US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4985

On September 14 2016 00:01 Gorsameth wrote:

Considering the alt-right is more or less in charge of the House (Freedom Caucus) and has their presidential candidate + the runner up (Trump/Cruz) I would say they are pretty cared about.

Declaring that "Connecticut is defaulting on its constitutional duty" to fairly educate its poorest children, a Superior Court judge on Wednesday ordered the state to come up with a new funding formula for public schools.

Judge Thomas Moukawsher's unexpectedly far-reaching decision also directed the state to devise clear standards for both the elementary and high school levels, including developing a graduation test. He also ordered a complete overhaul of Connecticut's system of evaluating teachers, principals and superintendents. And he demanded a change in the "irrational" way the state funds special education services.

Moukawsher's mandates come with a tight deadline: The remedies he is ordering must be submitted to the court within 180 days. It is unclear how the state Department of Education, the legislature and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy will come up with solutions, within six months, to complicated problems that have plagued public education in Connecticut for decades.

"Nothing here was done lightly or blindly,'' Moukawsher said, reading his entire 90-page decision from the bench, a highly unusual undertaking that took close to three hours. "The court knows what its ruling means for many deeply ingrained practices, but it also has a marrow-deep understanding that if they are to succeed where they are most strained, schools have to be about teaching children and nothing else."

The much-anticipated decision is the culmination of an 11-year legal battle between the state and the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding, an alliance of municipalities, boards of education, teachers' unions and education advocacy groups. The coalition filed a lawsuit against then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell, alleging that the state's education cost-sharing formula violates the state constitution and places an unfair burden on local property taxes to support school spending.

On September 14 2016 07:25 Wegandi wrote:


Um, the Freedom Caucus are mostly libertarians, not alt-righters lmao. You can't tell me Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, Raul Labrador, Mick Mulvaney, Walter Jones, Mark Sanford, Ted Yoho, etc. are trumpers/alt-righters lmao. Essentially, you know nothing about the membership or founding of the House Freedom Caucus, but want to associate what you perceive as "extreme right group" to your view of what the alt-right is. It's laughable really. You know, all those guys who wanted Rand Paul for president, are in charge of this body that is the basis of Trumps support. Haha you got to be kidding me.

On September 14 2016 07:45 Sermokala wrote:
The reason why flint and Detroit have such a terrible public services issue is because of their lack of population to cover their massive urban footprint.

+ Show Spoiler +

So things like water have to strech incredible distances to serve not enough people. Then you get the problems with the foreclosed houses and their utility hookups being sabotaged with looters and whatnot.

Blaming it on a 2012 law is really really stupid. Detoit is going to be in perpetual bankruptcy and flint is as well until they can raise enough captial to get a water system of their own. good luck selling those bonds to investors.

A national campaign to rewrite state laws and allow businesses to decide how to care for their injured workers suffered a significant setback Tuesday when the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma's version of the law is unconstitutional.

The 2013 legislation gave Oklahoma employers the ability to "opt out" of the state workers' compensation system and write their own plans, setting the terms for what injuries were covered, which doctors workers could see, how workers were compensated and how disputes were handled. The statute was backed by the oil and gas industry and retailer Hobby Lobby.

Buoyed by the success in Oklahoma, proponents took the idea nationwide as a coalition led by Wal-Mart, Lowe's and several of the largest retail, trucking and health care companies sought to pass similar laws across the country. Bills and draft proposals have been floated in Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Last year, an investigation by ProPublica and NPR found that the plans typically had lower benefits and more restrictions than workers' comp. The story was part of a series on how states have been dismantling workers' comp, which was designed a century ago to protect businesses from lawsuits while providing medical care and lost wages to workers who had been hurt on the job.

Tuesday's decision is the latest in a series of state Supreme Court rulings that have struck down several business-driven workers' comp laws featured in the ProPublica and NPR investigation.

The Florida Supreme Court struck down laws that placed strict caps on attorney fees and limited workers to two years of temporary disability pay regardless of whether they were able to return to work. Two-year caps have also been passed in California, North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Texas.

In addition, the top Oklahoma court in April overturned a provision that drastically cut compensation for workers who suffered permanently disabling injuries. Florida, New York and Tennessee have also significantly reduced benefits for such injuries in the past 13 years, but those provisions are still in place.

The stories also prompted two groups — one of academics and one of workers' comp regulators — to schedule separate forums later this month to discuss the various changes that have occurred and ways to improve workers' comp.

Oklahoma's ruling leaves Texas as the only state that lets employers opt out of workers' comp insurance.

On September 14 2016 08:09 farvacola wrote:

You're way out of your depth here, mate. The pre-existing issues facing places like Detroit or Flint were amplified far beyond their original scope of harm via objectively incompetent administration from both local and state officials, and the story of how the water in Flint came to be poison can be directly attributed to the needlessly elongated chain of decision making that arose from the 2012 bill's implementation and usage. Throughout the country, county and local officials make water deals, and sometimes those deals have very obvious choices because of quality concerns. The officials in Flint, along with the indirect supervision of a state government overseeing its statutory agenda, fumbled the ball as their decision to save money and take on Flint River water began to cause side-effects in the consuming populace. They made the wrong choice, and they knew it, only the inertia of the budget-cutting directive undercut the prioritization of health.

This idea that clean water is somehow structurally unobtainable ignores the obviously poor decisions that directly led to the events in Flint (public services are chronically underfunded in Michigan), and a big part of how those decisions came into form implicates the 2012 statute's oversight mechanism.
These casualties of the post-industrial age don't have to be as awful as they are, and places like Pittsburgh or Minneapolis/St. Paul are proof of that. Then again, I'm not going to make any extremely pointed claims about a place I don't live in, because that'd be "really really stupid."

On September 14 2016 07:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Apparently, there are several lawsuits filed about rigging the Democratic primary, and some of them seem to be pretty extensively researched, like this one: http://www.election-justice-usa.org/Democracy_Lost_Update1_EJUSA.pdf

Thoughts? I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but the compiled data seems to be interesting.

On September 14 2016 07:25 Wegandi wrote:


Um, the Freedom Caucus are mostly libertarians, not alt-righters lmao. You can't tell me Justin Amash, Thomas Massie, Raul Labrador, Mick Mulvaney, Walter Jones, Mark Sanford, Ted Yoho, etc. are trumpers/alt-righters lmao. Essentially, you know nothing about the membership or founding of the House Freedom Caucus, but want to associate what you perceive as "extreme right group" to your view of what the alt-right is. It's laughable really. You know, all those guys who wanted Rand Paul for president, are in charge of this body that is the basis of Trumps support. Haha you got to be kidding me.

69-year old woman punched in face outside rally by Trump supporter

WLOS — ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- Police say they arrested five people at Trump's night rally Monday in Asheville, and as of publishing have warrants out for two more people.

Police plan to arrest Richard Campbell of Edisto Island, South Carolina for assault on a female.

That female is 69-year-old Shirley Teter.

She has protested her whole life, she said. Now she adds Donald Trump's campaign to the list of things she's protested against.

"Why did I get involved yesterday, at my age? Because I ran into another situation that was sickening my heart," she said Tuesday afternoon, outside Cafe 64 in downtown Asheville.

Protesters met Trump supporters before the rally, and Teter was having fun.

"Whenever groups of them would start chanting 'Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump!' I would chant back, 'Dump, dump, dump, dump.' It was kind of comical," Teter said.

After the rally, Teeter experienced something she had never seen in all of her protests. Peace teetered over into something else.

"I said you better learn to speak Russian, and I said the first two words are going to be, ha ha. He stopped in his tracks, and he turned around and just cold-cocked me," Teter said.

She was punched in the face.

She says she fell on her oxygen tank and has sore ribs, a sore jaw, and cut her elbow. She later went to the hospital and is thankful she did not break any bones.

Police said they didn't make an arrest because officers didn't witness the punch.

Teter thanked the police for giving her a ride home. She said they were wonderful.

Many people expressed concerns for Teter on social media, and to those folks she says, "Thank you."

After the interview, Teeter called News 13. She wanted to add one more thing, a question.

She asks if people find a Trump supporter punching her in the face deplorable.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired four-star general who served under three Republican presidents, slammed GOP nominee Donald Trump as a “a national disgrace” and an “international pariah,” according to his personal emails seen by BuzzFeed News.

The remarks came in a June 17, 2016, email to Emily Miller, a journalist who was once Powell’s aide. In that same email Powell also said Trump “is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him. [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan is calibrating his position again.”

The website DCLeaks.com — which has reported, but not confirmed, ties to Russian intelligence services — obtained Powell’s emails. It may be the latest example of a Russian entity potentially trying to influence the US presidential election — in July, the FBI said it believed Russia was behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s internal emails right before they party’s convention.

In an Aug. 21 email from Powell to Miller, he blasted Trump for embarking on a “racist” movement that believes President Obama was not born in the US.

“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.”

Powell told BuzzFeed News, “I have no further comment. I’m not denying it.”

“As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday,” Powell wrote to his former aide.
Powell then recounted President Obama’s qualifications, including his graduation from Harvard as an editor of the Law Review.

Powell went on to write that Trump’s reported adviser, Roger Ailes — the former chair and CEO of Fox News who left the company after allegations of sexual harassment — wouldn’t help Trump with winning over women voters.

U.S. Household Income Grew 5.2 Percent in 2015, Breaking Pattern of Stagnation

Americans last year reaped the largest economic gains in nearly a generation as poverty fell, health insurance coverage spread and incomes rose sharply for households on every rung of the economic ladder, ending years of stagnation.

The median household’s income in 2015 was $56,500, up 5.2 percent from the previous year — the largest single-year increase since record-keeping began in 1967, the Census Bureau said on Tuesday. The share of Americans living in poverty also posted the sharpest decline in decades.

The gains were an important milestone for the economic expansion that began in 2009. For the first time in recent years, the benefits of renewed prosperity are spreading broadly.

The data was released into a heated presidential race, where Democrats seized on the statistics to promote Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and undercut Donald J. Trump’s dark assessment of the nation’s well-being.

“It has been a long slog from the depths of the Great Recession, but things are finally starting to improve for many American households,” said Chris G. Christopher Jr., director of consumer economics at IHS Global Insight. He said the gains had continued this year.

The economic recovery, however, remains incomplete. The median household income was still 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, adjusting for inflation. It also remained 2.4 percent lower than the peak reached during the boom of the late 1990s. The number of people living in poverty also remained elevated, although it shrank last year by about 3.5 million, or roughly 8 percent.