US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2369

The United States has been condemned for allegedly launching an airstrike on a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Afghanistan that is believed to have killed more than 20 aid workers.

It is understood the hospital was hit during an aerial bombardment on Kunduz, destroying a large portion of the facility. An MSF source told the Guardian at least 20 members of staff were killed and dozens more people were injured. They said the death toll could rise further.

The charity claimed the GPS coordinates of the hospital had been widely circulated to all parties fighting in the conflict. It also alleged the bombing continued for up to 30 minutes after it raised the alarm with US and Afghan officials.

At the time of the bombing, 105 patients and their carers, and more than 80 MSF international and national staff were in the hospital. At least 37 staff members were wounded in the incident, it said. None of the international doctors volunteering at the facility were hurt.

According to an MSF doctor, the dead included eight nurses, three doctors, six security guards, two cleaners and a pharmacist.

Two weeks after revealing that Volkswagen had cheated on diesel emissions tests, officials from the Environmental Protection Agency still have not formally ordered a recall of 482,000 VW products, but that step is "likely" to take place, according to an EPA spokesperson.

Sources inside Volkswagen, meanwhile, told TheDetroitBureau.com that the automaker is now working with the federal agency to come up with an acceptable fix for diesel models that can produce as much as 40 times the allowed level of pollutants such as smog-causing NOx.

VW has already said it is developing a retrofit for a total of 11 million diesel vehicles sold worldwide that contained a secret "defeat device" designed to reduce emissions levels during testing.

Two weeks after revealing that Volkswagen had cheated on diesel emissions tests, officials from the Environmental Protection Agency still have not formally ordered a recall of 482,000 VW products, but that step is "likely" to take place, according to an EPA spokesperson.

Sources inside Volkswagen, meanwhile, told TheDetroitBureau.com that the automaker is now working with the federal agency to come up with an acceptable fix for diesel models that can produce as much as 40 times the allowed level of pollutants such as smog-causing NOx.

VW has already said it is developing a retrofit for a total of 11 million diesel vehicles sold worldwide that contained a secret "defeat device" designed to reduce emissions levels during testing.

VW's problems have continued to escalate in recent days, and even as prosecutors in both the U.S. and Germany look into the scandal, the automaker's top U.S. executive has been summoned to Capitol Hill, where he will testify before a congressional oversight panel on Oct. 8.

"The American people want to know why these devices were in place, how the decision was made to install them, and how they went undetected for so long. We will get them those answers," said Rep. Tim Murphy, the Pennsylvania Republican who serves as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

The hearing will come less than a month after the EPA announced that Volkswagen had secretly added software code to its digital engine controllers designed to rein in emissions during testing. But in the real world, the nearly half-million diesel vehicles sold in the U.S. over the last seven years were allowed to produce significantly higher levels of pollution than allowed by federal standards.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate may pass bipartisan environmental legislation as soon as next week, and it's kind of a big deal.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on Friday announced support for a bill overhauling the country's decades-old chemical safety law, bringing the number of co-sponsors to 60.

The bill would reform the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, which has been widely panned as outdated and ineffective at protecting the public from hazardous chemicals. It would give the Environmental Protection Agency more authority to test and regulate chemicals, and to identify risky chemicals that should not be on the market. A Senate committee approved the legislation in April.

Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and David Vitter (R-La.) have taken the lead on the reform bill, and agreed to additional changes to accommodate the concerns of Markey and Durbin. The changes include increased funding from industry fees, which will pay for additional EPA testing, as well as faster compliance timelines for regulations. The senators said the changes are also meant to make it easier for states to move forward on their own regulations if the EPA has not issued a determination on a chemical's safety.

Markey said in a statement that the changes represent "positive and meaningful progress."

The Senate legislation has caused some tensions among environmental groups over whether the proposed changes to the law go far enough. Elizabeth Thompson, president of Environmental Defense Fund Action, said the additional changes have "further strengthened" the bill and put it closer to passing Congress. "Today we are even closer to a new law that can finally protect public health and the environment from harmful chemicals," Thompson said in a statement.

Representatives from the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, March of Dimes, and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine are slated to appear with senators at a press conference in support of the bill on Tuesday.

A US airstrike that killed up to 20 aid workers and patients in a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan constitutes a “grave violation of international law”, the charity’s president has said.

The bombardment, which occurred early on Saturday morning, went on for more than 30 minutes despite the charity raising the alarm with US and Afghan officials, and destroyed much of the compound in Kunduz.

The hospital had treated hundreds of people injured after the northern city fell to a dramatic Taliban attack last week, and when government troops launched an assault to reclaim it. Beds and corridors were still crammed with patients and their relatives when it was hit in the early hours of Saturday morning.

On Saturday evening, the dead included at least 12 members of staff and seven patients – three of whom where children. An MSF source told the Guardian the death toll could rise further.

“This attack is abhorrent and a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” said Meinie Nicolai, MSF’s president. “We demand total transparency from coalition forces. We cannot accept that this horrific loss of life will simply be dismissed as ‘collateral damage’.”

Jonathan Whittall, the charity’s head of humanitarian analysis, added: “MSF demands clarity on exactly what took place at our hospital in Kunduz and how this unacceptable event could have happened.”

The US military has been providing bombing raids to support Afghan forces fighting to reclaim control of Kunduz from the Taliban. It admitted that an airstrike may have caused “collateral damage”, a military term for civilian deaths and injuries.

Illegal immigrants—along with other noncitizens without the right to vote—may pick the 2016 presidential winner. Thanks to the unique math undergirding the Electoral College, the mere presence of 11-12 million illegal immigrants and other noncitizens here legally may enable them to swing the election from Republicans to Democrats.
The right to vote is intended to be a singular privilege of citizenship. But the 1787 Constitutional Convention rejected allowing the people to directly elect their President. The delegates chose instead our Electoral College system, under which 538 electoral votes distributed amongst the states determine the presidential victor. The Electoral College awards one elector for each U.S. Senator, thus 100 of the total, and D.C. gets three electors pursuant to the 23rd Amendment. Those electoral numbers are unaffected by the size of the noncitizen population. The same cannot be said for the remaining 435, more than 80 percent of the total, which represent the members elected to the House.
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The distribution of these 435 seats is not static: they are reapportioned every ten years to reflect the population changes found in the census. That reallocation math is based on the relative “whole number of persons in each state,” as the formulation in the 14th Amendment has it. When this language was inserted into the U.S. Constitution, the concept of an “illegal immigrant,” as the term is defined today, had no meaning. Thus the census counts illegal immigrants and other noncitizens equally with citizens. Since the census is used to determine the number of House seats apportioned to each state, those states with large populations of illegal immigrants and other noncitizens gain extra seats in the House at the expense of states with fewer such “whole number of persons.”
This math gives strongly Democratic states an unfair edge in the Electoral College. Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelming for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed Saturday that military records be amended to upgrade dishonorable discharges imposed on gay, lesbian and transgender military veterans.

People drummed out of the armed services in years past for being gay should be able to get their records changed to reflect an honorable discharge, Clinton said.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell is over, but that doesn't change the fact that more than 14,000 men and women were forced out of the military for being gay, some long before Don't Ask, Don't Tell even existed," Clinton said, referring to the 1993 law that allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the military if they did not reveal their sexual orientation.

On October 04 2015 08:14 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:


seems like a bit of a skewed title since legal immigrants skew population statistics as well.

On October 04 2015 11:59 Introvert wrote:
Hardly terrible, the title says exactly what the article says.

On October 04 2015 11:59 Introvert wrote:
Hardly terrible, the title says exactly what the article says.

On October 04 2015 12:23 GreenHorizons wrote:


You misunderstand, the title is terrible because the article is terrible. That they don't mention the previous two electoral college results (blowouts) betrays their intentions.

On October 04 2015 13:03 Introvert wrote:


That wasn't the point of the article. But you are right, there will never be a close election ever again.