US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2555

On November 24 2015 00:44 heliusx wrote:
You just linked me to an article using the paper you previously linked as a source. So I'll ask once more, where is the evidence to back up your assertion "We sell those drug cartels the majority of their fire arms"? Or are you just going trump style with 'facts'?

The man considered the father figure of environmental protection in the US has attacked Republicans for “going through all the stages of denial” over climate change, accusing leading presidential contenders Donald Trump and Marco Rubio of ignoring science for political gain.

William Ruckelshaus, who on Tuesday is to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom, told the Guardian that leading Republicans are harming the US’s reputation by attempting to stymie efforts to tackle climate change.

The criticism is particularly stinging as Ruckelshaus previously ran for election as a Republican and was appointed by Richard Nixon as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Ronald Reagan appointed him to a second term at the federal regulator in 1983.

“The [Obama] administration is trying to lead on climate change but they aren’t getting much support from the Republicans who have turned it into a partisan issue, which is too bad,” Ruckelshaus said. “If they are successful, that will set us back a fair bit. It won’t look good to the world and it won’t be good for the US.”

Republican leaders, who have signaled their opposition to any deal at looming climate talks in Paris, have attempted to dismantle key elements of Barack Obama’s strategy to lower emissions.

The Republican-dominated Senate voted on Tuesday to repeal Obama’s centerpiece policy that uses the EPA to enforce rules to cut pollution from power plants. Mitch McConnell, the senate majority leader, said Republicans were protecting middle-class Americans from “deeply regressive energy regulations that would eliminate good-paying jobs and punish the poor”.

Obama has vowed to veto any repeal, but any Republican who succeeded him as president appears unlikely to follow suit. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican nomination, has called global warming “bullshit” and a “total and very expensive hoax”.

Ben Carson, another potential nominee, has said climate change is “not a big deal”, while Florida senator Marco Rubio said last year that scientists have taken “a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to man-made activity. I don’t agree with that.”

Ruckelshaus criticised the current Republican leadership for “resisting doing anything” on climate change in a bid to appease the party’s increasingly conservative voting base.

On November 24 2015 02:03 Plansix wrote:
You are correct that I have no proof that we sell them the "Majority" of guns every year and I am assuming that. But 200K guns per year is a massive number and drug cartels aren't really public facing entities, so even the expects can only guess as to how many weapons they have. But they get a lot of them from the US and the US makes up the majority of the arms business world wide. Second place is Russia.

The government should ensure the health care coverage of all Americans, 51 percent of adults said in a new Gallup survey released Monday. That is slightly more than the 47 percent of Americans who said it is not the government's responsibility, though the difference is still within the poll's margin of error.

The 51 percent is the highest share of American sentiment in that direction since 2006, when nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) said government is responsible and just 28 percent did not. In the years following, only in 2011 did Americans have a more positive view of the role in government in health care than negative.

Support for a government role in health care increased along most demographic lines, most significantly among those aged 50 to 64 (up 12 points) and households making less than $30,000 (up 13 points).

On November 24 2015 00:27 oneofthem wrote:
to be sure the u.s. prison system and cops in certain areas are hugely destructive, but there are way more threats and the whole narcotic problem too.

i'd say europe's current situation is similar to the u.s. without the narcotics trade and related gang problems. the segregation and lack of law enforcement presence is shared with u.s. in the 60's. the gangs were able to take over power vacuum neighborhoods neglected by police. europe does not have this yet, but hte conditions are still ripe.

The big climate news last week was President Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone oil pipeline, so there wasn’t much attention paid to an electric utility’s decision to retire a 60-year-old coal plant in Alton, Illinois. Unlike Keystone, the Wood River Power Station isn’t a global symbol of global warming. Its owner is closing it voluntarily, for economic as well as environmental reasons. And coal plants get shut down all the time; Wood River was the 206th announced retirement in the U.S. in the last five years, representing about one third of the coal fleet’s capacity.

In terms of the carbon emissions broiling the planet, however, that’s actually the bigger news. While the rejection of Keystone is a huge symbolic victory for climate activists, and a nice talking point for Obama to use at the global climate talks in Paris, the ongoing destruction of the U.S. coal industry is a much more tangible victory for the climate. With Keystone, Obama laid down a marker that the U.S. intends to slash emissions and leave fossil fuels in the ground in the future, but coal retirements are already doing that at a rapid pace right now.

It’s awkward for Obama to admit, because he officially favors an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, and the U.S. really is producing record amounts of oil and gas as well as wind and solar. But his presidency has been a catastrophe for coal. Unlike oil, which remains the dominant source of transportation fuel, coal has been eclipsed by natural gas and in some areas by renewables as the most cost-effective source of electricity. And since coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, even worse for the planet than the oil from Alberta’s tar sands, its swoon has provided tremendous relief for the climate, dwarfing the impact of Keystone.

The latest numbers are startling. A new Sierra Club report with data from the Rhodium Group found that overall U.S. emissions will drop this year to their lowest level since 1995, even though U.S. economic output is at an all-time high. In the power sector, the closure of coal plants that once spewed about 128 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year has helped cut emissions 18 percent from 2005 levels—and plants that produced almost twice as many greenhouse gases have been scheduled for retirement. That’s already enough to meet the 2022 emissions targets in Obama’s Clean Power Plan, even though the ink on the plan is barely dry, and almost enough to meet its 2025 targets that Obama will ask the world to emulate in Paris.

Of course, there is no reason to think the retirements will stop with Wood River, especially now that the Clean Power Plan and so many other coal-related regulations are in place, so there is every reason to expect emissions to drop even further. For example, also last week, a report that led to the retirement of coal plant #205 in Tonawanda, New York, recommended the mothballing of another New York plant that could soon become #207. The coal industry is hemorrhaging cash, to the extent that the National Mining Association recently named the CEO of the bankrupt coal company Alpha Natural Resources to be its chairman. Its choices were limited; Patriot Coal, Walter Energy, and James River Coal also went bust this year, and the giant Arch Coal may follow suit soon. The U.S. retired as much coal in 2015 as it retired in the two decades before Obama took office, and the head of West Virginia’s largest utility recently warned that even if Obama’s carbon plan is blocked in court, coal isn’t coming back.

A US mayor has said businessman Donald Trump "is plain wrong" in claiming Arabs in his city cheered the attacks of 9/11.
Mr Trump, who is running for president, said he saw "thousands and thousands" of people in New Jersey celebrating.
But the mayor of Jersey City said no such thing happened and accused the Republican of "shameful politicising".
Mr Trump, who leads his party's race for the White House, has also urged increased surveillance of Muslims.
His comments come after the attacks in Paris which left 130 people dead, and evidence suggesting that some of the attackers used refugee routes to enter the country.
Since the attacks, the issue of national security and threat of homegrown terrorism has come to dominate the national political conversation.
"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down," he said at a rally in Alabama. "And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down."
Asked to explain on a Sunday morning political talk show, the business mogul said: "There were people were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations."
The mayor of Jersey City, Steven Fulop, released a statement later which said: "Trump is plain wrong, and he is shamefully politicising an emotionally charged issue.
"We were actually among the first to provide responders to help in lower Manhattan."

On November 24 2015 03:19 Nyxisto wrote:
I can't believe that people are making a fuss about 10k per year, what about those "tired and poor that are yearning to breath free?"

On November 24 2015 04:55 KwarK wrote:
If people were concerned that NASA might accidentally damage heaven with their activities would you have Obama promise to the US people that he'll tell NASA to be extra careful not to break anything as they fly towards the celestial curtain draped over the earth?

The "real talk, no pandering" crowd seems to very much want people to pander to their feelings. Come to the President with actual problems you're going to demand he address, not unfounded fears. Or if you are going to bring unfounded fears then don't be too surprised when he dismisses them. It's bad politics to call idiots idiots, maybe Obama should have made up some bullshit about how he'd have anti terrorist sniffer dogs smell each asylum seeker before they were let in, but this time he chose to call a spade a spade.