In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
California is already on track to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Now under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, the state will ratchet up its fight against climate change by launching an ambitious campaign to scale back emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
"This is big, and I hope it sends a message across the country," Brown said.
California reduced emissions by imposing limits on the carbon content of gasoline and diesel fuel, promoting zero-emission electric vehicles, and introducing a cap-and-trade system for polluters.
The new plan, outlined in SB32, involves increasing renewable energy use, putting more electric cars on the road, improving energy efficiency, and curbing emissions from key industries.
Brown signed another bill, AB197, that gives lawmakers more oversight of regulators and provides aid to low-income or minority communities located near polluting facilities such as oil refineries and factories.
California's crusade against climate change started under former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the state's original emissions-control law, known as AB32.
"Here we are, 10 years later, emissions have gone down and the economy has gone up," said Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), who wrote AB32 as well as SB32. "It's a success story."
But not everyone agrees. The two new laws signed by Brown faced fierce opposition from the state's business community, including the oil industry, as well as from Republicans.
WASHINGTON — Sexual assault in the military has plagued the Pentagon in recent years as a series of high-profile cases, and new data, revealed the extent of the problem. In response, President Obama and members of Congress demanded that military officials more aggressively address the threat and its causes.
Yet few military experts went as far as Donald J. Trump did Wednesday, when he suggested that the integration of women into the armed forces was an underlying cause of sexual assault.
Speaking at a candidates’ forum, Mr. Trump defended one of his Twitter posts from 2013 concerning the high number of sexual assaults in the military, and said that he had been “absolutely correct” in posting a message that said, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
The remarks drew criticism on Thursday from lawmakers and military experts, who said Mr. Trump had displayed ignorance of the Pentagon’s decades-long struggle to curb such assaults and the military justice system that is in place to prosecute them.
“That’s more than victim blaming, and it misunderstands the historical role of women in the military,” said retired Col. Don Christensen, a former chief prosecutor of the Air Force.
Senator Lindsey Graham at the United States Capitol on Tuesday. “Quite frankly, it’s absurd,” he said on Thursday, referring to the notion that the proximity of women was to blame for sexual assault in the military. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times American women in the military have taken on expanded roles in recent years as the Pentagon has integrated them into more combat positions. But they have worked alongside servicemen since the Revolutionary War, and in significant numbers since World War II, something Mr. Trump did not acknowledge.
Their roles have grown over the centuries from nurses, cooks and seamstresses, who maintained the camps of the Continental Army, to fighter pilots, soldiers, sailors and Marines who are battling the Islamic State in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
“We couldn’t run a military without women,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He noted that an argument that the proximity of women was to blame for sexual assault could be applied to women on college campuses and in workplaces, where they are also assaulted. “Quite frankly, it’s absurd,” he said.
As the Pentagon has released more detailed records on the problem, the statistics reveal that sexual assault in the military is not just a problem faced by women. In 2014, the latest numbers available, the Pentagon estimated that 20,300 servicemen and servicewomen were assaulted that year.
“Over half the victims are men,” said Colonel Christensen, who is now the president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group. Of the estimated 20,300 attacks in 2014 recorded by the Pentagon, roughly 10,600 of the victims were men, though women faced a higher rate of assault given their lower overall numbers in the armed forces.
Mr. Trump’s proposed solution of creating a military justice system to deal with sexual assault also puzzled national security experts. A military justice system has been in place in some form since the 1774 British Articles of War. It is an essential and distinct part of the military.
“George Washington beat him to it!” said Mr. Graham, who has worked as a military lawyer.
That system and its laws, known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice, have in fact been at the center of a protracted battle in Congress over its role in adjudicating such crimes.
One solution was first proposed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York. She has pressed for a measure, opposed by top Pentagon leaders, that would take sexual assault cases outside the military chain of command and give military prosecutors the power to decide which cases to try, rather than keeping that authority with the accuser’s own commander, as is the policy now.
Ms. Gillibrand’s logic — and that of her supporters, including a number of victims’ groups — is that more men and women in the military would come forward to report crimes if they did not fear retaliation by those supervising them.
The Pentagon’s newest statistics also showed that a majority of victims did not report attacks. The Defense Department said that in 2014, only 6,131 — under one-third — of attacks were reported.
The 2014 statistics, which were based on a study conducted for the Pentagon by the RAND Corporation, a think tank, found that 62 percent of women who reported sexual assault said they had faced retaliation for doing so. The study, released in May 2015 and endorsed by the Pentagon, offered no comparable statistic for men.
Ms. Gillibrand’s efforts have been rebuffed in favor of more modest measures, including those written by Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, that stripped commanders of their ability to overturn jury verdicts and mandated dishonorable discharge or dismissal for anyone convicted of sexual assault.
Other recent legislation guarantees that every sexual assault victim in the military receives an independent lawyer, known as a special victims’ counsel, and assures a civilian review of any case in which a commander overrules a prosecutor seeking to court-martial an accused offender.
“Donald Trump displayed a stunning lack of knowledge about how the military justice system works, the nature of sexual assault in the military or the dozens of systemic reforms that Congress has made to curb such crimes,” Ms. McCaskill said on Thursday.
Mr. Trump, pressed on Wednesday about whether his 2013 Twitter post was meant to suggest that women should not serve, said the solution was “not to kick them out.”
“Right now, part of the problem is nobody gets prosecuted,” he said. “You have the report of rape, and nobody gets prosecuted.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks on sexual assault in the military, like so many he has made on other topics, became instant campaign fodder.
Matt Heinz, who is challenging Representative Martha E. McSally, Republican of Arizona and a former Air Force combat pilot, issued a news release on Thursday morning that said, “Voters deserve to know if McSally will stick to her principles and denounce Donald Trump and his campaign.”
Lindsey Graham is still my favorite Republican. I rewatch his daily show appearance every time I need to remind myself that the entire GOP isn't filled with morons.
Yeah, I had a change of opinion on Lindsey Graham after he became pretty consistent on being economically conservative while being reasonable on social issues.
The House is slated to vote on a bipartisan bill that would allow families of September 11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia, setting the stage for a showdown with Barack Obama on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the attacks.
The Senate passed the bill in May by voice vote despite the strident objections from Saudi Arabia, a key US ally in the Middle East. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals.
The White House has signaled Obama would veto the legislation over concerns about exposing Americans overseas to legal risks. If the door is opened for US citizens to take the Saudis to court, then a foreign country could in turn sue the United States, the Obama administration has cautioned. Votes from two-thirds of the members in the House and Senate would be needed to override a veto.
“We wanted it to come to the floor, symbolically before the 15th anniversary,” said Democrat Jerrold Nadler, the bill’s sponsor in the House. “We’ve been aiming toward that the entire session.”
The bill set for a House vote Friday gives victims’ families the right to sue in US court for any role that elements of the Saudi government may have played in the 2001 attacks that killed thousands in New York, the Washington DC area and Pennsylvania.
Terry Strada, national chair for 9/11 Families United For Justice Against Terrorism, disagreed that the bill could backfire as the White House has warned.
“If we’re not funding terrorist organizations and killing people, then we don’t have anything to worry about,” she said.
The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act had triggered a threat from Riyadh to pull billions of dollars from the US economy if the legislation is enacted. But Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister denied in May that the kingdom made any threats over the bill. He said Riyadh had warned that investor confidence in the US would shrink if the bill became law.
“In fact what they (Congress) are doing is stripping the principle of sovereign immunities, which would turn the world for international law into the law of the jungle,” Al-Jubeir said.
The House vote will come two months after Congress released 28 declassified pages from a congressional report into 9/11 that reignited speculation over links at least a few of the attackers had to Saudis, including government officials. The allegations were never substantiated by later US investigations into the terrorist attacks.
Brian McGlinchey, director of advocacy website 28pages.org, said making the documents public “strengthened the resolve of 9/11 families and other advocates of justice to bring about the enactment” of the bill.
lol, internet denizens are now citing a poll conducted by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in support of the notion that Clinton's health warrants concerns regarding her fitness to serve. Naturally, none of these denizens mention the fact that the AAPS doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS, believes that abortions lead to breast cancer, and that vaccines cause autism. Ron and Rand Paul's affiliation speaks for itself as well :D
On September 09 2016 20:30 farvacola wrote: Any discussion of conservatism from a big picture standpoint that does not account for how robust conservatism remains at the local and state levels is an ill-conceived discussion imo.
Conservatism itself isn't dead and never will be - but I'm hoping that the current Republican brand of no-compromise slash-and-burn conservatism dies a quick death because it essentially precludes the Republicans from ever gathering a coalition of voters that will win the presidency. Which is better than the alternative of them actually winning.
One day after Donald Trump reiterated his admiration for Vladimir Putin, saying the Russian president was a better leader than Barack Obama, Republicans on Capitol Hill struggled to explain why their party’s presidential nominee was enamored with a man they have long cast as one of America’s primary foes.
Many Republicans who returned to Washington this week after the summer recess expressed confidence that Trump was improving as a candidate in both tone and message. But on Thursday, they found themselves in the familiar routine of distancing themselves from Trump’s comments – the latest being his praise for Putin in an NBC News national security forum held on Wednesday.
“If you’re running for leader of the free world and you’re expressing admiration for Putin, well then you’re losing me,” Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina and former Republican presidential candidate, told reporters.
“I think Vladimir Putin is a thug, a dictator, an autocratic ruler who has his opposition killed in the streets of Russia. He has dismembered his neighbor.”
While Graham said he found Obama to be “weak”, “indecisive” and someone Putin had “walked all over”, the visibly frustrated senator added: “But no, I’m not going to say that Putin’s a better leader than a democratically elected president of the United States even though I have differences with him.”
It was just earlier this week that Graham, who has thus far declined to endorse Trump and has been among the candidate’s biggest critics, spoke positively for the first time of the direction his campaign had taken. After telling reporters on Monday that Trump would give Hillary Clinton “a hell of a race”, the senator hardly minced his words when reacting to Trump’s overtures toward Putin.
“This whole idea of admiring Putin is the biggest misunderstanding of a relationship in a person since Munich,” Graham said.
Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who made his opposition to Putin a central tenet of his own presidential campaign, similarly disagreed with Trump’s assertion that the Russian president was a better leader than Obama.
“Look, I have tremendous policy disagreements with President Obama, but Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian thug who is accountable to no one,” Rubio told the Guardian.
“I don’t think what Vladimir Putin exhibits is leadership. I think what he exhibits is thuggery … and we should be clear-eyed about that,” he added, noting that Putin controlled the media, the military and often his political opponents were either imprisoned or found dead.
Asked by the Guardian if he was concerned that Trump had a penchant for commending Putin, despite those facts, Rubio said he was hopeful the candidate’s posture might evolve.
How many different flavors of "conservatism" are there? I know it exists as a general viewpoint, and a lot of people call themselves that; but people can self-identify as the same thing while having wildly divergent viewpoints, so I'm wondering how many different major variations there are, and what they each believe in.
Sounds like he's just trying to appeal to that portion of the Republican base that thinks, "at least Russia has a strong leader like Putin instead of our weak-ass Obama."
Such is my interpretation of the context of how he says it.
On September 09 2016 20:30 farvacola wrote: Any discussion of conservatism from a big picture standpoint that does not account for how robust conservatism remains at the local and state levels is an ill-conceived discussion imo.
Conservatism itself isn't dead and never will be - but I'm hoping that the current Republican brand of no-compromise slash-and-burn conservatism dies a quick death because it essentially precludes the Republicans from ever gathering a coalition of voters that will win the presidency. Which is better than the alternative of them actually winning.
This notion hones in on the essential problem facing conservatism, one the previously cited diatribe fails to address; slash-and-burn, obstructionist conservatism is what is both keeping Republicans in state/congressional offices yet keeping them out of the federal executive. Given that the "we don't understand Freedom" caucus is already planning to get in the way of anything and everything should Clinton win, I think things are going to have to get worse before they get better.
On September 07 2016 05:14 KwarK wrote: Trump has a stance on the environment, he thinks it was something made up by the Chinese to make American manufacturing less competitive. Never mind that you can't fucking breathe the air in some Chinese cities.
And you can't drink the water in vast swathes of the USA that have been fracked. Ever watched the doco gasland? The tapwater in many of those homes is flammable! All under the Obama administration.
Not to say this is in any way a good thing (I am against fracking for environmental reasons, although I think the safety could be resolved with good regulations), but in what world would a GOP candidate have advocated regulating the fracking industry?
In fact, Trump's stance on fracking is that we need to get rid of any incentives for solar or wind power, and that would lead to fracking being even more economically viable.
Never said they would, just pointing out how ridiculous it is for Dems to say global warming is such a huge issue when under their watch US oil output has doubled.
Watching Clintons "speech" from Cleveland recently - these coughing episodes are really getting worse.Watch this video for a couple of minutes and see for yourselves guys, how can someone be president in this condition? Struggling to put five words together.
Please, someone just watch a couple of minutes of that video and tell me how the fuck she is supposed to debate Trump on national television.
Just wanted to talk to you about the bold section since the rest is horse shit.
Energy independence is not mutually exclusive to reducing global warming. The aim is to do both. There is no energy replacement for oil as of now that the American people would expect. So what does Obama do? Increase funding on climate change research and alternative energy research while also making gas cheaper for Americans during Bush's toppling of the economy. If you cut the people's spending by making gas cheaper, they can more easily recover from the financial crisis. Now that wasn't the only thing he did--its one of the many compromises he helped wrangle to nickel and dime his way out of the debt. And it was from that hard effort that we've had the longest continual job growth in american history, cheaper gas, a huge reduction in Bush' debt, and are now far enough away from the horrors of the crisis that people are buying houses en mass again.
That's called a compromise. Aiming to reach a goal, and making sacrifices where needed to achieve that goal. Not everything is a moral quandary where you're either 100% all in or 100% all out. That's just stupid and immature thinking. Wait--how old are you? If you're a kid then it would make sense why you'd say such stupid things out loud.
So basically the US would never undermine the petrodollar by encouraging movement away from oil.... It's no coincidence that after Saddam Hussein was ousted that Iraqi oil was once again priced in Dollars not Euros.Can America be seen as some kind of climate change fighting hero when they're so desperate to keep the petrodollar system afloat?
In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar - 'the currency of the enemy' - for the more multilateral euro.
'It was seen as economically bad because the entire global oil trade is conducted in dollars,' says Fadhil Chalabi, executive director of the Centre for Global Energy Studies.
A more compelling argument as to why the US invaded Iraq than WMDs which even UN weapons inspectors said didn't exist no?
Are you suggesting it was Obama who pushed for the Iraq War by arguing for WMD's? Or was it a conservative president doing that.
Or are you suggesting that Obama, after going against the Iraq War, started putting focus on American resource independence in order to not be beholden to the Middle East.
On September 09 2016 23:09 zlefin wrote: How many different flavors of "conservatism" are there? I know it exists as a general viewpoint, and a lot of people call themselves that; but people can self-identify as the same thing while having wildly divergent viewpoints, so I'm wondering how many different major variations there are, and what they each believe in.
Even just broad strokes Tea Party, Neocons, GOP, Christian Right, and Rinos. But each of those also have a vast swath of different supporters once you break it down further.
Christian Right for example, don't really care about constitutionality as much as Neocons while Rinos are just shy of being democrat except for their stance on taxes and government infringement of rights. Then you have the actual GOP still standing strong in their pre-Reagan regalia etc...
To think there are only two parties in this country is to believe the lie that the parties are whole and united front with all the same beliefs. This is 100% wrong. There are dozens and dozens of different parties within each major group--and every decade or so they switch up whose voice is the loudest.
On September 09 2016 23:03 farvacola wrote: lol, internet denizens are now citing a poll conducted by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in support of the notion that Clinton's health warrants concerns regarding her fitness to serve. Naturally, none of these denizens mention the fact that the AAPS doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS, believes that abortions lead to breast cancer, and that vaccines cause autism. Ron and Rand Paul's affiliation speaks for itself as well :D
The fact that they're deliberately named to make it easy to confuse them with a legitimate physician honor society is also pretty shitty, lol.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing...They probably have them. I’d like to have them released.”
- D. Trump, several weeks ago
(Asked by Larry King whether the hack was a public service, as Putin says),
“I don’t have any opinion on it. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know who hacked. I’m not sure. You tell me. Who hacked? Who did the hacking?”
That is about the quality I would expect out of some sections of Texas. Let us not forget that this is the state that needed to be told to stop executing severally mentally handicapped criminals. Everyone else just did it on their own, realizing it was sort of fucked up. Not Texas.
On September 09 2016 23:10 LegalLord wrote: Sounds like he's just trying to appeal to that portion of the Republican base that thinks, "at least Russia has a strong leader like Putin instead of our weak-ass Obama."
Such is my interpretation of the context of how he says it.
His fascination with dictatorial strong men doesn't bother you? Are you not worried that it is more than just politics?
EPT
