US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3581

SOUTH DAKOTA (NEWS10) – The Keystone Pipeline leak is apparently worse than first thought.

TransCanada Corporation now says it appears approximately 16,800 gallons of oil have leaked in South Dakota since Saturday. The company says it reported the 400-barrel estimate Thursday to the National Response Centre and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration. It says the estimate is based on the excavation of soil to expose more than 100 feet of pipe and takes into account factors including oil observed in the soil and the potential area affected.

At first officials said less than 200 gallons were spilled.

TransCanada says the leak has been “controlled” although they have yet to find the source of the leak. The company has told customers the pipeline will remain closed until early next week.

On April 10 2016 14:19 GreenHorizons wrote:


lol no, but since people insist on not recognizing the argument I'm making I'm done talking about it.

On April 10 2016 14:35 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:

• Insist deal is bad
  
• Offer no alternative
  
• When asked for details you have no response
  

Is your intention to embargo Panama unless they meet some demands you haven't yet specified? You haven't given any details for anybody to understand your position so of course nobody recognizes your argument.

It's been a big week for supporters of paid family leave.

The city of San Francisco and the state of New York took groundbreaking steps toward new and more generous leave policies. Advocates hope the moves will create momentum in other places that are considering similar measures.

"I do believe this will pave the way for other states," says Dina Bakst, the co-founder of A Better Balance, a nonprofit in New York that advocates for family-friendly policies in the workplace.

"What we've seen in other fights, like paid sick days and our fights for pregnancy accommodations — it starts local and then it sweeps the nation," Bakst says. "I think we're on the paid family leave wave."

Starting in a few years, workers in New York state will be able to take 12 weeks of partially paid family leave to care for a new child or an ailing parent. That gives New York the most generous family leave benefits of any state in the country.

"We are restoring respect and pride and dignity to the worker with paid family leave," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a rally Monday, "which says no one should choose between seeing their child born and earning a paycheck."

The following day, San Francisco's board of supervisors approved a bill guaranteeing most workers six weeks of paid leave at their full salaries.

Both measures go far beyond what federal law requires. The Family and Medical Leave Act mandates that employers offer their workers 12 weeks of leave. But it's unpaid. And even that doesn't apply to many part-time workers.

Mississippi goddam, as Nina Simone once sang. You really know how to tick people off. The southern state has come a long way since it led the fight to maintain racial segregation. But this week it decided to take a new stand – against the LGBT community. Opponents of the anti-LGBT effort won’t give up without a fight, and this time, business leaders are at the vanguard.

Once shy of causing a political fuss, businesses large and small are backing LGBT rights, and states that don’t support them are losing jobs as a result.

Following the passage of House Bill 1523 into law Tuesday, Mississippi will soon be the state offering the least protection to gay, lesbian and transgender people at a time when twenty-one states, largely across the south, have introduced laws offering their clear response to the legalisation of gay marriage by allowing people and businesses to refuse services based on their own religious beliefs.

This sweep of anti-LGBT legislation is revealing the clear separation that now exists between conservative-leaning state legislatures and businesses, local and national, that are now supporters as well as signatories to campaigns calling for the legislation’s repeal.

The laws – allowing individuals and institutions to deny services on religious grounds in Mississippi and, in North Carolina, a ban on anti-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation and a requirement that, in public buildings and schools, transgender people use bathrooms corresponding to their gender as assigned at birth – produced a rapid response.

In North Carolina, PayPal canceled a $3.6m investment for a new global operations centre that would have employed 400 people; Nissan, the largest single employer in Mississippi, quickly reiterated its support of the LGBT community, and Duke Energy, the state’s largest power company, has come out strongly in opposition to discrimination, but has not taken a position on the law itself.

Local business leaders and educators warned that the legislation could harm the state’s competitiveness in attracting business and investment. “These assholes talk about gay women and gay men using the exact same language they were using in the 50s and 60s for segregationist purposes,” said the award-winning chef John Currence, owner of several restaurants in Oxford, Mississippi. He warned that Mississippi’s HB1523, known as the Religious Liberty Accommodation Act, would put businesses off from setting up in the state.

On April 10 2016 14:45 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's really not complicated. Don't take the deal unless they give up more than rules they can override if it goes against what they want. Let them keep begging if they don't want to.

I have issues with whether it was family farmers or Big Ag that benefited more as a result of the increase of duty free imports to Panama as well. But considering I can't get people to entertain the idea that we didn't need to take the deal in the first place, that would be an even harder point to make.

EDIT: I don't need to rewrite the trade deal myself to illustrate that them agreeing to rules they don't have to abide by wasn't enough. Of course I think they could have done more, but are people really arguing having a loophole to ignore the new rules doesn't significantly undermine any rules they "got"?

President Barack Obama on Friday told donors that Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were doing Democrats a “favor” by exposing extreme views within their party on issues such as immigration and national security.

“I actually think that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have done us a favor,” Obama said, referring to policy positions that would restrict Muslims and Mexicans from entering the country.

Obama said Trump and Cruz, the two front-runners in the Republican nomination contest ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election, have upset mainstream “establishment” Republicans with their insurgent campaigns.

But he told about 100 people at the annual “signature” fundraising dinner for Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, that Trump had laid bare what some in the Republican party had been saying for years.

“He said, ‘You know what? I can deliver this message with more flair, with more panache,’” Obama said.

Speaking in an opulent two-storey atrium with marble pillars in the home of billionaire oil heirs Gordon and Ann Getty, where donors paid $33,400 per couple to benefit the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Obama mocked Trump.

“In 10 months, I will no longer be president of the United States. But in 10 months, I will - contrary to Mr. Trump’s opinion - still be a citizen of the United States,” he said, drawing laughter and cheers from the crowd.

Trump had long raised questions about whether Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born outside the United States.

On April 11 2016 00:36 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:


Nobody is saying that the loophole was a good thing. You're just jumping to the conclusion that we should either embargo Panama or some other form of trade retaliation unless they dismantle their bank secrecy laws. This position would never happen and the idea that we can just hold out on trade because they aren't going to nuke us like Iran is not reasonable.

If you want to talk about hurting family farmers that would be not having trade deal with Panama and preventing exports either from an embargo or just a raise in tariffs. I'm not sure a trade deal exists that benefits Big Ag less than family farmers. A more reasonable position would be Big Ag getting a great deal while family farmers get a bad deal, but that wasn't the case with the Panama trade deal.

The point of suggesting a deal was thinking about whether Panama would accept that deal and if they didn't what the consequences of that would be. It's really easy to say we could have gotten a better deal and of course they're going to submit to us because USA USA USA. What isn't easy is clearly stating what your demands are, what the repercussions are if your position isn't accepted, and how that effects relations with other nations.

John Kerry will not offer an apology for the United States’ use of the atomic bomb against Japan when he becomes the first US secretary of state to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum on Monday, a senior US official said.

Kerry is visiting the city, which was obliterated by a US atomic bomb on 6 August 1945, to attend a gathering of foreign ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies that Japan opened on Sunday with a call to end nuclear weapons.

The US diplomat is to join his counterparts from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan on Monday to tour the city’s atomic bomb museum and to lay flowers at a cenotaph for its victims, becoming the first in his post to do so.

“If you are asking whether the secretary of state came to Hiroshima to apologise, the answer is no,” a senior US official told reporters late on Sunday.

“If you are asking whether the secretary and I think all Americans and all Japanese are filled with sorrow at the tragedies that befell so many of our countrymen, the answer is yes,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added.

Kerry’s trip could pave the way for an unprecedented visit to Hiroshima by a sitting US president when Barack Obama attends the annual G7 summit to be held in Japan next month.