US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2787

On January 25 2016 13:46 LuckyFool wrote:


I came in this thread to ask this very question haha. Seems like no one really knows. I just looked up his party affiliations because I've always thought of him as a Democrat, but he technically switched to Republican in 2001 and then switched again to independent where he's been since 2007. Probably would equally take votes away from both, maybe he could hurt the Democrat a little more since NYC typically votes hard Democrat, but some would go with their former man.

Regional air-quality regulators in California voted on Saturday to require the utility responsible for a ruptured underground pipeline in the Los Angeles area to underwrite an independent study on the health effects of a huge methane leak from the site.

The natural gas leak in Aliso Canyon, just outside the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch, began on Oct. 23 and ranks as the worst ever in California.

Odorized methane fumes sickened scores of people and led to the temporary relocation of thousands of residents from the northern Los Angeles community near the leaking storage field in Aliso Canyon.

The 4-1 vote on Saturday by a hearing board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, a regional agency, stopped short of requiring the utility to extract more gas from the crippled field than it already had pledged to siphon out, under orders from state officials.

Gas extraction is designed to ease pressure on the ruptured wellhead and slow the leak.

Lawyers from Southern California Gas Co, the owner of the facility, told the air-quality hearing board any requirement from them could not conflict with the orders from the state Public Utilities Commission and Governor Jerry Brown.

"We're going to comply with the law, we are going to do what they've asked us to do," Robert Wyman, a lawyer for SoCalGas, told regulators at the meeting in Los Angeles.

After that, the board members required the utility to underwrite an independent study on the effects of the leak on local residents and imposed additional monitoring and reporting requirements on the utility.

On January 25 2016 14:17 GreenHorizons wrote:



I guess it would depend on how he ran. I don't really see him taking any votes from Bernie or Trump though. He would more just give people who would never vote for either someone to vote for.

On January 25 2016 15:23 Bagration wrote:


I would try to look at it from a regional perspective, since Electoral votes would be key - in which case which states would he be strongest in (New England?), in which case it would be harmful to the Democrats.

On January 25 2016 11:32 xDaunt wrote:
So apparently the latest disclosed emails show that Hillary (or people from her team) copied materials and information from top secret and secure email servers and then pasted those materials into emails on Hillary's private server. She's toast.


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Source.

On January 26 2016 00:04 oneofthem wrote:
bloomberg can just threaten to run to push the dems away from the left

On January 26 2016 00:04 oneofthem wrote:
bloomberg can just threaten to run to push the dems away from the left

On January 26 2016 00:11 Mindcrime wrote:


and toward the totalitarian?

On January 26 2016 01:14 xDaunt wrote:

Why in the world do you have such a boner for Bloomberg?

The Supreme Court has ruled that a previous decision that put an end to automatic life sentences without parole for juveniles should be retroactive.

The 6-3 ruling means that some 2,100 juvenile murders will now have the possibility of parole.

As NPR's Nina Totenberg reported, this case was a "procedural spiderweb." But the implications of it were easy to understand: At issue was whether a previous ruling by the high court applied to Henry Montgomery, who killed a police officer in 1963 when he was 17-years-old. Montgomery was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

But back in 2012, the Supreme Court decided that sentencing youth to life without parole amounted to cruel and usual punishment. That rule obviously applied to all future cases, but what about past cases?

The Supreme Court resolved today that it did indeed have jurisdiction to review this case and that its previous ruling was substantial enough that it should apply retroactively.

What I meant to say is that I have a Donald Trump joke. Actually, it's not mine. It was told to me by a former Trump-world executive, who says Trumpsters liked to tell it amongst themselves, as it captures a certain essence. But since it's a little salty, with mature themes and adult language, and since I am a family-friendly writer, I will let him have the floor:

So Donald Trump is riding in an elevator. The elevator doors open, and a gorgeous blonde steps in. She sees him, and says, "Oh my God, you're Donald Trump!" And he says, "Yes, I am." And she says, "Can I suck your *$@!?" And he says, "What's in it for me?"

On September 9, 2002, as the George W. Bush administration was launching its campaign to invade Iraq, a classified report landed on the desk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it carried an ominous note.

“Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD,” Rumsfeld wrote to Air Force General Richard Myers. “It is big.”

The report was an inventory of what U.S. intelligence knew—or more importantly didn’t know—about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Its assessment was blunt: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns. ... We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program.”

Myers already knew about the report. The Joint Staff’s director for intelligence had prepared it, but Rumsfeld’s urgent tone said a great deal about how seriously the head of the Defense Department viewed the report’s potential to undermine the Bush administration’s case for war. But he never shared the eight-page report with key members of the administration such as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell or top officials at the CIA, according to multiple sources at the State Department, White House and CIA who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Instead, the report disappeared, and with it a potentially powerful counter-narrative to the administration’s argument that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons posed a grave threat to the U.S. and its allies, which was beginning to gain traction in major news outlets, led by the New York Times.

While the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq was at the heart of the administration's case for war, the JCS report conceded: “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

The rationale for the invasion has long since been discredited, but the JCS report, now declassified, which a former Bush administration official forwarded in December, nevertheless has implications for both sides in the 2016 presidential race, in particular the GOP candidates who are relying for foreign policy advice on some of the architects of the war, and the Democratic front-runner, who once again is coming under fire from her primary opponent for supporting the invasion.

The Hillary Clinton campaign has been engaged in an aggressive effort to accomplish one crucial political goal: Knocking off Bernie Sanders’ halo. One common thread running through many Clinton attacks on Sanders — whether it’s questioning his record on guns or suggesting his single payer dream isn’t going to happen — has been to try to portray Sanders as a conventional politician (after all) who is not quite as pure as the scenes of his rapt, transported crowds suggest and is promising more than he can deliver.

The city of Flint has belatedly rewritten water testing instructions that have been blamed for the gross underestimation of its lead pollution crisis, with the Michigan government to be sued this week over its continued support for the distorted tests revealed by the Guardian.

People in Flint have been complaining about their water since the summer of 2014. Until December 2015, officials in the city were handing out instructions to residents which said they should test their drinking water only after they had had turned on the “cold faucet of your kitchen or main bathroom sink and let it run for three to four minutes”.

This practice of “pre-flushing” pipes has been criticized by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and other scientists for reducing the amount of lead and copper corrosion found in samples.

Analysis conducted by the Virginia Tech scientists Marc Edwards, Rebekah Martin, and Min Tang, who were among the first to uncover the toxic water crisis in Flint, found that of 21 Flint households tested under these altered conditions, 16 showed much higher lead levels when their water was tested normally.

The Harris County, Texas grand jury tasked with investigating Planned Parenthood announced today that it has decided not to indict the women's health provider. Instead, the grand jury has indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress. Last summer, their group released a series of secretly-recorded and deceptively-edited videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue—which would be illegal.