US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2275

Hillary Clinton is proposing a slate of campaign finance reform measures aimed at limiting political donations by corporations and large donors while increasing transparency in election spending.

Clinton, who is seeking the nomination to be the Democratic candidate in the November 2016 presidential election, identified measures she would pursue if she became president.

Among them are rules requiring greater disclosure of political spending, including by publicly traded companies and US government contractors, and a program that would provide matching funds for small donations to presidential and congressional candidates.

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political system and drowning out the voices of too many everyday Americans,” Clinton said.

“Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee.”

The measures are aimed at tapping into voter concern over inequality, ranging from income to influence in national affairs. Clinton has put the issue at the center of her campaign, saying she will champion “everyday Americans” and boost the middle class.

But Clinton has come in for criticism for that theme, given her own family wealth and her decades in high-profile public positions.

Clinton also plans to call for an overturning of the controversial 2010 Citizens United ruling by the supreme court. It allowed corporations and individuals to spend unlimited money for political advocacy through independent political action committees so long as they do not coordinate with candidates.

That ruling has become a flashpoint on the campaign trail, drawing criticism from other candidates as well, such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has pressured Clinton on her left.

Tens of thousands of people in the United States and abroad have signed petitions calling on President Barack Obama to accept more Syrian refugees, as European governments continue to grapple with a massive influx of newcomers — most of them from war-torn Syria.

A WhiteHouse.gov petition that requires 100,000 signatures to be formally considered by the Obama administration had 47,463 as of 1:30 a.m. EDT on Tuesday. The petition, launched on Aug. 31 has until the end of September to meet its goal.

The Obama administration said it is "actively considering" ways to be more responsive to the global migrant crisis, including refugee resettlement. Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the National Security Council, did not elaborate on specific measures being considered, but said they included "refugee resettlement." Boogaard noted that the U.S. has provided over $4 billion in humanitarian assistance since the Syrian crisis began, and over $1 billion in assistance this year.

Former Secretary of State and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton called for a "concerted global effort" to assist refugees fleeing their homelands.

"I think we need to have a broad-based global response," Clinton told the Associated Press. "The United States certainly should be at the table, but so should everybody else."

Meanwhile, several other petitions have been launched on advocacy websites such as MoveOn.org, calling on the U.S. to lift its limit on Syrian refugees as Europe struggled to cope with record numbers of asylum seekers. Almost 1,300 people of a 2,000-person goal had signed a petition — one of several — set to be delivered to Obama.

One MoveOn.org petition signer, the Reverend Everett Shattuck, 59, a Church of the Brethren minister from Mill Creek, Indiana, said opening his home to refugees was part of the U.S. tradition of welcoming immigrants.

“Plus, we have to share some responsibility for that [war] because of our regime changes in the Middle East. Most of those refugees are a result of that,” Shattuck said, alluding to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But others, although welcoming refugees, worried that extremists could enter the U.S. along with those fleeing the fighting.

A federal judged ordered Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis be released from custody and her contempt order be lifted Tuesday, but her lawyers said the defiant clerk plans to continue blocking marriage licenses for gay couples when she returns to work.

Davis was ordered into federal custody Sept. 3 after repeatedly refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, saying it would violate her religious beliefs, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against her.

A CNN journalist at the jail reported that according to her attorneys, Davis "has not changed her mind" and intends to bring the licensing process to a halt all over again when she's back on the job.

“The problem here is that the attorney says she has not changed her mind, that Kim Davis is adamant that as long as her name appears on those marriage licenses, she objects and she will attempt to stop those licenses from being distributed,” CNN correspondent Martin Savidge said during a live broadcast.

In his release order, federal judge David Bunning ordered Davis not interfere in any way "with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples." All of the Rowan County deputy clerks but one – Davis' son – said last week they would issue licenses to LGBT couples, and the first couples received marriage licenses on Sept. 4.

On September 09 2015 05:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
This should be entertaining:



Source

On September 07 2015 10:09 coverpunch wrote:

It was a failure or it is now? It's also a bit bizarre to treat it solely as a Bush policy and ignore the seven years under Obama.

Obama himself sang a different tune in 2011:


I don't think anyone is going to be calling Iraq a failure or a mistake. It's fine for Sanders to say it to cheering anti-war crowds, but it won't work with a broader audience that needs the president to show strong confidence in America's inherent goodness and for other members of government that need him to go along with American policy. It certainly isn't going to work for a Republican who is an establishment candidate.

The other big problem with your proposed answer is it raises too many interesting questions about what the next president plans to do in the Middle East and North Africa. All of the solutions on the table under Obama have been so unpopular that only the Iran deal has been worth pursuing and everyone has been content to let Obama use drones or train proxy armies, giving the political capital to say America is doing something but not being sucked into a wasteful commitment. But everyone recognizes that the situation is continuing to deteriorate and nobody has a good answer.

A unit of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has won an election to represent California recycling plant workers, opening the door to a legal challenge of a U.S. labor board's decision redefining the relationship between companies and workers hired by franchises and staffing agencies.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced Tuesday that Teamsters Local 350 won the 2014 election handily, by a vote of 73-17. The ballots were not counted until last week, after the board issued a decision saying the plant's owner, Browning-Ferris Industries, was a “joint employer" of workers hired by a staffing company.

The NLRB’s new joint employer standard could upend workplace practices among franchisors and subcontractors because it expands the legal liability that many businesses could face for alleged labor violations. For example, McDonald’s USA could now be considered jointly responsible for the working conditions at its franchised locations if it is found to exercise sufficient control over how franchisees treat employees.

The Teamsters claimed victory in the election days before the Tuesday NLRB announcement.

“This is a big victory for these workers who patiently stood together to change their own lives for the better, and helped millions of other workers in the process,” said Teamsters Solid Waste and Recycling Division director Ron Herrera in a Friday statement.

The union's lawyer, Susan Garea, said Browning-Ferris is expected to refuse to bargain with the Teamsters. If that happens, the union would file a complaint with the board, she said, and the case would likely end up before a U.S. appeals court, though that could take years.

But in the meantime, the NLRB’s general counsel is continuing to move forward with parallel litigation that lists McDonald’s as a joint employer with selected franchisees.

On September 09 2015 06:20 Acrofales wrote:


I don't care about the legal ramifications. I just think it is fucking appalling that this judge takes some poor (trying to break up) couples' life and ruins it for the sake of making a political point.

On September 08 2015 11:15 Chocolate wrote:
Yeah I agree marijuana isn't a gateway drug in the true sense of the word, but I didn't know that calling it a gateway drug meant the relationship had to be causative.

I'm not going to give you a source because I don't care enough to do so but don't play dumb and act like most crack smokers haven't used cannabis in some form at some point in their lives.

On September 09 2015 06:29 Acrofales wrote:

You got that correlation the wrong way round.

The fact that most crack smokers used marihuana says absolutely nothing about marihuana smokers and everything about crack smokers.

It's like trying to claim that all animals are cows, because you can easily show that all cows are animals. That the evidence to the contrary doesn't hold up you comfortably ignore by pointing out how every cow you have studied has turned out to be an animal, and therefore being an animal is a gateway to being a cow (okay, I might really have stretched the metaphor here, but I ran with it and had fun!)

On September 09 2015 06:46 Simberto wrote:


A correlation is twodirectional. It also says nothing about causation. If a correlates with b, that also means b correlates with a, but it does not say anything about whether a causes b, b causes a, c causes a and b, or any other thing you can imagine. It just means that a and b tend to appear in tandem more or less often than random chance would make them.

Being a cow correlates with being an animal and being an animal correlates with being a cow. (If you have a random sample of things, and look how often "cow" and "animal" appear in tandem, it will happen more often than it statistically would if they were both randomly distributed.) This does not mean that being a cow causes being an animal, or that being an animal causes being a cow.

On September 09 2015 06:53 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
It's all Politics even with Theocratic ideologues

https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/641363096167051264