04:02 ticklishmusic wrote:
Colin Powell came out in favor of the Iran deal

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) boss Sergio Marchionne said on Sunday that seeking a tie-up with General Motors at was a “high priority” and such a deal would also be the best strategic option for its U.S. rival.

GM’s board rebuffed a merger proposal from the Italian-American carmaker earlier this year. That has not stopped Marchionne from wooing his bigger competitor as he seeks to reduce the number of players in the industry and share the prohibitive costs of building greener and more intelligent cars.

“That discussion remains a high priority for FCA,” he told journalists on the sidelines of the Formula One Italian Grand Prix in Monza, northern Italy.

American service members used in chemical and biological testing have some questions: What exactly were they exposed to? And how is it affecting their health?

Tens of thousands of troops were used in testing conducted by the U.S. military between 1922 and 1975. As one Army scientist explained, the military wanted to learn how to induce symptoms such as "fear, panic, hysteria, and hallucinations" in enemy soldiers. Recruitment was done on a volunteer basis, but the details of the testing and associated risks were often withheld from those who signed up.

Many of the veterans who served as test subjects have since died. But today, those who are still alive are part of a class action lawsuit against the Army. If they're successful, the Army will have to explain to anyone who was used in testing exactly what substances they were given and any known risks. The Army would also have to provide those veterans with health care for any illnesses that result, in whole or in part, from the testing.

The law firm representing the veterans estimates at least 70,000 troops were used in the testing, including World War II veterans exposed to mustard gas, whom NPR reported on earlier this summer.

Bill Blazinski has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which he thinks may have been caused by the military tests. He was 20 years old when he volunteered in 1968.

"There would be a guaranteed three-day pass every weekend unless you had a test," he says. "There would be no kitchen police duties, no guard duties. And it sounded like a pretty good duty."

What sounded more like a vacation than military duty quickly changed, he says. In one test, doctors said they would inject him with an agent and its antidote back to back.

"We were placed in individual padded cells. And you know the nurse left and I'm looking at this padded wall and I knew it was solid but all of a sudden started fluttering like a flag does up on a flag pole," he recalls.

To learn about what substances made him hallucinate, in 2006, Blazinski requested the original test documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "It showed an experimental antidote for nerve agent poisoning with known side effects, and another drug designed to reverse the effects of the firs," he says."

Researchers kept information about which agents they were administering from test subjects to avoid influencing the test results. A lawyer representing the veterans, Ben Patterson of the law firm Morrison and Foerster, says that's a problem.