US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2440

On October 28 2015 06:09 CannonsNCarriers wrote:
Speaking as a Liberal, I really hated Citizen's United (CU) as a decision and feared its consequences for the country. But having seen how it actually worked out, I am much less concerned. CU has effectively destroyed the Republican party as a governing entity.

The Republican congress can no longer put up consistently conservative, effective politicians anymore (Boehner/Cantor/McCarthy). Republicans are now wholly beholden to ideologically driven lunatics who find everything in the world to be insufficiently conservative. The link to CU here is that the Super PACs have been sniping out all the effective negotiators of the Republican party for being impure and insufficiently conservative because they committed the unforgivable sin of negotiating with Democrats. These CU powered Super PACs have taken scalp after scalp until now the Republican congress depends on Democrats to pass actual governance legislation (see my link above, team Pelosi will put up all the votes for the big deal Wednesday). Compare the effectiveness of a real Republican politician like McConnel or Boehner to one of the Super PAC era whack jobs like Cruz or that Jordan imbecile from the house freedom caucus.

Moreover, the Super PAC managers spend like 4 out of 5 of the dollars they receive on their own salaries. I don't mind that they take money from the vicious and evil minded rich and pocket it for themselves. And the consequences have been the destruction of the Republican party, which I also don't mind.

On October 28 2015 05:52 farvacola wrote:
It's really not that unrealistic. Many things need to fall into place first, but the Supreme Court justices that Sanders appoints will be anti-Citizens United, there'll be injury in fact guaranteed given the repetitive nature of elections and the sheer volume of money spent via CU's holding and authorization, and you better believe that a host of very capable lawyers will be looking to bring such a case before the Supreme Court. It would only be a matter of time. But no, Sanders himself cannot overturn CU, he can merely put the people who can into power.

On October 28 2015 06:43 always_winter wrote:
Speaking as a liberal, you're not concerned with Citizens United and John Boehner is an effective politician? Does. Not. Compute.

The Republican race is quite literally a sprint to the right to see which puppet can have the privilege of being fondled by the old wrinkly hands of the Koch brothers. Citizens United is one of the most abhorrent abridgements of popular sovereignty in American history.

John Boehner personally orchestrated the government shutdown, opposed every piece of Democratic legislation brought before Congress, and only after his departure did Senate Republicans take steps to avert the shutdown.

I don't know what kind of leaves you've been smoking off the trees you're hugging, but they don't seem very liberal to me nor do they seem rooted in reality.

On October 28 2015 06:43 cLutZ wrote:


He also needs to appoint justices that are capable of distinguishing The New York times from an advertisement placed in the NYT and from a startup blog and a lone pamphleteer. Or Fox News from an ad run on Fox News from a movie the is OnDemand.

Remember that Citizens United is a group that was prosecuted/had an injunction imposed against them by the FEC because they tried to run a documentary about Hillary Clinton in theaters and OnDemand during the Democratic primaries. How this is distinguishable from an Op-Ed in the NYT or a favorable/unfavorable interview on CBS (or an SNL appearance) without engaging in viewpoint discrimination is something you need to be able to articulate from first principals. And I have actually never seen that done, particularly in the Citizens United dissents.

In a speech to a meeting of police chiefs, President Obama defended the job of police departments across the country, called for tougher gun laws and said the United States criminal justice system needs reform.

"Too often, law enforcement gets scapegoated for the broader failures of our society and criminal justice system," Obama said at a meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago. "I know that you do your jobs with distinction no matter the challenges you face. That's part of wearing the badge. But we can't expect you to contain and control problems that the rest of us aren't willing to face or do anything about – problems ranging from substandard education to a shortage of jobs and opportunity, from an absence of drug treatment programs to laws that result in it being easier in too many neighborhoods for a young person to purchase a gun than a book."

Obama spoke just as the White House sought to distance itself from comments made by FBI Director James Comey. As we reported, Comey linked the recent rise in violent crime in some cities to less aggressive policing that he said may be due to the increased scrutiny officers have faced after a rash of high-profile police killings of black men.

According to the Associated Press, White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz told reporters traveling with Obama that it is not clear that crime has spiked nationwide.

"The available body of evidence does not support the notion that law enforcement officers around the country are shying away from doing their job," Schultz said.

In his speech, Obama said that he rejected a narrative that frames the relationship between officers and the communities they police as "us" and "them."

American police forces, he said, have made communities safer, and that's something every American should take pride in.

On October 28 2015 07:02 zlefin wrote:

I'm not quite clear on where you're coming from on this.
Could you clarify your point/stance?

WASHINGTON -- Although outgoing House Speaker John Boehner may be reluctant to acknowledge it, the latest budget deal between Congress and the White House includes a provision that will require wealthy Americans to turn over more money to the IRS.

Boehner claimed Tuesday that the deal doesn't increase taxes. Whether that's an accurate statement depends on how one defines the term "tax increase." The federal government has three basic ways it can increase its tax revenues: raise tax rates, eliminate loopholes and deductions, or ramp up IRS enforcement of existing tax laws. The latest budget deal took what's behind Door No. 3.

The proposed deal is expected to generate $11 billion in new federal revenue from what both sides are calling "tax compliance" measures, including $9 billion from new auditing standards for hedge funds, law firms and other business partnerships. In plain English, that means the IRS is going to be getting more money by improving its tax collection policies for rich people.

It's an open secret in Washington that a lot of wealthy people don't pay all of the taxes they owe. But figuring out who is taking advantage of perfectly legal tax deductions and who is illegally dodging payments can be a difficult and costly endeavor. It's particularly hard when people have their money tied up in a large business partnership, because the existing rules for auditing partnerships are old and designed for relatively simple businesses.

Under existing law, if the IRS thinks a firm has been skimping on its payments, it can't just look at a single tax filing for the business and calculate what it owes; it has to audit the individual tax returns of every single partner involved in the business. That's not a big deal for a local bakery or flower shop with two or three partners. But many far more complex operations -- hedge funds, law firms and other things that pay rich people lots of money -- can have hundreds or even thousands of partners, making it extremely difficult for the IRS to show that money is being held up.

A 2014 GAO report found that, as of 2011, there were more than 10,000 businesses with at least 100 partners, and more than 500 businesses with at least 100,000 partners. And the large partnership structure is particularly appealing for many firms precisely because it is harder to track tax chicanery than if the company were simply organized as a corporation, which can be audited at the corporate level. The number of large partnerships more than tripled from 2002 to 2011.

The change included in the budget would eliminate those more complicated auditing rules for partnerships and allow the IRS to audit them once, at the partnership level, without fussing with hundreds or thousands of other tax returns.

Say you bought health insurance through the federal health exchange, paid the premiums and followed the rules.

And then say you start having pain in your hands. Your doctor refers you to a rheumatologist to test for arthritis.

But when you search for the specialist, there isn't one there.

That happens more often than you'd think. In fact, as many as 14 percent of health plans sold on the federal government's insurance exchange are missing doctors in at least one common specialty from their networks, according to a study published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, by researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The means patients may find themselves facing big medical bills for care they thought they had bought insurance to cover.

The researchers reviewed 135 health plans in the 34 states that sell health insurance through the federal marketplace and found that 19 of them lacked in-network specialists in some areas. The most common missing specialties were psychiatry, rheumatology and endocrinology.

"If somebody needed to access a psychiatrist or a rheumatologist, or they had a thyroid disorder and needed an endocrinologist, they would not be able to find an in-network specialist to care for them," says Stephen Dorner, a medical student who was an author of the study while he earned his master's degree at Harvard.

Dorner and his colleagues searched for specialists within 50 miles and 100 miles of the most populous city where each plan was offered. Some plans lacked specialists such as dermatologists and oncologists in the narrow radius but included them farther away.

The Affordable Care Act requires that health insurance plans have enough doctors in their networks to ensure that their customers can get the health care they need.

On October 28 2015 07:53 notesfromunderground wrote:
He's got a point. It's very difficult to keep people from spending money. People find sneaky ways to move money around and pay one another. That's why we should focus less on some idea that we can regulate away the symptoms of the problem and focus on the problem itself - let's redistribute the wealth and start publicly funding elections, and then we don't have to worry about elections being corrupted by the super-rich

Or we can just use social media to organize ourselves politically and then we don't even need the money, because social media is pretty much free. I think that's what we're doing right now

(Also - do you think the NYT is conspiring with Hillary Clinton? Or is it just a case of tacit collusion and shared interests? I want to hear from all of you on your views regarding 'conspiracy as such' on my blog: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/497442-conspiracies#1)

On October 28 2015 07:53 notesfromunderground wrote:
He's got a point. It's very difficult to keep people from spending money. People find sneaky ways to move money around and pay one another. That's why we should focus less on some idea that we can regulate away the symptoms of the problem and focus on the problem itself - let's redistribute the wealth and start publicly funding elections, and then we don't have to worry about elections being corrupted by the super-rich

Or we can just use social media to organize ourselves politically and then we don't even need the money, because social media is pretty much free. I think that's what we're doing right now

(Also - do you think the NYT is conspiring with Hillary Clinton? Or is it just a case of tacit collusion and shared interests? I want to hear from all of you on your views regarding 'conspiracy as such' on my blog: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/497442-conspiracies#1)

On October 28 2015 08:38 notesfromunderground wrote:
I think the lesson to be drawn here is that it is impossible to outlaw Power. You cannot pass a law which prohibits those with Power from exercising it. What you have to do instead is get some of your own Power and use it to contest that of your enemy.

So ultimately, the idea of "repealing citizen's united" as a panacea for representative democracy in the new gilded age of mass media is a red herring. In the same way that "regulating wall st" is a naive fantasy. I hope what I'm saying makes sense to some readers.