The poster I responded to was blaming the bad economy on the Republicans blocking Obama's attempts to fix the economy and I asked why he did not take steps to fix it when the Dems had control of both Houses of Congress. Your defense of him is that he did and they failed, but we should hold the Republicans responsible because they did not go along with doing more of what didn't work in the first place?
You mean after Obama made it clear that he was not willing to compromise? When the Republicans wanted to negotiate on the stimulus bill right after Obama took office, Obama's response was "I won." Why would the Republicans want to compromise after that?
OK, so Obama didn't wait. That means his economic policies are a failure. I'm ok with that conclusion. There are really only two conclusions one can reach about Obama and the economy. Either he failed because he did not act on it soon enough or he failed because his economic policies don't work. In either case, it is time to replace him because he has not gotten the job done (that is by his own statement). It was Obama himself who said that if he did not have the economy fixed in 3 1/2 years, he would be out of a job.
Right, because centralized government control has always worked so well to bring down the costs of economic activity. It may be that some purported conservatives (whether or not they are is another question for another discussion) suggested the mandate. However, it is definitely true that no conservative (purported or otherwise) were involved in actually designing PPACA. PPACA is entirely owned by the Democratic Party because they wanted it that way. So any failures in it are failures of the Democratic Party, no matter where they got the ideas from. They did not bring any conservative thinkers in to help them design the implementation of their plan. They intentionally excluded them.
Excuse me, but Obama had two years of complete control of both houses of Congress. What is it that he was going to do to revive the economy that the Republicans stopped that he couldn't have done then?
I thought the idea of "stimulus" bills was to stimulate other economic activity, not to be the economic activity. According to the chart you linked, while the government was spending millions of dollars per job, there was a slight increase in the number of jobs. As soon as the government money ran out, so did the jobs. That's not stimulus, that's welfare.
How well did work out to revive the economy? Perhaps the reason that Obama has failed to revive the economy is because his ideas for doing so don't work? However, that is a different argument than the one the poster I replied to made. He argued that Obama failed to revive the economy because the Republicans blocked his efforts. However, Obama had two years when there was nothing the Republicans could do to stop him. So the question for that poster is, why didn't Obama pass the bills needed to revive the economy then?
In what way would have moving the Gitmo prisoners to the states have helped the economy? As to Obama's rhetoric are you referring to his response to Republicans when just after his election they wanted to work with him on designing an economic stimulus package? "I won"
What part of Obamacare is supposed to reduce the cost of your malpractice insurance?
Unless you think that the health care payment reform that is Obamacare (not health care payment reform in general, this specific reform) was a bigger priority than the economy when Obama took office, it is ridiculous to blame the Republicans for Obama's failure to pass anything to address this country's economic problems. If he had passed policies that improved the economy, he would have increased his political capital making it easier to pass some kind of health care reform. Instead he passed the politically unpopular Obamcare, making it harder to pass economic bills. The thing is that by passing Obamacare first, he made passing his economic policy bills harder in two ways. The first way is that he lost control of Congress. However, the second way was that he made people aware that they disagreed with his political and economic philosophy. If he had passed his economic policies when he had control of Congress and they worked (actually, he did pass them and they didn't work), many people who disagreed with his economic policy would have been more willing to give new bills the benefit of the doubt and supported (or at least not opposed) passing them.
Why did he wait until the Republicans took control of the House to start sending proposals to help the economy? The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress for Obama's first two years. They were in a position to pass anything they wanted to.
Of course you also ignore that the Senate has refused to even vote on every bill that the House has passed to help the economy since the Republicans took control of the House. The House (the only chamber that the Republicans control) has passed over 200 bills designed to help the economy that the Senate has not even brought up for a vote. Obama's and the Democrat's approach has been their way or nothing.
Why did Obama wait until he lost control of Congress to try and revive the economy? If he had taken action to revive the economy during his first two years there would have been nothing the Republicans could have done to undo it. The Republicans only control the House which means that if Obama had put as much effort into reviving the economy (something a majority of U.S. voters want done) as he did in to passing his healthcare financing act (something the majority of U.S. voters did notwant done) there would be nothing the Republicans could have done or could do to thwart him.
The main problem with your argument is that we don't have one agency with one set of regulations. We have 50 state agencies AND the EPA. An additional problem with the EPA is that you end up with "one size fits all" regulations. Situations are different in different parts of the country. A regulation that is a good idea in one area may be a bad idea in another. In addition, state level agencies will be more responsive to voter preferences than a federal level agency because it does not take as many irate individuals to change the laws overseeing a state agency as it does a federal agency.
Having one federal agency makes life easier for large corporations, but does not really do anything for a small business that only operates in a single state. For a small business that operates in a single state, it will be easier to get their legitimate concerns addressed. It will also be easier for a private citizen to get their concerns addressed by a state level agency than by a federal agency. A single federal agency makes good sense if you favor large corporations. Separate state agencies make better sense if you favor small business over large corporations.
All of the "official reasons" you find for the Department of Energy are things that were being done by some other government agency at the time the Department of Energy was created, so those would not be reasons to create the Department. Second, it was not necessary to be part of some "backroom discussion" in order to know what the purpose for creating the Department of Energy.. I was alive and paying attention to the news in 1977 when Jimmy Carter signed the law creating the Department of Energy. Jimmy Carter, and other politicians, in pushing Congress to pass the law creating the Department of Energy spent quite a bit of time touting how it would help the U.S. reduce its dependence of foreign energy.
The idea was that by centralizing the various federal agencies that dealt with energy under one department and making that department a cabinet level department it would be possible to create a federal policy that would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. It was never spelled out how this would be accomplished.
The regulation of most fracking is not coming from the EPA. It is coming from the same place it would come from if the EPA was disbanded, state level departments of environmental resources (or equivalent).
The rational for the creation of the Department of Energy was to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. The thing is, since the establishment of the Department of Energy, the U.S. has become significantly more dependent on foreign energy supplies. That means that the Department of Energy has been a complete failure at the mission for which it was created (or at least the mission which was claimed to be the reason it was created).
Well, since I would have to start beating my wife in order to stop, I guess you mean never. Which of course means that you are not willing to follow your own advice and stop doing what is pissing Muslims off enough to try and kill you (the only reason they blow themselves up is because they are not militarily strong enough to kill non-muslims on a large scale through direct military action).
The FEC has spent a long time tightening the laws.
If the FEC has been tightening the laws, then we have bigger problems than lobbyists bribing elected officials, since the FEC is not part of either branch of Congress and therefore had no business changing laws in any manner.
There is an important missing piece to this story. What was the ad that Google refused to run? I actually searched to see if I could find the ad that Google rejected, but was unable to find it. Without knowing the content of the ad that Google rejected it is impossible to know if Google was behaving in an acceptable manner or not. The story as told reflects badly on Google, but it is told exclusively from the perspective of the Sex Party. Yes, we are given a quote from a Google email where they say that "it doesn't allow the solicitation of funds (donations) unless they are tax exempt." But notice, that is a sentence fragment, we do not know what came before the word "it" in that quote.
Did the Sex Party submit an ad which was constructed in such a way that they knew it would trigger a ban from Google in order to be able to generate a news story that would gain them more attention than any ads they could actually run would? Did they intentionally play things out so that it would appear to Google that they were a porn site? There are other ways that the Sex Party could have played this so as to lead Google to ban their ad. I am not saying that they did. I do not know. But without seeing the ad that was initially banned, I have no way to judge that...and the fact that they are not putting the ad up for perusal anywhere that I can find suggests that the possibility that the Sex Party intentionally gamed the system to get banned needs to be given serious consideration.
They would probably call the police and have you arrested for indecent exposure. However, most places of business do not have those signs because they care if you wear shoes and/or a shirt, but because of health regulations (they can be fined by the local health department if they allow people in the store without shoes and/or a shirt).
The evidence suggests none. It's not like we have no experience with these types of incidents in places where people were carrying weapons with a concealed carry permit. It's just that you don't hear about them because the death toll is too low to make national news. Now the incidents I am aware of do not involve smoke grenades in a darkened location, but considering that the argument you make (other people being killed in the crossfire) has been brought up in those types of scenarios suggests that it no more applies here than in those situations.
The Supreme Court as the final arbiter of whether or not a law is Constitutional has not Constitutional basis. An early Supreme Court ruled that it had such power and everyone since has accepted that such was the case. The defendant in the case where the Court gave itself that power was none other than James Madison considered the "Father of the Constitution" (for legitimate reasons). It would be interesting to know what he would have felt about this ruling if it had not led to the Court finding in favor of his actions.
You missed his point. The question he proposed was, "Did the price of gas or the price of milk go up more in the last decade?" He believes that few if any people would actually know the answer, so they would answer based on something other than the actual price of either. He is further postulating that the same is true of the temperature, very few people have actually tracked the changes in temperature over time, therefore there answer to questions about changes in temperature are based on their political beliefs, not the actual temperatures.
That's interesting because when I learned Spanish somewhat longer ago, "americano" already usually meant someone from the U.S., and when I visited a Latin American country a little over 20 years ago, the locals all asked if I was "americano", meaning from the U.S. So, the Spanish word "americano" has meant someone from the U.S. for quite some time now (admittedly, the Spanish speaking world is a large and diverse place, and my experience only really encompasses Mexico and Central America).
The main reason for my original post was that I am pretty sure that the poster I replied to thought that professor Mann was a U.S. citizen and used the term "american" in that manner, when in fact, Professor Mann is a Canadian.
Slashdot Mirror
The poster I responded to was blaming the bad economy on the Republicans blocking Obama's attempts to fix the economy and I asked why he did not take steps to fix it when the Dems had control of both Houses of Congress. Your defense of him is that he did and they failed, but we should hold the Republicans responsible because they did not go along with doing more of what didn't work in the first place?
You mean after Obama made it clear that he was not willing to compromise? When the Republicans wanted to negotiate on the stimulus bill right after Obama took office, Obama's response was "I won." Why would the Republicans want to compromise after that?
OK, so Obama didn't wait. That means his economic policies are a failure. I'm ok with that conclusion. There are really only two conclusions one can reach about Obama and the economy. Either he failed because he did not act on it soon enough or he failed because his economic policies don't work. In either case, it is time to replace him because he has not gotten the job done (that is by his own statement). It was Obama himself who said that if he did not have the economy fixed in 3 1/2 years, he would be out of a job.
Right, because centralized government control has always worked so well to bring down the costs of economic activity. It may be that some purported conservatives (whether or not they are is another question for another discussion) suggested the mandate. However, it is definitely true that no conservative (purported or otherwise) were involved in actually designing PPACA. PPACA is entirely owned by the Democratic Party because they wanted it that way. So any failures in it are failures of the Democratic Party, no matter where they got the ideas from. They did not bring any conservative thinkers in to help them design the implementation of their plan. They intentionally excluded them.
Excuse me, but Obama had two years of complete control of both houses of Congress. What is it that he was going to do to revive the economy that the Republicans stopped that he couldn't have done then?
I thought the idea of "stimulus" bills was to stimulate other economic activity, not to be the economic activity. According to the chart you linked, while the government was spending millions of dollars per job, there was a slight increase in the number of jobs. As soon as the government money ran out, so did the jobs. That's not stimulus, that's welfare.
How well did work out to revive the economy? Perhaps the reason that Obama has failed to revive the economy is because his ideas for doing so don't work? However, that is a different argument than the one the poster I replied to made. He argued that Obama failed to revive the economy because the Republicans blocked his efforts. However, Obama had two years when there was nothing the Republicans could do to stop him. So the question for that poster is, why didn't Obama pass the bills needed to revive the economy then?
In what way would have moving the Gitmo prisoners to the states have helped the economy? As to Obama's rhetoric are you referring to his response to Republicans when just after his election they wanted to work with him on designing an economic stimulus package? "I won"
What part of Obamacare is supposed to reduce the cost of your malpractice insurance?
Unless you think that the health care payment reform that is Obamacare (not health care payment reform in general, this specific reform) was a bigger priority than the economy when Obama took office, it is ridiculous to blame the Republicans for Obama's failure to pass anything to address this country's economic problems. If he had passed policies that improved the economy, he would have increased his political capital making it easier to pass some kind of health care reform. Instead he passed the politically unpopular Obamcare, making it harder to pass economic bills. The thing is that by passing Obamacare first, he made passing his economic policy bills harder in two ways. The first way is that he lost control of Congress. However, the second way was that he made people aware that they disagreed with his political and economic philosophy. If he had passed his economic policies when he had control of Congress and they worked (actually, he did pass them and they didn't work), many people who disagreed with his economic policy would have been more willing to give new bills the benefit of the doubt and supported (or at least not opposed) passing them.
Why did he wait until the Republicans took control of the House to start sending proposals to help the economy? The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress for Obama's first two years. They were in a position to pass anything they wanted to.
Of course you also ignore that the Senate has refused to even vote on every bill that the House has passed to help the economy since the Republicans took control of the House. The House (the only chamber that the Republicans control) has passed over 200 bills designed to help the economy that the Senate has not even brought up for a vote. Obama's and the Democrat's approach has been their way or nothing.
Why did Obama wait until he lost control of Congress to try and revive the economy? If he had taken action to revive the economy during his first two years there would have been nothing the Republicans could have done to undo it. The Republicans only control the House which means that if Obama had put as much effort into reviving the economy (something a majority of U.S. voters want done) as he did in to passing his healthcare financing act (something the majority of U.S. voters did notwant done) there would be nothing the Republicans could have done or could do to thwart him.
Citation needed
The main problem with your argument is that we don't have one agency with one set of regulations. We have 50 state agencies AND the EPA. An additional problem with the EPA is that you end up with "one size fits all" regulations. Situations are different in different parts of the country. A regulation that is a good idea in one area may be a bad idea in another. In addition, state level agencies will be more responsive to voter preferences than a federal level agency because it does not take as many irate individuals to change the laws overseeing a state agency as it does a federal agency.
Having one federal agency makes life easier for large corporations, but does not really do anything for a small business that only operates in a single state. For a small business that operates in a single state, it will be easier to get their legitimate concerns addressed. It will also be easier for a private citizen to get their concerns addressed by a state level agency than by a federal agency. A single federal agency makes good sense if you favor large corporations. Separate state agencies make better sense if you favor small business over large corporations.
All of the "official reasons" you find for the Department of Energy are things that were being done by some other government agency at the time the Department of Energy was created, so those would not be reasons to create the Department. Second, it was not necessary to be part of some "backroom discussion" in order to know what the purpose for creating the Department of Energy.. I was alive and paying attention to the news in 1977 when Jimmy Carter signed the law creating the Department of Energy. Jimmy Carter, and other politicians, in pushing Congress to pass the law creating the Department of Energy spent quite a bit of time touting how it would help the U.S. reduce its dependence of foreign energy.
The idea was that by centralizing the various federal agencies that dealt with energy under one department and making that department a cabinet level department it would be possible to create a federal policy that would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. It was never spelled out how this would be accomplished.
The regulation of most fracking is not coming from the EPA. It is coming from the same place it would come from if the EPA was disbanded, state level departments of environmental resources (or equivalent).
The rational for the creation of the Department of Energy was to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy supplies. The thing is, since the establishment of the Department of Energy, the U.S. has become significantly more dependent on foreign energy supplies. That means that the Department of Energy has been a complete failure at the mission for which it was created (or at least the mission which was claimed to be the reason it was created).
Well, since I would have to start beating my wife in order to stop, I guess you mean never. Which of course means that you are not willing to follow your own advice and stop doing what is pissing Muslims off enough to try and kill you (the only reason they blow themselves up is because they are not militarily strong enough to kill non-muslims on a large scale through direct military action).
The FEC has spent a long time tightening the laws.
If the FEC has been tightening the laws, then we have bigger problems than lobbyists bribing elected officials, since the FEC is not part of either branch of Congress and therefore had no business changing laws in any manner.
So, when did you become a Muslim?
There is an important missing piece to this story. What was the ad that Google refused to run? I actually searched to see if I could find the ad that Google rejected, but was unable to find it. Without knowing the content of the ad that Google rejected it is impossible to know if Google was behaving in an acceptable manner or not. The story as told reflects badly on Google, but it is told exclusively from the perspective of the Sex Party. Yes, we are given a quote from a Google email where they say that "it doesn't allow the solicitation of funds (donations) unless they are tax exempt." But notice, that is a sentence fragment, we do not know what came before the word "it" in that quote.
Did the Sex Party submit an ad which was constructed in such a way that they knew it would trigger a ban from Google in order to be able to generate a news story that would gain them more attention than any ads they could actually run would? Did they intentionally play things out so that it would appear to Google that they were a porn site? There are other ways that the Sex Party could have played this so as to lead Google to ban their ad. I am not saying that they did. I do not know. But without seeing the ad that was initially banned, I have no way to judge that...and the fact that they are not putting the ad up for perusal anywhere that I can find suggests that the possibility that the Sex Party intentionally gamed the system to get banned needs to be given serious consideration.
They would probably call the police and have you arrested for indecent exposure. However, most places of business do not have those signs because they care if you wear shoes and/or a shirt, but because of health regulations (they can be fined by the local health department if they allow people in the store without shoes and/or a shirt).
I am sure that a phablet is the perfect device for porn watching.
The evidence suggests none. It's not like we have no experience with these types of incidents in places where people were carrying weapons with a concealed carry permit. It's just that you don't hear about them because the death toll is too low to make national news. Now the incidents I am aware of do not involve smoke grenades in a darkened location, but considering that the argument you make (other people being killed in the crossfire) has been brought up in those types of scenarios suggests that it no more applies here than in those situations.
The Supreme Court as the final arbiter of whether or not a law is Constitutional has not Constitutional basis. An early Supreme Court ruled that it had such power and everyone since has accepted that such was the case. The defendant in the case where the Court gave itself that power was none other than James Madison considered the "Father of the Constitution" (for legitimate reasons). It would be interesting to know what he would have felt about this ruling if it had not led to the Court finding in favor of his actions.
You missed his point. The question he proposed was, "Did the price of gas or the price of milk go up more in the last decade?" He believes that few if any people would actually know the answer, so they would answer based on something other than the actual price of either. He is further postulating that the same is true of the temperature, very few people have actually tracked the changes in temperature over time, therefore there answer to questions about changes in temperature are based on their political beliefs, not the actual temperatures.
That's interesting because when I learned Spanish somewhat longer ago, "americano" already usually meant someone from the U.S., and when I visited a Latin American country a little over 20 years ago, the locals all asked if I was "americano", meaning from the U.S. So, the Spanish word "americano" has meant someone from the U.S. for quite some time now (admittedly, the Spanish speaking world is a large and diverse place, and my experience only really encompasses Mexico and Central America).
The main reason for my original post was that I am pretty sure that the poster I replied to thought that professor Mann was a U.S. citizen and used the term "american" in that manner, when in fact, Professor Mann is a Canadian.