US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7211

On March 28 2017 15:17 LegalLord wrote:

The bolded part kind of highlights what I think. Judging by the details it looks like more of a standard murder than a terror case in the sense that we think of it.

Jackson, 28, told the newspaper he would have killed "a young thug" or "a successful older black man with blondes ... people you see in Midtown."

He told the newspaper his aim was to force women in interracial relationships to reconsider.

He said he hoped to make white women think: "Well, if that guy feels so strongly about it, maybe I shouldn't do it."

On March 28 2017 17:36 nojok wrote:
Come on guys, are you really surprised Muslims don't have the monopoly of far right idiots? We all have some.

On March 28 2017 20:01 plated.rawr wrote:

I think the annoyance lies more in how disproportionately much attention lunatics with religious or cultural ties to muslim-dominated regions get. It gets twice as fun if you also consider everyone under this sociocultural umbrella is narratively treated as one mass, while mostly all other acts of non-war violence is mostly regarded as independents or small groups.

Its easier to sell an established narrative, i know. That doesnt make it representative to its actual effect however, even though it affects political discourse, voting and national legalese.

Id love legislation demanding proportionate reporting, as an informed public is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy. We're far past this, however, and im afraid we are past the point of no return.

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday to roll back most of President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy, celebrating the move as a way to increase the nation’s “energy independence” and to restore thousands of lost coal mining jobs.

But energy economists say the expected order falls short of both of those goals — in part because the United States already largely relies on domestic sources for the coal and natural gas that fires most of the nation’s power plants.

“We don’t import coal,” said Robert Stavins, an energy economist at Harvard University. “So in terms of the Clean Power Plan, this has nothing to do with so-called energy independence whatsoever.”

Administration officials said the new order would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to start the legal process of withdrawing and rewriting the Clean Power Plan, Mr. Obama’s climate change policy. Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday that it will help the United States “be both pro-jobs and pro-environment” and described it as the “energy independence executive order.”

Yet, coal miners also should not assume their jobs will return if Trump’s regulations take effect.

The new order would mean that older coal plants that had been marked for closings would probably stay open, said Robert W. Godby, an energy economist at the University of Wyoming. That would extend the market demand for coal for up to a decade.

But even so, “the mines that are staying open are using more mechanization,” he said. “They’re not hiring people.”

“So even if we saw an increase in coal production, we could see a decrease in coal jobs,” he said.

Legal experts say it could take years for the Trump administration to unwind the Clean Power Plan, which itself has not yet been carried out because it has been temporarily frozen by a Supreme Court order. Those regulations sought to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants. If enacted, they would have shut down hundreds of those plants, frozen construction of future plants and replaced them with wind and solar farms.

Throughout his campaign, Mr. Trump highlighted his support of coal miners, holding multiple rallies in coal country and vowing to restore lost jobs to the flagging industry. At a rally last week in Kentucky, Mr. Trump vowed that his executive order would “save our wonderful coal miners from continuing to be put out of work.”

While the number of coal mining jobs has dropped in the United States, they do not represent a significant portion of the American economy. Coal companies employed about 65,971 miners in 2015, down from 87,755 in 2008, according to Energy Department statistics.

And though the percentage of coal mining jobs dropped sharply, economists said that was not driven by the Clean Power Plan. Rather, they blamed two key forces: an increase in production of natural gas, which is a cheaper, cleaner-burning alternative to coal, and an increase in automation, which allowed coal companies to produce more fuel with fewer employees. The rollback of Mr. Obama’s regulations will not change either of those forces, economists say.

“The problem with coal jobs has not been CO2 regulations, so this will probably not bring back coal jobs,” Mr. Godby said. “The problem has been that there has not been market demand for coal.”

The coal industry nonetheless cheered the move.

“These actions are vital to the American coal industry, to our survival, and to getting some of our coal families back to work,” said Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal mining companies.

But even Mr. Murray conceded that he did not expect the Trump administration’s order to return coal mining numbers to their former strength. “I really don’t know how far the coal industry can be brought back,” he said.

Mr. Trump’s directive on Tuesday will also eliminate about a half-dozen of Mr. Obama’s smaller executive orders and memorandums related to combating climate change.

On March 28 2017 21:38 LightSpectra wrote:
Just curious, suppose a million coal jobs came back overnight. After you factor in the cost of the environmental damage (both locally and in the global ecosphere) and the increased strain on the medical industry, would it be more economical to just pay a million people the same wage to do literally nothing?

Paying 1m people a bit above minimum wage would come out to approximately $20b/year by the way. (Less than half of Trump's proposed spending hike for the defense department.)