US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6529

On January 10 2017 06:24 Thieving Magpie wrote:


This i the 7d chess while everyone is playing Go analogy Trump apologist normally use isn't it?

On January 10 2017 01:21 Liquid`Drone wrote:
He really needs to learn to just.. drop it. Pretty much all of superstardom thinks he's terrible, none of them care about Trump insulting them.. By now, he's just incentivizing celebrities to insult him, and if he's gonna spend his presidency being involved in perpetual twitter wars with every beloved american, that's really not gonna help him.

Donald Trump will name son-in-law Jared Kushner a senior advisor in his White House, multiple news outlest are reporting

Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway tweeted on Monday.

Kushner, a 36-year-old real-estate developer and publisher of the New York Observer, has been married to Trump's daughter, Ivanka, since 2009. When it was reported last week that Kushner and Ivanka Trump would be moving to Washington, D.C., it fed into speculation that one or both would serve as advisors in the Trump administration.

Bringing family members into the White House may prove difficult, though. That's because of a 1967 anti-nepotism law, inspired by another famous family, as NPR's Jim Zarroli recently reported:

The anti-nepotism law was passed by Congress in response to President John F. Kennedy's decision to appoint his brother Robert as attorney general, says Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
"It was very controversial at the time. Lyndon Johnson in particular did not like that, and when he became president he helped shepherd this anti-nepotism law through the U.S. Congress," West says.
But it's not entirely clear what that law means. Here is what the statute lays out, as NPR's Ailsa Chang reported in November:

"A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official."
The question now is what exactly "agency" means, Chang reported.

The Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York, which last year leaked radioactive material into groundwater near New York City, will close by April 2021, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday.

“For 15 years, I have been deeply concerned by the continuing safety violations at Indian Point, especially given its location in the largest and most densely populated metropolitan region in the country,” Cuomo said. “I am proud to have secured this agreement with Entergy [the plant’s operator] to responsibly close the facility 14 years ahead of schedule, to protect the safety of all New Yorkers.”

The plant has had 40 “safety events”, “operational events”, and shutdowns since 2012. The shutdowns have exposed apparent fragility in the nuclear facility’s workings: in December 2015 the plant was shut down for three days after droppings from a “large bird” caused an arc between power lines and a transmission tower. In April 2016, Entergy admitted it had found that bolts holding together the interior of one of Indian Point’s reactors were damaged and, in some cases, missing.

Entergy also came under fire in 2016 after the Guardian published a safety assessment of proposed natural gas pipelines to be built by energy pipeline company Spectra on Indian Point property. The assessment, provided to the Guardian by engineer Paul Blanch and obtained through a freedom of information act (Foia), was partly hand-drawn and did not adequately account for the damage to the plant that could result from a breach of the lines.

Local environmental groups have made the plant a nemesis, though those who work at the facility in Buchanan, New York, want it to remain open. The plant employs just under 1,000 people; Entergy’s chairman and CEO, Leo Denault, thanked Indian Point’s employees in a statement on the coming closure and said the company was “committed to treating our employees fairly and will help those interested in other opportunities to relocate within the Entergy system”.

Paul Gallay, of activist group Riverkeeper, has campaigned long and hard to have the plant closed. “Given the scope of the risk Indian Point poses, this is an essential step to a safer and more secure New York,” Gallay told the Guardian.

Gallay said that although the announcement was encouraging, the project of detoxification was just beginning. “The very first priority is to get the spent fuel out of the overpacked storage pools where it’s resided for the whole 45-year length of the operation of the facility,” he said. “This agreement requires that and must be followed by prompt and full radiological decommissioning.”

But he was pleased, he said. With Indian Point closed, “necessary cleanup work can begin in earnest”.

On January 10 2017 06:33 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
also this is apparently happening. How is this supposed to work with his children running his buisnesses?



http://www.npr.org/2017/01/09/508990297/trump-to-reportedly-name-son-in-law-jared-kushner-as-senior-advisor

On January 10 2017 05:10 mustaju wrote:

As for @danglars I did not see a reason to namedrop Altemeyer, but I saw every reason to defend his work from being offhandedly dismissed without researched. Simberto and Nyxisto addressed the matter better than I could.

On January 10 2017 06:24 Thieving Magpie wrote:


This i the 7d chess while everyone is playing Go analogy Trump apologist normally use isn't it?

On January 10 2017 05:56 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Of course Trump, who apparently can't elevate himself higher than a youtube comment section answered with a tweet shitstorm of schoolboy taunts.

Really a great idea to put that dude in office. 2016, the year america lost all sense of decency.

The most conservative and often rebellious congressional political faction within the Republican Party is headed in a new, policy-oriented direction this year – and it’s starting with Obamacare, says the North Carolina congressman who helped found the House Freedom Caucus.

In the first days of the 115th Congress, U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows – now chairman of the caucus – signaled he and other conservatives may tangle with Republican Party leaders over the timing of replacing the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare.


The band of nearly 40 conservative lawmakers in the Freedom Caucus will meet Monday to decide whether they’ll oppose mainstream Republican efforts to immediately repeal Obamacare without a replacement.

If the group is successful, the push could put Meadows and the Freedom Caucus on the front line of shaping an overhaul to the nation’s health care policy.

On January 10 2017 06:44 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Karis, I think a lot of people were willing to deal with Trump during the campaign as it just being part of the campaign. 'He did what he had to do to win' - and hey, he did win. People defending him are saying that we need to look at his policy, not just blast him for what might have been empty campaign promises. Personally, I think this is totally fair (although I also think the argument 'his cabinet picks speak volumes of the policies we're gonna get' is valid).

However, I think people, even large swaths of the ones who voted for him, will grow really, really tired of that same behavior from the actual president. He has his loyal fanclub, those won't care, maybe they'll even appreciate him 'sticking it to the overrated hollywood phonies' or whatever. But all the people who voted Trump because they hated Hillary's face or because they were staunch republicans concerned with the direction of the country and they saw SCOTUS as incredibly important etc, all the upstanding conservatives who are genuinely very concerned with displaying proper, moral behavior, who want the president to be a good role model for their own children etc.. They're gonna get fed up with this. Republicans also like hollywood movies, and they also like some Hollywood actors. At this pace, there will be very few he has not insulted on twitter after the next two years of golden globe and oscar ceremonies.

On January 10 2017 06:58 LegalLord wrote:
It's amazing to me just how much news attention this apparent spat between Trump and Hollywood seems to get.

On January 10 2017 06:45 Doodsmack wrote:
The Freedom Caucus might still have outsized influence in a Republican controlled government.



Source

On January 10 2017 06:58 LegalLord wrote:
It's amazing to me just how much news attention this apparent spat between Trump and Hollywood seems to get.

On January 10 2017 07:37 LegalLord wrote:

It annoys a lot of us, though, because policies of our new president are more important than his spat with this or that person.

On January 10 2017 07:37 LegalLord wrote:

It annoys a lot of us, though, because policies of our new president are more important than his spat with this or that person.