US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7218

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama ran an ad with this opening line: "The hands that built this nation can build a new economy. The hands that harvest crops can also harvest the wind."

And then it showed men working on roofs: "The hands that install roofs can also install solar panels."

The ad was directed at a group Obama was acutely aware he had to win over — white, working-class men. A quarter of those same men deserted Democrats in 2016, according to a New York Times analysis, and voted either for Donald Trump or a third-party candidate.

On Tuesday, President Trump is trying to start making good on his promises to many of those same white men — coal workers. The Trump administration is doing an about-face on President Obama's climate and environmental policies. The president signed an executive order with a goal of taking restraints off businesses and boosting the coal industry.

"He made a pledge to the coal industry, and he's going to do whatever he can to help those workers," a senior administrative official said Monday ahead of the executive order's signing.

Speaking at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, Trump said a "new era" in energy production is starting Tuesday.

Surrounded by about a dozen coal miners, he said, per NPR's Jennifer Ludden, "You're going back to work." He pledged to "end the war on coal and have clean coal, really clean coal."

But there are problems with both Trump's nostalgic Make America Great Again coal promises and Obama's radical vision for a reshaped economy.

Trump's ignores the reality of a changing energy industry. Solar jobs, for example, have taken off over the past decade. The Obama administration tried hard to incentivize clean energy (so much so that it got caught up in the Solyndra scandal. The head of Solyndra was an Obama campaign bundler. Obama visited the company and touted it. His administration incentivized companies like it. In 2011, the government helped Solyndra refinance, but just months later, the company failed).

But solar now accounts for some 260,000 energy jobs in the country, the majority of which are held by installers. That's almost four times the number of coal industry jobs, about 70,000, as of May 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that industry has been on a steady and steep decline over the past 30 years:



In the energy industry, solar is outpaced only by the oil industry, according to a major report by the Solar Foundation. And solar's gotten cheaper to produce (despite Trump's proclamations during the campaign that he loves solar except that it's expensive).

As KQED, an NPR member station in San Francisco, reported in December, "Power from big solar projects is about 70 percent cheaper today than it was a decade ago. Wind power has also come down."

The problem for Democrats is where those jobs are created. It's not like the coal jobs that faded in West Virginia and Kentucky were replaced by solar. In fact, those two states rank 45th and 41st in solar jobs per capita, respectively, according to the Solar Foundation. That's not to mention Michigan (28), Wisconsin (26) and Pennsylvania (43), which flipped blue to red for the first time in decades.

On March 29 2017 16:32 opisska wrote:
I keep hearing people say "how much Obamacare cost them". Is it because the system is in some way that I don't understand terribly inefficient, or is it just people complaining that they have to shell money so that others don't die in the streets?

On March 29 2017 06:00 Danglars wrote:

Surely you can see the problem with referring to "the Russia allegations" are a matter of subjective interpretations. There have been a litany of claims about what is improper, unethical, shady, quizzical, or otherwise. Yes, I do mock you for talking about the Russia allegations as if they were a uniform block and not this collection of shady assertions very much lacking in alleged criminality. Rep. Eric Swalwell alleged that we are witnessing the covering up of a crime ... What is the crime? If you fail to see anything problematic in structuring investigations in these gray areas almost totally detached from statute, I will mock the allegations until the cows come home. Next week it could be Lewandowski in the conference room with the Russian deputy vice chair on agricultural diversity and the undue influence he might exert in the USDA.

On March 29 2017 15:19 Danglars wrote:

I'm almost equally pleasured by legislative inaction. It's only partially allayed by knowing how much Obamacare has cost my friends and family with high premiums for less care and higher deductibles.

On March 29 2017 10:11 MasterCynical wrote:


It's been compromised by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, just like everything else on the internet.

(LOS ANGELES) — California prosecutors on Tuesday charged two anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood with 15 felonies, saying they invaded the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.

The charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress come eight months after similar charges were dropped in Texas.

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a longtime Congressional Democrat who took over the investigation in January, said in a statement that the state "will not tolerate the criminal recording of conversations."

Prosecutors say Daleiden, of Davis, California, and Merritt, of San Jose, filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.

Daleiden said in an email to The Associated Press that the "bogus" charges are coming from "Planned Parenthood's political cronies."
"The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners," Daleiden said.

The conversations included officials from Planned Parenthood and StemExpress, a California company that provides blood, tissue and other biological material for medical research and had received fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood.

In one of the pair's videos, Daleiden poses as "Robert Sarkis" of the phony Biomax Procurement Services and is shown discussing liver tissue with the chief executive of StemExpress at a Northern California restaurant.

Abortion opponents said the recordings showed Planned Parenthood was illegally harvesting and selling the organs. Planned Parenthood said the videos were deceptively edited to support extremists' false claims.

"As we have said from the beginning, and as more than a dozen different state investigations have made clear: Planned Parenthood has done nothing wrong, and the only people who broke the law are those behind the fraudulent tapes," said Mary Alice Carter, interim vice president of communications for Planned Parenthood, in a statement.

In April of last year, Daleiden said in a Facebook post that California Department of Justice agents raided his home, seizing all of his video footage along with personal information.

Since then the case had gone largely quiet, with virtually no revelations about the investigation and no indication that the charges were coming before they were filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court.

The case is one of the first of high-profile prosecutions for Becerra, who left the U.S. House to take over for Kamala Harris after she became a U.S. Senator.

On March 29 2017 21:26 LightSpectra wrote:


No guessing games required, I explicitly said what I meant by "Russian allegations", i.e. there was an explicit conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the presidential election in Trump's favor.



Sorry you and 3% of America had to pay more so that 7% of America could have health insurance. Must really weigh down on your conscience that all of those slimy parasites get to have vaccines and ER care without going bankrupt.

You can be smart and support UHC so that America stops being the first-world country that pays the most per-capita while having the worst results to show for it, but if you weren't convinced before, doesn't sound like you will be now.



Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: Tor was designed with the presumption that every three-letter agency was going to try to compromise it.

The fact that the CIA and NSA leaks show that they try to compromise Tor-users by using exploits in Flash and Firefox seem to suggest that they don't have an exploit available for Tor itself, so you have quite the case to make there.

On March 29 2017 21:55 Danglars wrote:
Haha explicit. Tell me, are you referring to explicitly asking for cyberwarfare against the Clinton camp ... incite to commit them with promises of reward?

On March 29 2017 22:02 LightSpectra wrote:
Here's the thing about whistleblowing: either you support it or you don't. You don't get to say "we love leaks that hurt our enemies but we need to stamp out the leaks that hurt us." Donald Trump hated Wikileaks when they revealed the "Collateral Murder" but loved them when they hurt the Democratic Party. Don't be like Trump.

Daleiden did America a public service, just like Ellsberg, just like Provance, just like Kiriakou, just like Snowden. Let's be consistent and either say "we want to know ALL crimes going on without our knowledge" or "we want ALL crimes to be obscured from our vision so we can pretend everything is awesome." I know which side I'm on.



Why the hell do you keep bringing the Clintons up? Nobody cares about them anymore, they have no power. I'm concerned about our POTUS being compromised. Please drop your odd obsession with the Clintons. They are totally irrelevant at this stage. If you want them to be prosecuted for any crimes, fantastic, but that's not the pressing concern for anybody else right now.

On March 29 2017 22:25 Danglars wrote:

If you were explicit in your hypothetical all this would be avoided. You might recall one accusation of conspiracy that involved the Clinton camp, or do you need me to find you a couple links? Seriously, I'm having trouble understanding you.

On March 29 2017 22:55 maybenexttime wrote:


Are you talking about Poland or Czech Republic? :-)

On March 29 2017 22:42 opisska wrote:
Thanks for the ACA comments guys. I can imagine that some people are just pissed that their "costs went up" and don't see that they had to, because there are other people who are ill and poor, but also the comments on how the extra costs are split in an rather haphazard way show that some people are probably pissed pretty rightfully. It seems to really show that covering everyone while pretending that you still do it in a free market, naturally leads to a clusterfuck.

I am sometimes pissed with our own healthcare system, there are things that aren't optimal and that directly threaten my health, but I guess I should still be pretty happy about what we have. We actually have a party that has as a policy point going towards the US insurance model, but luckily they are hovering around a couple of percent and this movement doesn't seem to be getting any relevance any time soon.

President Trump’s company is actively seeking to open a second Washington hotel as part of a planned nationwide expansion, potentially creating another venue where he stands to benefit financially from customers doing business in the nation’s capital.

Representatives of the Trump Organization, now run by the president’s adult sons, have inquired in recent months about converting one of several boutique, medium-sized hotels in upscale neighborhoods in and near downtown and reopening it under the company’s new Scion brand.

On March 29 2017 23:05 zlefin wrote:
I would certainly not recommend the american system, most places in europe have a better overall setup in terms of user satisfaction/results; though as always there are issues.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, making his first visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels this week, will reiterate Donald Trump’s demand that allies ramp up their military spending, a senior State Department official said.

Tillerson’s message will echo comments by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, who pressed the spending issue on a visit last month, and may test the patience of allies who are looking for evidence of the Trump administration’s professed support for NATO.

So far, they’re not getting much.

Tillerson initially declined to attend the spring gathering of NATO foreign ministers, citing a conflict with a visit to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jinping and a planned trip to Moscow. While critics said that Tillerson could have attended the Brussels meeting given that he travels on a U.S. Air Force jet, NATO nonetheless rescheduled the meeting for Friday so that Tillerson could attend.

But even as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has worked aggressively to address Trump’s priorities, the White House has not put much focus on NATO and has still not nominated a NATO ambassador.

Briefing reporters ahead of the trip to Brussels, the senior State Department official said that along with the spending demand, Tillerson would press allies to increase NATO’s role in counter-terrorism efforts.

NATO allies have formally committed to allocating at least 2 percent of annual economic output for military spending but only five NATO allies — the United States, Greece, the United Kingdom, Estonia and Poland — hit the target in 2016, according to NATO statistics.

“It’s essential that the allies honor their commitment from the last two previous summits to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, and of that defense spending, 20 percent needs to go for capacity building, for investment in capabilities and military equipment,” the senior official told reporters on Tuesday.

Beyond spending and terrorism, the official said Tillerson “will also be consulting with allies about our shared commitment to improve the security situation in eastern Ukraine, and the need for NATO to continue to push Russia to end its aggression against its neighbors, and to fulfill the Minsk commitments with regard to Ukraine.”

Mattis, during his first trip to NATO since joining the Trump administration, said last month that allies would need to increase spending or risked seeing the U.S. “moderate” its support for the alliance. Mattis repeatedly declined to say what consequences might flow from a failure to meet the targets, citing clear efforts by allies to ramp up expenditures.

The senior official refused to speculate on consequences but insisted that the current imbalance in spending was unsustainable.