US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6354

On December 02 2016 13:13 xDaunt wrote:

Which is why I said that the deal was undeniably good for Indiana. We don't know what Trump did to get Carrier to accept the deal from Indiana that they wouldn't accept previously. My best guess is that Trump threatened United's federal contracts to get them to cave, but we don't know, and probably won't for some time.

On December 02 2016 19:24 Dan HH wrote:
https://twitter.com/HouseScience/status/804402881982066688

This is the House Science Committee's official account, what the fuck America?

On December 02 2016 20:25 Acrofales wrote:

How can someone like this (clicky) be the chairman of the House Science Committee. However, given that he's in charge, the twitter retweeting Breitbart's climate change denial drivel is unsurprising.

This piece is a bit old, but most of the people mentioned are still in the committee (thank god Todd Akin was ousted, though):
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/congress-s-science-committee-doesn-t-get-science

I find it quite amazing that the country with by FAR the most Nobel prizes, and that has been leading the world in innovative technology for the last 6 decades has a government that is so dead-set against science. The US has consistently been anti-science for the last 10 years or so. You have the consistent push for teaching Intelligent Design in biology classes. You have Inhofe with his snowball. You have president-elect Donald Trump saying vaccines cause autism. You had George W. put a full moratorium on stem cell science with his notion that IVF waste products were babies too (and it is still not completely rolled back). It's quite amazing to think that despite all this, the US is maintaining their position in scientific research. But it's also mindblowingly ridiculous that these people can be in charge.


EDIT: also, the irony of breitbart using as their one and only source for that article the Daily Mail, while in the same piece deriding "leftist news sources" and MSM for getting their climate news from "unreliable fake news sites"... because of course, Nature is a bad source, when compared with the stellar scientific (and journalistic) merits of the UK's Daily Mail.

EDIT 2: clicking through to the source, it wasn't just any old Daily Mail. It was the Mail on Sunday. Which is the Daily Mail's tabloid... I guess they took a break from covering Brangelina's divorce or describing what Kate Middleton had for breakfast to take a stab at "science".

The European Union has probably lost at least €5bn (£4.5bn) to VAT fraud related to carbon trading and there is a risk that the criminals will now shift their attention to Europe's electricity and gas markets, according to Europol.

The news will cause further embarrassment for European governments negotiating at the Copenhagen climate summit and trying to persuade other parts of the world to sign up to carbon trading as a way of reducing emissions.

As the GOP confronts the complexity of repealing Obamacare, Senate Republicans hailing from states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act are feeling an extra layer of pressure.

Altogether, there will likely be 20 Republican senators from Medicaid expansion states next term. Many come from so-called “Trump country,” the industrial and rust belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that were critical to Trump’s win. Working class whites in general have been among the top beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion.

"I'm from a state that has an expanded Medicaid population that I am very concerned about," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) this week. "I don't want to throw them off into the cold, and I don't think that's a strategy that I want to see. It's too many people. That's over 200,000 people in my state. So we need a transition. I think we'll repeal and then we'll work during the transition period for the replacement vehicle."

Millions of the Americans who have been able to enroll in Medicaid due to the expansion live in states represented by Republicans in the Senate. According to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data, in December 2015, the most recent monthly report available, more than 2.5 million people in GOP-represented states were enrolled in Medicaid through the expanded eligibility. That doesn't include the enrollees in the red states that have expanded more recently, Louisiana and Montana. (Colorado, Nevada and North Dakota -- all states with GOP senators -- were also not included in the CMS data set due to reporting issues.) Medicaid expansion in Capito’s state -- which voted for Trump overwhelmingly -- was implemented by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in 2013 without the approval of its legislature. Other GOP senators live in purple states where Democratic state legislatures expanded Medicaid, while the states of some members -- like Iowa Sens. Joni Ernst (R) and Chuck Grassley (R) -- only expanded Medicaid once their Republican governors were able to work out a deal with the Obama administration to expand in a moderated form.

“A number of us have been talking about that you want to make sure that any repairing and fixing -- because it clearly needs repairing and fixing -- that we do now takes into account the current situation with different states that have taken different actions. Indiana’s expansion was different from ours, was different from Ohio’s. ... It’s a topic that a lot of us were focused on it," said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK).

Only two of the Republican senators from expansion states will be up for reelection in 2018.

The expanded Medicaid program in the Affordable Care Act raised the eligibility level for low income adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line, up from 100 percent in the traditional program. The idea was that the expansion would cover the gap between low income adults enrolled in the traditional Medicaid program and those consumers who can afford subsidized insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

The program is set up so that the federal government covers 100 percent of the expansion for the first three years, and then 90 percent beyond that. Some Republicans argue that states shouldn't be expected to pick up that portion of the bill and the program was challenged in the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority ruled that states could have the choice whether to expand Medicare.

Many GOP lawmakers are leaning towards an Obamacare repeal plan that would give them a sunset period during which to cobble together a replacement. Health policy experts warn that this approach can still cause chaos in the near-term.

President-elect Donald Trump is considering ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State, according to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.


The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment. An Exxon spokesman also declined to comment on Scarborough’s report.

Texas native Tillerson has led the United States’s largest oil company since 2006 and has worked there for more than four decades.

Tillerson's selection would put a spotlight on Exxon, a major corporation with a wide reach and operations in dozens of countries.

The company has numerous partnerships with Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and has lost more than $1 billion due to the sanctions the United States imposed on Russia, according to RT, a Russian state-owned news service.

Tillerson, who made $27.3 million last year, could clash with Trump on some high-profile issues.

For example, Tillerson believes in man-made climate change, which Trump has dismissed as a hoax.

Exxon supports the Paris climate agreement and wants the United States to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, both policies that Trump strenuously opposes.

The company has also been in a high-profile fight in the last year with environmentalists and some Democratic state attorneys general over its past position on climate change.

Greens say Exxon knew decades ago that fossil fuels cause climate change but tried to sow doubt publicly about it in order to fight policies that could hurt its finances.

On December 02 2016 18:30 Acrofales wrote:

This just skirts around the elephant in the room. If it's such a big deal to Indiana, how come they couldn't offer a 7million tax break a few months ago and Carrier would've stayed in the first place.

For Trump to have much of anything to do with it, something must have been done at a federal level that Indiana alone couldn't provide and Obama was unwilling to discuss/offer.

Well, either that, or it was 100% Pence, and he just let Trump take credit.

On December 02 2016 13:32 ticklishmusic wrote:
danglars, did you bother reading the article for the bit where he thoroughly cut ties with the nation of islam explicitly citing their anti semitic ideas a decade ago?

On December 02 2016 13:28 farvacola wrote:

Dude, you may have missed it, but your party just elected a man who associates with people who supposedly have ties to groups who say things just as controversial. Naturally, these associations will be characterized as extremely attenuated in the land of the enemies of Edmond Dantes, but there's no reason to think that Democrats can't utilize exactly the same tactic in their favor similarly.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals. [...]

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?

This campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and minorities at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an extraordinary social achievement — and has even changed, quite literally, the face of right-wing media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham have gained prominence. But it also appears to have encouraged the assumption, especially among younger journalists and editors, that simply by focusing on identity they have done their jobs.

Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for example, the laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X to do Y” — is told and retold. Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own. No major news outlet in Europe would think of adopting such a focus.

GATLINBURG, Tenn. — The death toll stands at 11 in the historic wildfire that tore through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and this resort town earlier in the week, with no identities of the dead confirmed by officials so far and the search still on for others, authorities said Thursday.

Tennessee Emergency Management Agency spokesman Dean Flener said he'd been notified Thursday night of the most recent death. He said he had no specifics, including where the body was found or whether the person died in a hospital.

Authorities haven't said whether they'll be forced to rely on dental records to identify the remains found.

In Memphis, family announced that Jon and Janet Summers had been confirmed among the dead. The couple and their three grown sons were vacationing outside Gatlinburg and got separated as they fled the flames. The three sons have been recovering from burns in a Nashville hospital.

Gatlinburg Police Chief Randy Brackins fought back tears at a morning news conference as he described the crawling pace of the process.

"It's one of the most difficult things you can imagine," he said. "I know you're frustrated. If it were my family members, I'd be frustrated."

Firefighters and emergency crews continue to work their way through fire-ravaged remote areas of Gatlinburg and surrounding Sevier County amid blocked roads, downed power lines, fallen trees and mudslides. Two of the four zones searched stood at 80% and 90% complete Thursday morning, with the other two expected to be complete by nightfall, Gatlinburg Fire Chief Greg Miller said.

About 200 firefighters, including various crews from agencies across the state, remain on the ground, with about 20% of the force still fighting flames and the rest focused on the search, he said. National Guardsmen and Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers fanned out to help conduct health and welfare checks at 74 homes.

"We're never going to give up hope. I will always hold out hope of a rescue," the fire chief said. "But now we are at hour 65 since the beginning of the fires. We have to come to the realization that the potential is great it will be more of a recovery (of corpses) than a rescue."

Some of the searchers have lost homes and family members of their own, and most refused to go home despite being told to take breaks, Miller said.

"Just like me, just like them and just like you, we've never seen anything like this before," he said. "Most people are numb, but they care about finding these people. They're sleeping on the floor. They don't want to go home."

Estimates place the number of homes and businesses damaged or destroyed at more than 700 so far — about 300 inside the Gatlinburg city limits and another 400 in neighboring Pigeon Forge and unincorporated communities such as Wears Valley and Cobbly Nob. A map will be posted on Facebook of damaged properties, officials said, with updates in real time.

Forecasts of more high-speed winds Thursday increase the odds of further fire outbreaks, emergency workers warned, and the less than 2 inches of rain that's fallen since Tuesday hasn't helped to put out hot spots.

On December 02 2016 23:24 Danglars wrote:
"Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because is absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored ... Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists."

On December 03 2016 01:33 Yurie wrote:


Has the US started back up with controlled burn to stop these kind of fires after the previous stop? The tight control over when a fire starts and quickly putting out small ones lead to these huge ones as I understand it from wiki and youtube summaries regarding the problem. The scientific articles such as this seem to be behind pay walls.

On December 03 2016 01:16 Logo wrote:
I don't understand how people can keep making big huge sweeping statements about America and what America wants given the actual election result, how close the election was, various complicating factors (voter ID laws in Wisconsin quite notably). You're talking literally about <80k votes out of >120 million cast when the losing candidate had a lot of flaws that has nothing to do with any sort of identity agenda and way more to do with specific campaign detail blunders. Comparing Trump to 'generic republican' Mitt Romney this huge anti-establishment/anti-identity mandate/shift is a difference of Trump getting 3% (~1.7 million) more votes (which is less than 1.5% of the total votes cast).

Like the election should have been a blowout for the dems and it wasn't and that matters a lot, but stop pretending like the results means some huge shift that justifies your agenda. Most people, by quite a lot, still clearly agree with the general gist of the democratic idea. The voters just want a different candidate to represent it (and yes some different policies in some areas).

But again that's also not a pass for the dems, they need to be way more about people over corporate interests and do way more for working people. It's just also not a refutation of the other parts of their platform. But these are complaints that apply regardless of if Clinton had won or not and people have been pushing for them for a long time.

It's so painful to read all these takes on the election given how much people want to pretend that there's some huge mandate from the result as if the election was a huge massive blowout instead of a narrow loss in an election that should have been a pretty solid win. Yes the difference between the expectation and result is bad, but the result is still not a blowout (or landslide, or whatever else you want to use).

On December 03 2016 01:34 TanGeng wrote:

It's amazing how much commentary is either ignorant of American history or doesn't even try to get American history correct. I'm not sure if it's trying to oversimplify the situation to dumb audience or attempts to continue the denial and delusion.

The first identity prominent movement in national political scene was the "Know Nothings" AKA "American Native" AKA "American" party, which was a response to Catholic immigration - read Irish not Marylander - by WASPs. Part of this movement actually broke away into the Anti-Slavery Republican Party of Lincoln.

Speaking of this identity politics, i found one of lecture about Nationalism and National identity that might make sense of the situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90O889YOTV4
100 minute if you can spare it, covering the topic as fast as possible.

As usual just a starting point.