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FCC Abides By GOP Request To Stop What It's Doing, Deletes Everything From Meeting Agenda (arstechnica.com)
One day after republicans from the house and senate sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, urging him to avoid passing regulations before Donald Trump's inauguration as president, Wheeler appears to have complied with the request. The FCC today "announced the deletion of all items that were originally scheduled to be presented and voted on at tomorrow's meeting." Ars Technica reports: Before the change, the agenda included votes on price caps for "special access" business data services; Universal Service funding to expand mobile broadband networks; wireless roaming obligations; and requirements for audio description of TV programming for blind and visually impaired people. The only item not deleted from tomorrow's meeting is part of the "consent agenda," which means it is routine and wasn't going to be presented individually. Of the major items, the business data services proposal had received the most attention. These are dedicated wireline circuits provided by traditional phone companies like AT&T and Verizon; the services supply bandwidth for cellular data networks, indirectly affecting the price consumers pay for wireless service. The business data services are also used by banks and retailers to connect ATM machines and credit card readers, by government and corporate users to connect branch offices and data centers, and to support public safety operations and health care facilities. The now-deleted agenda item would have phased in price cap decreases of 11 percent over three years to account for "over a decade of efficiency gains" since the last price cap adjustment.
Except that it's likely to be Agit Pai, former Verizon lawyer and obstructionist Republican asshat who opposed everything FCC Chairman Wheeler did.
What the hell is this? Yes the future FCC may be different from the current one, but we still have a current FCC. The government can't just shut down for two months after an election.
This is the same logic they used to block the supreme court nomination, and is wrong for the same reason.
The FCC could pass regulations that will be invalidated upon Trump's inauguration, or they could avoid wasting everyone's time and do this. They took the cost-cutting choice.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Because it forces the next person to actively undo them, which can potentially be a news story with political backlash. Instead, the next person now doesn't have to do anything and they get their way, and no one will remember when it just doesn't happen.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
By framing Trump's win as being the result of sexism you fail to acknowledge that many people chose not to vote for Clinton for various flaws, completely unrelated to her gender. Without some convincing proof otherwise, I'd assume that the number of people who voted for Trump _because_ Clinton was female is vanishingly small. The number for whom it was a consideration may be higher, but is still dwarfed by the number of people who rejected Clinton for her ties with banks and big business, 'pay for play' and accusations of corruption, scandals relating to mishandling of classified material, feeling that the Democrat's no longer represented the interests of those who once voted for them and/or any of dozens of other reasons that came up during the campaign.
The degree to which any of those has merit can be debated. What can not is that these had a marked impact on various groups of voters that may previously have voted for a Democrat candidate.
And what's wrong with NPR? They're the most balanced and fair media outlet I've seen in the last decade. They present views and stories from across the spectrum. Liberals complain that it's too conservative, conservatives complain that it's too liberal, so it feels just right to me.
Stop picking sides like this is just a dumb ball game! Start using your brain to decide how you feel about the issues instead of letting others tell you how to think. Read the news from all segments instead of just the ones that agree with you. Once you start calling people "libtards" then you sound like a drunken fan in the bleachers.
Late night TV shows go and talk to the people on the streets and they're clueless. Ask them who they are voting for and it's "um, duh, Hillary because she's a woman?" or "um, duh, Trump because he's going to make things great?" They vote for their candidate because that's the team they always root for and not because they have the slightly clue what their candidate's policy platform is. They probably think that all of politics can be boiled down to left vs right, or liberal vs conservative, and that chemistry is earth, air, fire, and water.
If you think the US is a backwater then you're really out of touch. I think America is already great and can be made greater. I see no evidence in history that the US was greater in the past than it is today and that it needs to be made great "again". We are doing better today than in the any time in the past. We continue to make forward progress in small pieces. This does not mean that everyone is personally happy and fulfilled though, we continue to have problems that need fixing. But they won't be fixed by going back in time.