US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8301

On August 04 2017 14:09 LegalLord wrote:
Honestly, the rest of the world deserves Trump far more than the US does. It's some delicious irony to suck on for all those who thought Bush was just an aberration and that you could expect Obama-esque leadership from this point on. Well, hope you can enjoy some Bush plus.

On August 04 2017 16:16 Slydie wrote:
I am having an argument with a american-politics nerd, can Trump fire Mueller, or is that politically impossible? Even if he somehow manages to firie him, would that not just drag him further dowm the swamp, and call for some 9/11 like independent investigation, with the power to examine his butthole for russian connections?

On August 04 2017 16:16 Slydie wrote:
I am having an argument with a american-politics nerd, can Trump fire Mueller, or is that politically impossible? Even if he somehow manages to firie him, would that not just drag him further dowm the swamp, and call for some 9/11 like independent investigation, with the power to examine his butthole for russian connections?

On August 04 2017 22:40 OtherWorld wrote:
So, is the transcript of the Trump - Malcolm call real ? Like, where did they get the source material ? Because if that's real, then that's quite frightening.

The Obama years were a great time for the gun business.

But since the election of Donald Trump as president and the resulting decline in fears over increased gun regulation, sales in the industry have plummeted.

On Thursday, shares of gunmaker Sturm, Ruger & Co. (RGR) were down as much as 9% after reporting results Wednesday afternoon that missed expectations. In the second quarter, sales for the company were down 22% against the same period last year while profits fell 53%.

...

Back in 2015, for instance, gunmaker Smith & Wesson said, “[W]e experienced strong consumer demand for our firearm products following a new administration taking office in Washington, D.C. in 2009.”

And as the gun control debate raged on in Washington, D.C., gun sales boomed in anticipation of a future in which it was more difficult to buy firearms. The Trump administration, however, has taken this political tailwind away from the industry as consumers no longer fear the government will come to take their guns.

On August 05 2017 00:19 KwarK wrote:
What happened to a real unemployment rate of 60% which was being suppressed by the politicians in Washington?

On August 05 2017 00:27 Doodsmack wrote:
CNN has a Trump favorable headline up on that. Even a favorable picture.

http://www.cnn.com/

By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

But with his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.

Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.

The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.

The Harvard case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-Americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.

“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard.

His group, a conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.

The federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.

In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one Harvard points to with pride. The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of Harvard in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.

The university has extended that ethos to many low-income students, allowing them to attend free. Harvard has argued in a Supreme Court brief that while it sets no quotas for “blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians,” if it wants to achieve true diversity, it must pay some attention to the numbers. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the “excellence” of a Harvard education.

Melodie Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said that the university’s admissions policy was fair; that it looked at each applicant “as a whole person,” consistent with standards established by the Supreme Court; and that it promoted “the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives.”

Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander, according to data on the university’s website.

For the Harvard case, initially filed in 2014, Mr. Blum said, the federal court in Boston has allowed the plaintiffs to demand records from four highly competitive high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students: Stuyvesant High School in New York; Monta Vista High School in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.; and the Boston Latin School.

The goal is to look at whether students with comparable qualifications have different odds of admission that could be correlated with race and how stereotypes influence the process. A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called “the Asian tax.”

The lawsuit also cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.

On August 05 2017 02:42 Falling wrote:
Well I think it is definitely worth investigating to make sure the policy is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing. Just because you implement something, doesn't mean it actually work in the way you hoped to.

On August 05 2017 02:42 Falling wrote:
Well I think it is definitely worth investigating to make sure the policy is actually doing what it is supposed to be doing. Just because you implement something, doesn't mean it actually work in the way you hoped to.

This was a loss. A lunch or two with the chief financial officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where.