US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5544

On October 13 2016 13:12 Mohdoo wrote:
Honestly, I'm not seeing why I should believe these women like the one on the plane. How do you prove something like that? How am I supposed to believe something that can't be proven? Jes got a history, but I can't pretend it doesn't make sense for people to make this up. Wouldn't be the first time political sex lies have come up.

On October 13 2016 23:03 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

Like/Dislike ratio says it all.
No-one is listening to Clinton and that establishment line anymore dude.

Maricela Flores, a 43-year-old immigrant from Mexico, was so unhappy at her job as a janitor at a Target store just outside Minneapolis – unhappy about having to work seven days a week, about being paid $8 an hour, about not having health coverage or paid sick days – that she did something unusually risky. She went on strike even though she was not part of a labor union.

When Flores, a mother of five, walked out in February of 2013, she was one of just eight janitors from stores in the Twin Cities to go on strike that day to demand better conditions. Flores was relieved not to get fired.

Now, 44 months later and after a highly unorthodox organizing drive that included six more one-day strikes, Flores and other janitors who clean Target, Macy’s and Best Buy stores in the Twin Cities are declaring victory. On Thursday, they will announce that 600 janitors have won union recognition and will soon start collective bargaining in the hope of winning higher pay, health coverage and other improvements.

“I could have done nothing, but I chose to fight,” Flores said. “This has been a long fight, but now I feel overjoyed. All the hard work has paid off.”

Flores hopes that her new union, Local 26 of the Service Employees International Union, will bring important gains when it bargains with the retailers’ cleaning contractors. “We want fair work scheduling, health insurance, higher wages,” Flores said in Spanish. “All these things would allow me to be more involved in the daily lives of my children and to have a better quality of life.”

This fight began seven years ago when an immigrant workers’ center in Minneapolis – Centro Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (United Workers Center in Struggle) – contacted janitors at retail stores in the Twin Cities area. That workers’ center, known as CTUL, formed an organizing committee, led a three-mile protest march, held a 12-day hunger strike and sponsored a series of steadily expanding one-day strikes, which aimed to pressure retail powerhouses like Target and Best Buy, both based in the Twin Cities, to give the janitors a voice at work.

The effort grew more ambitious, with its focus turning towards getting Target to adopt a Responsible Contractor Policy. Target adopted such a policy in 2014, requiring its contractors to comply with labor and wage laws, and the janitors’ focus then changed to forming a labor union, convinced that this was the best way to win better conditions.

Labor experts say this is probably the most successful effort to unionize retail store janitors in the US. “The retail janitorial industry has been overwhelmingly non-union – it was viewed by most people as ‘unorganizable,’” said Stephen Lerner, the former head of the SEIU’s Justice for Janitors Campaign, which unionized tens of thousands of office building janitors nationwide.

On October 13 2016 23:03 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

Like/Dislike ratio says it all.
No-one is listening to Clinton and that establishment line anymore dude.

On October 13 2016 23:11 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Hooray!



Source

On October 13 2016 21:54 Plansix wrote:
Although the situation in Libya is less than ideal, I have not heard convincing argument that an absence of intervention would have resulted in a better outcome.

Speaker Paul Ryan told top donors on Wednesday evening that he’s growing concerned about whether House Republicans will be able to weather the political storm this November — and suggested the outcome for his party could be dire.

During a conference call, Ryan said he believed that House Republicans had taken a serious hit amid Donald Trump’s freefall following release of the now-infamous "Access Hollywood" video, according to a person who was on the call. Ryan noted that Republicans lost more than 20 seats in 2008, when John McCain lost to Barack Obama by seven percentage points. By comparison, Ryan pointed out grimly, Trump is trailing by around 10 percent nationally.

"Speaker Ryan holds routine calls with top supporters, top grassroots organizers, and many others. This is an opportunity to discuss our efforts to win in November," said Zack Roday, a Ryan spokesman.

Ryan's comments came as new stories were breaking in the New York Times, Palm Beach Post and Rolling Stone alleging that Trump improperly touched four women in separate incidents going back decades. The Trump campaign denied the allegations and has threatened to sue at least one of the publications, yet the controversy over Trump's sexual interactions with women — and his vulgar comments about them — has dominated the presidential race for the last five days, led to a collapse in his poll numbers, and threatens to sweep away the House and Senate GOP majorities.

Trump is furious that Ryan told his House GOP colleagues in a Monday call that he will no longer defend the Republican presidential nominee or campaign with Trump. During that discussion, Ryan — who is still endorsing Trump — added that members should worry about their own races, not the presidential battle.

Wednesday evening, according to the participant, Ryan sought to clarify his earlier remarks on Trump. Ryan told that he had never intended to pick a fight with Trump, but rather to simply highlight the need to maintain the party’s hold on the chamber. For his members to survive, Ryan said on the call, they would need Trump to do well in November.

But Ryan also had tough words for Trump. The speaker said that the media was set on driving a wedge between Trump the congressional wing of the party, but that Trump — whom Ryan described as lacking political discipline — had failed to understand that dynamic.

Ryan is aware that Trump's troubles have put the House in play. Democrats must net 30 seats in order to capture the majority, a tall order but one that’s become less unrealistic as Trump craters.

Ryan also said on the call that he would be appearing with College Republicans on Friday, when he would be laying out a case against Hillary Clinton. Ryan was joined on the call by Spencer Zwick, his top fundraiser and a top ally of Mitt Romney.

On October 13 2016 23:03 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:

Like/Dislike ratio says it all.
No-one is listening to Clinton and that establishment line anymore dude.

On October 13 2016 23:10 Plansix wrote:

I am looking forward to the “Come at me bro” response from the Times.

Remember when papers reported on Bill Clinton’s problem with women. Remember when he threatened to sue them in an effort to silence them. Remember when Fox News had endless talking heads demanding Obama provide his birth certificate and Obama threatened to sue them.

Yeah….

The race to build the world's largest solar power plant is heating up. California-based energy company SolarReserve announced plans for a massive concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Nevada that claims to be the largest of its kind once built.

SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the $5 billion endeavor would generate between 1,500 and 2,000 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1 million homes. That amount of power is as much as a nuclear power plant, or the 2,000-megawatt Hoover Dam and far bigger than any other existing solar facility on Earth, the Review-Journal pointed out.

"It's a big project," Smith told the publication. "It's an ambitious project."

SolarReserve's Sandstone project involves at least 100,000 mirrored heliostats that capture the sun's rays and concentrates it onto 10 towers equipped with a molten salt energy storage system. The molten salt, heated to more than 1,000 degrees, then boils water and creates a steam turbine that can drive generators 24/7.

Compared to photovoltaic arrays, the appeal of CSP systems is that solar power can be used after sunset.

"It's really the ability to provide renewable energy that's available on demand 24 hours a day," Smith told NPR.
SolarReserve already operates a CSP plant near Tonopah, a revolutionary 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant that's now powering Nevada homes. The company says on its website that this "completely emission free" CSP plant runs without the requirement for natural gas or oil back up.

"Energy storage provides a firm, reliable electricity product on-demand, day and night," SolarReserve says, adding that the plant "helps meet growing demand for clean, renewable energy sources."
Smith told the Review-Journal that Sandstone construction probably won't begin for another two or three years. Once construction begins, Smith estimated the project should create about 3,000 jobs for about seven years.

He said the company will also have to build a new transmission infrastructure to carry the energy to market, and the generated power will likely will be "exported to the California market."

SolarReserve is narrowing down project sites for its 6,500-hectare project. Smith said two potential sites on federal land in Nye County have been shortlisted. However, as NPR reported, environmentalists such as Solar Done Right's Janine Blaeloch are concerned about the environmental impact of such a project.

On October 13 2016 23:57 ticklishmusic wrote:


This doesn't look like a lawsuit, it looks more like complaining under a letterhead. But hey, when your client is paying you a few hundred bucks an hour you don't question him too much.

On October 13 2016 23:58 KwarK wrote:
So, on a politics note, Trump is pulling out of all states but North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Here's the problem with that. The last three polls in Pennsylvania put Trump 9 points behind, 10 points behind and 11 points behind. 538 put his chances of winning Pennsylvania at this point outside of the margin of error. Polling is an inaccurate science but it wouldn't just take inaccurate polling at this point, it'd take a completely unexpected outside factor. Incidentally Clinton is outspending Trump in Pennsylvania 20:1.

I wrote previously about how if we assume that he doesn't win Pennsylvania, an assumption I'm sticking with, he needs to win all the red states and Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. He's currently losing hard in Nevada (and added Arizona to the list, despite it previously being pretty solidly red).

This is essentially an allin bet on Pennsylvania from what I can see. If he flips it that's 20 electoral college votes. If he loses all three of the competitive states he's no longer ahead in, Iowa, Nevada and now Arizona, that's 21 electoral college votes.

+ Show Spoiler [electoral math] +

On October 13 2016 23:58 KwarK wrote:
So, on a politics note, Trump is pulling out of all states but North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Here's the problem with that. The last three polls in Pennsylvania put Trump 9 points behind, 10 points behind and 11 points behind. 538 put his chances of winning Pennsylvania at this point outside of the margin of error. Polling is an inaccurate science but it wouldn't just take inaccurate polling at this point, it'd take a completely unexpected outside factor. Incidentally Clinton is outspending Trump in Pennsylvania 20:1.

I wrote previously about how if we assume that he doesn't win Pennsylvania, an assumption I'm sticking with, he needs to win all the red states and Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. He's currently losing hard in Nevada (and added Arizona to the list, despite it previously being pretty solidly red).

This is essentially an allin bet on Pennsylvania from what I can see. If he flips it that's 20 electoral college votes. If he loses all three of the competitive states he's no longer ahead in, Iowa, Nevada and now Arizona, that's 21 electoral college votes.

+ Show Spoiler [electoral math] +

On October 13 2016 23:10 Plansix wrote:

I am looking forward to the “Come at me bro” response from the Times.

Remember when papers reported on Bill Clinton’s problem with women. Remember when he threatened to sue them in an effort to silence them. Remember when Fox News had endless talking heads demanding Obama provide his birth certificate and Obama threatened to sue them.

Yeah….

On October 14 2016 00:11 Doodsmack wrote:


Why is this law firm tarnishing its name by sending this letter LOL. Mr. Kasowitz needs to be a little more concerned about his reputation.

On October 13 2016 13:15 GGTeMpLaR wrote:


It's not about proving whether it actually happened or not for either of them. It's just politics.

Most people have made up their mind on whether or not they believe the accusers or not based purely on who they support in the election. It has nothing to do with the truth.

Bill and Trump are both guilty until proven innocent in the minds of millions of Trump and Clinton supporters right now.

This election is a mummer's farce of democracy among other things.