US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2367

On October 02 2015 23:57 Jormundr wrote:

Not true, Switzerland has super high gun ownership and they're fine.
I mean they don't let people have ammo but hey it's LITERALLY the same as America.

On October 02 2015 23:57 Jormundr wrote:

Not true, Switzerland has super high gun ownership and they're fine.
I mean they don't let people have ammo but hey it's LITERALLY the same as America.

On October 03 2015 00:01 jcarlsoniv wrote:


I generally hesitate to jump in on gun control debates, but this is pretty fascinating. What's the point of having guns if you can't have ammo? Are there high occurrences of pistol-whip related violence?

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Thursday that he regrets remarks he made about Hillary Clinton and the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

"This committee was set up for one sole purpose: to find the truth on behalf of the families for four dead Americans," the California Republican said in an evening interview with Fox News' Bret Baier. "Now, I did not intend to imply in any way that that work is political. Of course it is not. Look at the way they have carried themselves out."

The mini-firestorm started when McCarthy on Tuesday bragged to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

The comments undermined House Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy’s (R-S.C.) efforts to keep his panel’s work focused on the Benghazi attacks in 2012 and stay above the political fray. Multiple Republicans on Thursday tried to contain the fallout, and clarify the committee's intent.

McCarthy said on Thursday evening that he had spoken to Gowdy and expressed the view that they have rightly conducted their work in an apolitical way. "No one questions Trey's integrity or this committee. It was never my intention to ever imply that this committee was political, because we all know it is not," he said, while acknowledging that he should have come out right after he made the remarks to clarify.

On October 03 2015 01:32 aRyuujin wrote:


Wonder if this is significant enough to alter the speaker race

A bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill that would make sweeping changes to criminal justice in the US, including a long-awaited scaling-back of mandatory minimum sentences.

Introducing the bill at the Capitol on Thursday, Republican senator Chuck Grassley called it “a landmark piece of legislation”, and praised its bipartisan nature. “This is a bill we can be proud of,” he said.

“Today is one of the finer days in Congress, especially when you compare with what’s happening along the way [in the House of Representatives],” said Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, who also spoke at the announcement.

If passed into law, the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act will reduce the mandatory life without parole sentence for a third drug or violent offence and the mandatory minimums on drug and gun possession.

Notably, it would also expand the “safety valve” exception, which allows non-violent drug offenders with non-serious criminal histories to escape mandatory minimums. It would also allow some prisoners to earn time credits on their sentence to complete rehabilitation programmes.

In an effort to reduce the disparity in sentencing between drug and violent offences, it also creates new mandatory minimum sentences of 10 years for interstate domestic violence resulting in a death, and a new mandatory minimum of five years for providing weapons for terrorists.

The bill was introduced by Grassley, the chair of the senate judiciary committee, and the second-ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin.

A year ago, when Tennessee passed a bill allowing women to be charged with assault if they use narcotics while pregnant, health advocates warned that the law would deter women from seeking vital medical care out of fear of being prosecuted. Their concerns are now coming true.

“We are getting lots of anecdotal information about women not seeking critical prenatal care, and avoiding going to the hospital to give birth, because they are scared of being arrested and having their baby taken away,” said Allison Glass, state director of Healthy and Free Tennessee, a nonprofit women's advocacy group. “Not only does the current law do nothing to help those who may, in fact, need treatment, but it’s actually having a negative public health impact.”

The controversial law, which went into effect in July 2014 despite vocal opposition from leading medical groups, was passed in response to Tennessee’s growing opioid epidemic. Over the past 10 years, the state has seen a nearly tenfold rise in the incidence of babies born with "neonatal abstinence syndrome" (NAS), a group of symptoms that can occur when babies are in withdrawal from exposure to narcotics.

Babies with NAS may be irritable, have trouble feeding and sleeping or suffer from vomiting and diarrhea, but medical professionals stress that the condition is treatable and hasn’t been associated with any long-term negative consequences.

Critics of the Tennessee law contend that incarcerating mothers and separating them from their babies leads to far more severe health outcomes than NAS, and that it flies in the face of medical consensus.

On Friday, national and international experts on NAS, public health researchers, clinicians, reproductive health advocates and drug treatment professionals are descending on Tennessee to try and convince the state of just that.

A two-day national symposium on pregnancy and neonatal abstinence syndrome is being held in Nashville. The location of the event is no coincidence: As the only state in the country thus far to explicitly criminalize drug use during pregnancy, Tennessee has become ground zero in the debate over how to treat pregnant women who struggle with addiction.

On October 02 2015 23:57 Jormundr wrote:

Not true, Switzerland has super high gun ownership and they're fine.
I mean they don't let people have ammo but hey it's LITERALLY the same as America.

On October 01 2015 10:44 zlefin wrote:
You can choose your own opinions, you can't choose your own facts. That's kinda the point of this; there's a difference between things that are truly a matter of opinion, and intentionally misrepresenting the facts.

A new rule from the Obama Administration aims to further reduce the main ingredient in smog. That might sound like good news if you live in a city where smog is a problem. But after the rule was announced, there were plenty of complaints about it.

Technically, the Environmental Protection Agency is reducing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone limits from the current level of 75 parts per billion (ppb) down to 70 ppb.

Ground-level ozone is linked to respiratory illnesses and it can worsen diseases like emphysema and asthma. It's created when pollution from cars, factories, power plants and other sources chemically react with sunlight. It's primarily a problem during the warmer months of the year.

"Put simply — ozone pollution means it hurts to breathe for those most vulnerable: our kids, our elderly and those suffering from heart and lung ailments," said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

The EPA was under a court-ordered deadline to issue a rule today. A year ago, a scientific advisory committee suggested the agency set the standard between 60 and 70 ppb. Environmental groups are critical of the EPA for setting the new limit at the upper end of that spectrum.

While acknowledging the tighter standard will provide health benefits, John Walke, senior attorney and director of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the EPA missed an opportunity to set an even lower level, closer to the 60 ppb.

The day before Pope Francis met anti-gay county clerk Kim Davis in Washington last week, he held a private meeting with a longtime friend from Argentina who has been in a same-sex relationship for 19 years.

Yayo Grassi, an openly gay man, brought his partner, Iwan Bagus, as well several other friends to the Vatican Embassy on September 23 for a brief visit with the Pope. A video of the meeting shows Grassi and Francis greeting each other with a warm hug.

In an exclusive interview with CNN, Grassi declined to disclose details about the short visit, but said it was arranged personally with the Pope via email in the weeks ahead of Francis' highly anticipated visit to the United States.

Oklahoma’s top criminal court agreed Friday to stop all executions indefinitely after confusion over a lethal injection drug shipment led to a stay for an execution, although officials maintained their refusal to divulge the identity of the state’s lethal drug provider.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin issued the stay on Wednesday just before the scheduled execution of Richard Glossip, whose case has garnered international attention, after the state’s corrections department received potassium acetate instead of potassium chloride from a pharmaceutical provider. The shipment of wrong drug arrived hours before Glossip’s scheduled execution.

The state’s Court of Criminal Appeals on Friday accepted Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s request for a stay of three executions set for the next two months while authorities investigate the circumstances around the shipment of the wrong drug. Pruitt’s office declined to identify the pharmaceutical company that had sent the shipment, explaining that Oklahoma law protects the company’s identity for its safety.

State officials said the shipment of potassium acetate — instead of the potassium chloride mandated in Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol — was not a mistake, although they acknowledged that the drug was outside their protocol.

“I don’t think it was a mistake, because we were told potassium acetate is medically interchangeable with potassium chloride,” Corrections Department spokesman Alex Gerszewski told Al Jazeera.

A day after a massacre on a U.S. college campus, Jeb Bush said "stuff happens" but that does not mean gun restrictions should be tightened.

"We're in a difficult time in our country and I don't think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It's very bad to see," the former Florida governor said. Then he added: "Look, stuff happens and the impulse is always to do something and it's not necessarily the right thing to do."

His comments came during an appearance in Greenville, South Carolina where the 2016 candidate was discussing gun control and urging caution before pushing laws and new regulations. He first said that in Florida "we believe that concealed weapons permits is a proper thing."

"All sorts of rules that are appropriate for Florida may not be appropriate for other places but the basic right is embedded and it's a personal right to bear arms but that shouldn't be infringed," he said.

Bush also said the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, that left nine dead and seven injured was "just heartbreaking."

On October 03 2015 06:11 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Wow...



Source