US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9034

Mississippi GOP Sen. Thad Cochran insists that he is not retiring from Congress, despite widespread speculation about the veteran lawmaker’s health and political future.

The 79-year-old Cochran appeared frail and at times disoriented during a brief hallway interview on Wednesday. He was unable to answer whether he would remain chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and at one point, needed a staffer to remind him where the Senate chamber is located.

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Cochran said in a low voice when asked whether he plans to retire after 44 years in office.

However, when queried about whether he would stay on as Appropriations chairman, Cochran seemed confused and just repeated the question. “As chairman of the Appropriations Committee?” Cochran asked.

Cochran had to be guided by staffers around a security checkpoint inside the Capitol. He started to walk into a first-floor room — though the Senate chamber is on the second floor. He was then ushered by an aide up to the Senate.

When another reporter asked whether leadership had pressured Cochran to return for a vote on the budget resolution — a key moment in the tax reform debate — Cochran smiled and responded, “It’s a beautiful day outside.”

Cochran sat quietly in his seat during Wednesday's lengthy vote session. He smiled and responded when a fellow senator stopped by to offer greetings, but generally did not speak to anyone else.

On one amendment, Cochran voted “yes” despite being told by an aide to vote “no.” The staffer tried to get the senator to switch his vote, but Cochran kept flashing the “thumbs up” sign, even walking over to the clerk tallying the vote and doing so. GOP floor staffers repeatedly told him the leadership wanted a "no" vote. Several more moments passed before Cochran realized he was voting the wrong way and then changed his vote.

Cochran, who turns 80 in December, has faced questions about his health for the past several years. Cochran has been treated recently for urological problems, though his aides and political allies insisted he was fine. President Donald Trump last month spotlighted Cochran's health when he claimed that Obamacare repeal legislation would have passed had Cochran not been hospitalized. Cochran, though, wasn't in the hospital at that point.

Top Senate Republicans say they are not pressuring Cochran to retire or step down as Appropriations Committee chairman, a powerful perch from which he helps oversee hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending each year. Cochran made a career of steering federal dollars back home, working with former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) for years to ensure their state benefited from hundreds of “earmarks” inserted in annual appropriations bills.

The use of earmarks, which were banned in 2010 after the tea party movement helped Republicans regain control of Congress, helped make Cochran popular back home. He never faced a serious challenge from 1984 until 2014. But that year, conservative outside groups attacked him during the GOP primary and Cochran barely survived a runoff. He went on, however, to easily win the general election.

Cochran’s seat is viewed as particularly important, given that the GOP establishment went all out to help him beat state Sen. Chris McDaniel in the 2014 primary.

Cochran is up for reelection in 2020, and Republicans are desperate for him to stay in office and avoid a special election. McDaniel already is planning a campaign against incumbent Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) in 2018.

Cochran was first elected to Congress in 1972, making him one of the longest serving GOP lawmakers in history. His election to the Senate in Mississippi in 1978 was a watershed moment for Republicans. Cochran was the first Republican to win a statewide election in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Now, the state is overwhelmingly red, with the GOP controlling the governorship, Legislature and congressional delegation. President Donald Trump easily carried the state in the 2016 presidential election.

The Senate has had other once-vibrant members who faced questions about whether they still had the capacity to serve as they aged. The late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) served until the age of 100, but was forced to give up the chairmanship of Armed Services. Another legendary lawmaker, the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) was eventually replaced as chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

On October 20 2017 12:02 GoTuNk! wrote:


I obviously wish you the best, but this is simply anecdotal evidence. A greenland farmer could present an opposite experience. The world average crop yields could be rising (or lowering) while specific places have worse (or better) results.

Maybe you could research into drought statistics for your area, but I doubt you'll find enough data that allows you to claim that man made climate is making droughts more severe/frequent in California.

On October 20 2017 19:04 Liquid`Drone wrote:
When people speak of 'point of no return' with regard to climate change, it does not mean 'we are fucked from that date', it means 'it'll be too late to revert emissions to hinder stuff like permafrost thawing which might release trapped greenhouse gasses'.

Basically the point of no return is a 'this ensures that global warming will happen on a 'bad' scale 50-100 years from now', not a 'it's gonna go to hell right now'. And there seems to be a consensus that this has already happened. Climate change will have disastrous effects. That's inevitable regardless of what we do now. The question is how disastrous - it's not a binary 'we're fucked' or 'we're fine', it's about moving us closer to the 'we're fine' point of that scale.

I also think arguments such as 'it'll be more costly to hinder climate change than to deal with the effects of climate change' could be totally fine. It's just that this argument is almost exclusively presented by people who also don't acknowledge the scientific consensus, and who also seem entirely opposed to the idea of dealing with the effects of climate change. (For example, there's a strong correlation between 'opposed to immigration' and 'thinks climate change isn't a real problem', but to me, one of the biggest problems with climate change is that even moderate projections will forcibly relocate a 9 digit number of people. The recent refugee crisis was completely insignificant compared to what might happen if any degree of; bangladesh floods, himalayas run out of water, middle east becomes too hot for humans to live, north africa runs out of water, happen. Nobody you should take seriously claims that all of these will definitely happen for sure, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that some of these to some degree happen, and there are so many people living in those regions that even if changes happen that make 10% of the population of those regions have to relocate because those regions can no longer support that many people, then we're looking at a couple hundred million people.. If you wanna be like, 'yeah, but we need the energy to thrive, us western countries just need to accept a couple hundred million more immigrants then', that'd actually be kinda fine with me. It's just, I've never actually seen someone hold that position.

On October 20 2017 22:08 Slydie wrote:


I am all for immigration, but very sceptical about the climate hysteria, for some reasons:

-We are talking about projections with a high degree of uncertainty of an extremely complicated system.
-Our scope of climate is extremely small. Right now, the climate is historically GREAT, fairly warm and stable. What should be looked for ib 10s of millions of years, not 100s. At some point, we will face something truely dramatic, like an ice age or an ash cloud from a supervolcano, but I do not think this global warming is comparable to that.
-Humans deal very well with climate change, emigrating and changing lifestyle. We always have, and will always have to deal with them, as or planet is not a stable place.

On October 20 2017 22:08 Slydie wrote:


I am all for immigration, but very sceptical about the climate hysteria, for some reasons:

-We are talking about projections with a high degree of uncertainty of an extremely complicated system.
-Our scope of climate is extremely small. Right now, the climate is historically GREAT, fairly warm and stable. What should be looked for ib 10s of millions of years, not 100s. At some point, we will face something truely dramatic, like an ice age or an ash cloud from a supervolcano, but I do not think this global warming is comparable to that.
-Humans deal very well with climate change, emigrating and changing lifestyle. We always have, and will always have to deal with them, as or planet is not a stable place.

On October 20 2017 22:08 Slydie wrote:


I am all for immigration, but very sceptical about the climate hysteria, for some reasons:

-We are talking about projections with a high degree of uncertainty of an extremely complicated system.
-Our scope of climate is extremely small. Right now, the climate is historically GREAT, fairly warm and stable. What should be looked for ib 10s of millions of years, not 100s. At some point, we will face something truely dramatic, like an ice age or an ash cloud from a supervolcano, but I do not think this global warming is comparable to that.
-Humans deal very well with climate change, emigrating and changing lifestyle. We always have, and will always have to deal with them, as or planet is not a stable place.

On October 20 2017 22:06 farvacola wrote:
Something tells me that the DoD thinks what happened in Niger figures as a "real" Benghazi and they're getting out in front of it before the White House can play counterfactuals.

The only thing certain in this life are death, taxes and the US department of energy’s massive underestimate of renewable energy capacity.

Every two years, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), America’s official source for energy statistics, issues 10-year projections about how much solar, wind and conventional energy the future holds for the US. Every two years, since the mid-1990s, the EIA’s projections turn out to be wrong. Last year, they proved spectacularly wrong.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, and Statista recently teamed up to analyze the EIA’s predictions for energy usage and production. They found that the EIA’s 10-year estimates between 2006 to 2016 systematically understated the share of wind, solar and gas. Solar capacity, in particular, was a whopping 4,813% more in 2016 than the EIA had predicted in 2006 it would be.

To be fair, there is a caveat here: The prediction in 2006 was that 10 years hence the US would be generating just 0.8 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy. With such a low baseline figure, any increase will look huge in percentage terms.
Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable trend in the data: The EIA regularly underestimates the growth in renewables but overestimates US fossil-fuel consumption, which some critics see as an attempt to boost the oil and gas industry.

These estimates matter because they form the basis for actions by the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies (hence the outdated goals set in the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan, which may be reached without new policy intervention).

The agency’s “projections bear little resemblance to market realities” because they ignore publicly available evidence, argues the clean-energy non-profit Advanced Energy Economy. It cites the EIA’s 2015 expectation for solar capacity to double by 2026, despite a pipeline of projects that would—and ultimately did—exceed that benchmark by early 2017. Similarly, the EIA expected the installment of 6.5 GW of new wind capacity between 2017 and 2030—even though new US wind installations averaged 6.5 GW per year between 2007 and 2014. “They’re not just conservative about change,” Advanced Energy Economy vice-president Robert Keough told Politico. ” They’re ignoring the evidence of what’s actually happening in the market.”

But it may simply be a problem of methodology. Michael Grunwald at Politico reports the EIA seems to base its projections on the assumption that renewable energy costs won’t fall much, when in fact they keep plunging.

In the agency’s defense, the pace of technological change is unpredictable. Conservative models are almost always wrong during times of breakneck technological or economic change (as with wind and solar), and the government is not in the business of rosy speculation. Politicians do the EIA no favors by promoting, then threatening, tax credits to encourage renewable investments.

Even as the EIA (slowly) adjusts its models, the US will likely stay the renewable course. Solar and wind have reached grid parity in many places, reports UtilityDive (pdf), and the majority of new electricity-generating capacity in the US in the last two years has come from renewables. That proportion is only expected to grow.

On October 20 2017 22:08 Slydie wrote:


I am all for immigration, but very sceptical about the climate hysteria, for some reasons:

-We are talking about projections with a high degree of uncertainty of an extremely complicated system.
-Our scope of climate is extremely small. Right now, the climate is historically GREAT, fairly warm and stable. What should be looked for ib 10s of millions of years, not 100s. At some point, we will face something truely dramatic, like an ice age or an ash cloud from a supervolcano, but I do not think this global warming is comparable to that.
-Humans deal very well with climate change, emigrating and changing lifestyle. We always have, and will always have to deal with them, as or planet is not a stable place.

Before the Industrial Revolution, humanity depended on burning wood and candle wax. But with the ability to harness the energy in oil and other fossil fuels, quality of life and capacity for progress increased exponentially.

On October 20 2017 23:29 Adreme wrote:
Ahhh there it is the Danglers dodge. When you are determined to defend the indefensible because merely admitting the president screwed up would be impossible for your worldview, you instead change the argument to not be about the thing in question which cannot be defended you decide to make it about the reporting about the thing that cannot be defended.

No matter what else you try to talk about instead Dangers, the president was CLEARLY in the wrong here. It was probably not intentional, he did not wake up and say "let me offend the widow to a fallen soldier today" but he did and instead owning up to it like an adult he decided to be a child and lie about the entire thing. If he had take the mature adult approach and simply said to her "I did not communicate what I was trying to say very well, I was merely alluding to the fact that you must have gone thru this possibility in your head every single day since he left, since that is the greatest fear of every spouse of a soldier, but even with all that the real thing must still truly sting. I am sorry it came across how it did and I truly salute you and your husband for the service that you both provided to this country and his memory will live in through you and your children (I think he has children I do not remember very well)"

Say that, make sure it gets public and the entire story goes away in less then a day and by the way I wrote that on the fly a real version would be much better. Instead he decided to fight against a delicate a fallen widow because his ego is so small and fragile that the mere thought of being wrong causes him to lash out.

I get that you want to talk about anything but the president being wrong, but can you at least admit that this ENTIRE mess is of the presidents own making and that he messed up?

On October 20 2017 23:37 Danglars wrote:

And Saint Obama has no scandals and didn't presage any of this shit. It would be more tiresome if it was less widespread, but you see it everyday. Rather sad.

Adreme has a monk like serenity when he straight ignores the John Kelly briefing and tweet to focus in on Donald Trump. You see, facts don't matter to him. Straight up. He can respond to a post without even pretending to address the substance of the post. Seriously. It takes a special mania to talk past the actual post and then ask questions as if everything's peachy. When you decide not to troll, I'll be here. Maybe next current event?

On October 20 2017 23:40 KwarK wrote:

Wait, how is this now about Obama and his beatification? Wasn't this about Trump not being able to express sympathy to a widow?