so now, we just have "whoever has enough money to spend" is in charge of determining Free Speech.
That's not how speech works. If you want to speak, you speak. If I want to speak, I speak. If a bunch of people agree with your ideas, you can collect money and run an ad too. If nobody agrees with your position or the ad you want to run, maybe you should rethink your position.
The news is biased, solution: unlimited political advertisements, which are surely non-partisan in nature. Surely you jest. Your solution for somewhat biased news, is purely %100 subjective information presented for the sole reason of supporting a certain canidate available only to those with enough money, who generally want to use this to support canidates to further remove the people who aren't making as much's ability to buy canidates of their own by removing more of their money.
I hope Republicans enact school choice legislation in your area soon so you won't be doomed to a life of people thinking you're dumb because you can't put a sentence together.
If I understand what you mean correctly, you're saying that in the post-Citizens United world, only billionaire Republicans are able to start PACs and run ads. This is incredibly dishonest.Plenty of liberal billionaires are out there supporting liberal candidates and liberal causes, notably Mike Bloomberg and his anti-gun group, Tom Steyer and his anti-fracking group, and George Soros and his laundry list of liberal groups. The difference between what liberal groups spend and what conservative groups spend is ultimately a rounding error. Both sides are ultimately funding their own infrastructures to convince people that their ideas are correct. Lessig's group is trying to take that ability away from one side.
May first is a socialist holiday true...
My thesis is that Lessig's candidates lost in part because the freedom of speech restrictions he wants to enact are unpopular with voters. Another thing that's currently extremely unpopular with voters is Communism. All I said was that part of the reason for Lessig's failure is that he named it after a Communist holiday. That's true regardless of how much you think people should celebrate an incident where anarchists killed a bunch of people at a "peaceful protest."
For example, Chris Dodd's donations to the Obama campaign to pass more copyright laws may not have made the voters change their mind, but it might have convinced Obama that he needs to push for legislation in the MPAA's favor.
If the later scenario is the case, then Lessig is really doing it wrong.
And now, just to bring it full circle, remember that Lessig's PAC itself doesn't exist to convince people to support campaign finance restrictions. It exists to convince legislators to enact restrictions Lessig supports.
No, the restrictions on who can run campaign advertisements are the free speech restrictions that cause people to oppose Lessig's group (and other groups, like Wolf PAC, which have the same goals.)
You talk about free speech and yet you seem to ignore the history that brought us the previous limits on such "speech."
The history of previous limits on limits on speech? In this country, I believe it started with the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams. It was illegal to criticize the draft during Wold War I. The so-called Fairness Doctrine. Exploiting tax records to intimidate opponents in California, Wisconsin and Houston.
The history of limiting free speech in this country is a series of regrettable mistakes. I'd prefer not to continue the trend.
The numbers are very clear.
House and Senate Republicans got significantly less from small donors this mid-term cycle.
House Democrats got less from small donors and (seemingly a lot) less from large donors.
Senate Democrats got a lot more from small donors.
You can't draw any clear line between these numbers and what voters think of MAYDAY PAC, but it does seem to show that small donors (aka the average voter) were significantly less interested in supporting the winners this election cycle.
I didn't check the accuracy of the numbers in terms of whether the Center for Responsive Politics' numbers are true, but they don't mean what you say they do. The numbers you are quoting are for individual donors. To my knowledge, Lessig's group isn't concerned with individual donors. He's only concerned with Political Action Committees, or PACs.
In terms of the impact of PACs vs. individuals, your source, the CRP, says
Of the money raised by Senate and House campaigns, CRP’s analysis shows, the bulk still came from individual donors (as opposed to PACs)
The CRP is a lefty anti-"bad" money in politics group. They're against PACs too. If they had a way to make the data seem like PACs were worse, they would have said so, but their data doesn't support that, and so they don't make the claim.
You and Lessig are making two different points. Because you're using $200 as the dividing line between big money and small money, and you're against big money, it seems like you want to ban political donations of greater than $200 from individuals. Lessig's dividing line is "If the money came from a PAC, it's big money," so he wants to ban PACs.
Personally, I'm in the camp that lets groups of people buy advertising space to say whatever they want about political candidates. I'm pro-free speech. The cure to bad speech is MORE speech.
Is there some non-campaign finance related restrictions on speech that they're endorsing?
If so, I'm not aware of it and I'd like to know more.
No, the restrictions on who can run campaign advertisements are the free speech restrictions that cause people to oppose Lessig's group (and other groups, like Wolf PAC, which have the same goals.)
Think about it like this. Think about the percentage of "straight news" stories that are in fact supporting one candidate or opposing the other. Most of them, right?
That's the media. Those stories don't get covered by Lessig's restrictions, but ads in favor of the guy the media opposes are restricted. That's the big problem with Mayday style free speech restrictions. It lets some people and some corporations (media corporations and the people who run them) are allowed to say, print, or broadcast whatever they want to affect the election, but everyone else will get penalized by the government for trying to affect the election.
Lessig's big bet is that the media will agree with him and support his guys more often. That's the problem with Mayday.
So you know, conservatives call the Republican party "the stupid party" and the Democrats "the evil party." I've never heard those labels reversed before, but I suppose I don't hang around the kind of people that think the Democrats aren't going far enough to push this country to the left. I suppose it's comforting that people who think the opposite of me politically use the same imagery to discuss the same perceived problems in their party.
Tom Steyer gave a whole ton of money to get politicians to give speeches in support of his cause. (And they did it on the floor of the Senate in lieu of, you know, running the country. Talk about gridlock.) If you're against money in politics, regardless of who the money is going to, like Lessig claims to be, you should be against Steyer.
No, Citizens United was a front group. It used the whole group of citizens argument as an excuse to push their agenda through, which was to open the door for unfettered corporate spending.
I have yet to see any credible evidence that citizens were ever denied participation in the political process.
Citizens United is a group of citizens. It's a small one. It may not be as large as you'd like, but it IS a group of citizens who spent their money in concert with each other.
My examples of a "a horrible one party dictatorship" were Iran and the USSR, by the way. I'm not accusing Lessig or Democrats or whoever of trying to deny people participation in the political process.
What 2014 shows most clearly is the power of partisanship in our elections. Whatever else voters wanted, they wanted first their team to win.
Maybe they showed that. Or maybe they showed that the voters don't want to put Lawrence Lessig in charge of determining who gets free speech and who does not. Maybe the voters think that individuals shouldn't lose their right to express their support for a candidate financially just because they're acting in a group. Maybe the voters think that the voters should be exposed to more information on a candidate than just what the news shows them, because the news goes out of its way to favor certain candidates and certain policies. Maybe the voters think that campaign finance laws invariably turn into incumbent protection schemes, and they think there's a lot of crappy incumbents. In short, maybe the voters rejected Lessig's idea because they think it's a bad idea.
Also, this was a wave election for Republicans. I wouldn't expect anyone using Communist imagery (and who launched on a Communist holiday*) to do well in this environment.
*If a leftist wants to convince me that his organization, which is named after a website URL and so can't contain a space, should be interpreted as "Mayday" rather than "May Day," there are 364 better days to launch the organization on than May 1st. You'll note Wolf PAC doesn't have this problem.
If Citizens United sought to disenfranchise voters as much as possible from the election process...
Citizens United is a group (of citizens, who are also presumably voters) that runs ads to convince voters to vote for candidates that support specific policies. Citizens United is effective because people have the franchise.
If we lived in a horrible dictatorship where there was one party rule, and being a member of the other party was a crime (think North Korea or the old Soviet Union or something), running ads saying "Vote against the guy in power" wouldn't work.
As a rule, U.S. conservatives have been against birth control. The recent turn appears to be motivated by preventing them from having to pay for it, and decreasing access (by making it more expensive for the consumer)
Nice talking point, but it's inaccurate. There's a huge difference between being against people using birth control and being against paying for someone else's birth control.
The Pill costs about $8 for a month's supply without a prescription, and it isn't free with the copay required with insurance. Making it OTC would lower the cost from $8/month. Also, making it OTC removes the cost of a doctor's visit as well as the opportunity cost of missing a day of work. (Liberals are against removing the doctor's visit because a large number of poor women get their prescription through Planned Parenthood, which is one of the larger donors to the Democratic party.) Taking something that costs less than $10 per month and removing an upfront cost is NOT "reducing access" in any meaningful way.
Face it. Any adult in this country who wants to be taking the pill already has access to it. All you're doing is scaremongering, and luckily people have wised up to your ruse. Look at Mark Udall's campaign to see how well this War on Women nonsense is working for your guys,
I don't think anyone would argue against their right to say it - making it not a first amendment issue...
Let me educate you. The First Amendment recognizes six rights. The Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." These two prohibitions (which are commonly summarized as "freedom of religion") are just as much a part of the First Amendment as freedom of speech is.
what's being argued is that they may not have the right to continue to claim the right to avoid both taxes and financial disclosure while at the same time saying what they're saying
The Establishment Clause of the Constitution (the first of those recognized rights) means that the Government (through incorporation, the First Amendment applies to states and municipalities as well as the Federal Government) isn't allowed to have one set of tax laws for religions whose leaders support the mayor and a second set for religions whose leaders oppose the mayor.
Also, that isn't even what's being argued. The definition of tax exempt organization is a federal decision and this is a municipal matter. Religious leaders circulated a petition to have a question placed on the ballot to repeal a law that they opposed, but they mayor supported. The municipal government claims that some of the signatures on the petition are improper and so are refusing to place the question on the ballot. Supporters of the initiative are suing to have the signatures ruled valid and the question ordered onto the ballot. Since the city is being sued, it gets to request RELEVANT documents from the plaintiffs (this is called "discovery.") The mayor's office filed papers claiming that the sermons were relevant. When the subpoenas were revealed to the media, there was a shitstorm, leading the mayor's office to claim that the subpoenas were pro forma and ultimately that the sermons were requested by mistake. Nobody really believes them (especially because they are still demanding most of the same information,) but according EVEN TO THE MAYOR OF HOUSTON, the mayor's office shouldn't be requesting this kind of stuff.
The churches in Houston are NOT actually being accused of tax evasion. This is a dopey fishing trip designed to punish the political opponents of an elected Democrat. The sole purpose here is to scare the pastors' allies and the mayor's enemies. Which all plays into my thesis that Democrats are willing to ignore the First Amendment to the Constitution if it prohibits them from a "Big Government" goal, just like they're willing to ignore any other part of the Constitution that gets in their way.
I left out the subpoenas in Houston simply because the list was too long, but yeah, that's another example of the phenomenon. Democrats are remarkably self-consistent on "expanding government" when it comes to First Amendment issues.
Obamacare doesn't mandate that health care plans pay for prescriptions. Prescription medications are subject to the same copay rules as anything else, which still makes some prescription mediation unaffordable for some.
But not birth control. The birth control pill itself costs about $8 per month without insurance paying for it. It would almost definitely come down from there if it doesn't require a prescription.
The biggest part of the cost for birth control pills is the doctor's visit required to get it (and the opportunity cost, i.e. taking off work to see a doctor). You'll note that a charitable reading of Obamacare shows that it does NOTHING to affect this cost. (An uncharitable, or "accurate", reading of the law shows that Obamacare makes this cost worse.) This is the part that some Republicans are trying to eliminate in order to bring costs down.
The first amendment is one notable thing where this doesn't hold true, however. On that, the parties are inconsistent with their systems of thought.
How so? From my perspective, the self-consistent Democrat view towards "fixing things" via the first Amendment would have them doing things like limiting how people can ask for redress of grievances by slow walking tax exemption applications.Or by using a state tax service as a tool to conduct a secret investigation into an opponent's donors, thus making it difficult for the opponent to get donors. Or by hassling Christians whose exercise of religion extends to providing logistical support to weddings. Or by instituting "speech codes" on campus. Or by mandating that every citizen who pays income tax pay for two government news services (one on TV, one on radio) that don't even pretend to give a non-Big Government view.
In many other countries, teens have access to (oral) contraceptives.
Interesting, then, that only Republican candidates are talking about making The Pill available over the counter. Democrats are against the idea because apparently a lot of women go to Planned Parenthood specifically to get prescriptions for The Pill, and Planned Parenthood is a huge Democrat donor.
Further, if the facility exists, anyone can turn the jitter back on. It's no different from what we've been saying about backdoors - once they exist, anyone can use them. There's also risks of social engineering attacks against those running satellites.
Satellites launched since 2000 (roughly half the current constellation) lack the necessary transmitters to rebroadcast the jitter, and currently slated replacement satellites will also lack that transmitter. If the federal government wanted to reintroduce the jitter, they would have to replace most of the constellation. At that point, it's pretty much no longer GPS.
Maybe I wasn't clear there. I meant that most people in the US who are centrists are called socialists or communists because politics in the US have moved so far to the right. They aren't actually socialists, they only seem to be when viewed from the far right. Truly far left politicians are very rare, if not practically non-existent, in the US.
I understood what you said the first time, I just assert your claim is false.
So I repeat myself. Name a far-left politician. They don't have to be from the US. Just give me a name and, ideally, some sort of profile so I can read up on what a real "far leftist" believes that the US variety does not.
AARP members who believe their interests are aligned with the organization: Millions.
Facebook users who give a rats ass about Facebook's corporate opinion: 0
Right, but there probably ARE more Facebook users whose views align with Facebook Corporate than there are AARP members whose views align with AARP corporate.
The GPS specification is public and known 100%. In the early days of the GPS system, there was a random error introduced deliberately that could only be filtered out with a military receiver. The Federal Government stopped including the random error in the early 90s, and made it against the law for them to turn the random error back on in 2000. Modern GPS satellites don't even have the capability of transmitting the error signal.
There's two ways to become an American citizen. Birthright Citizenship, or Naturalization. When you're born here, you get a copy of your birth certificate, and the original is filed with the county in which you were born. That can be used to prove your citizenship. If you weren't born here, and became a citizen later in life, you went through a process controlled by the federal government. The Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service (or INS)) keeps records of who was naturalized.
Also, if you're an American and you wish to renounce your citizenship, you do so through the State Department. This too creates a paper trail.
TLDR: The government has a record of everyone who is a citizen.
This is 100% false. There is nowhere in the United States with an abortion ban. Texas has restrictions on the procedure, and recently changed the inspection practices for abortion clinics to bring them in line with other similar ambulatory surgery centers. That's not the same thing as banning abortion.
Actual centrists (who, around here, are usually called socialists or communists) have very little representation in the federal government.
You have an insane perception of the political scale. I'd love to hear more about it. If socialists and communists, as they exist in the USA, don't constitute the "far left," can you give an example of a far left politician?
Then media consolidation happened, the fairness doctrine was tossed and newsrooms nationwide were expected to turn a profit. It is that, not the audience, that caused the decline of in-depth reporting.
Regardless of the merits of the fairness doctrine, by the mid 80's when it was repealed, it was NOT ensuring a non-biased media.
Well, the side I support stopped putting Shell's logo in their products, so Shell should probably stop paying.
There's a difference between "I support Shell" and "I oppose dopey pressure tactics." Shell's 87 octane gas burns in my car the same as anyone else's 87 octane, and that's pretty much my relationship with Shell. (A pro-Shell zealot would praise the quality of the fuel additives that make Shell gas burn cleaner than Exxon or Texaco or whoever.) However, it is wrong for dopey environmental activists to SCARE CHILDREN in an attempt to keep business partners away from Shell. Slashdot should not be pretending that Greenpeace is in the right here, and neither should you.
Slashdot Mirror
so now, we just have "whoever has enough money to spend" is in charge of determining Free Speech.
That's not how speech works. If you want to speak, you speak. If I want to speak, I speak. If a bunch of people agree with your ideas, you can collect money and run an ad too. If nobody agrees with your position or the ad you want to run, maybe you should rethink your position.
The news is biased, solution: unlimited political advertisements, which are surely non-partisan in nature. Surely you jest. Your solution for somewhat biased news, is purely %100 subjective information presented for the sole reason of supporting a certain canidate available only to those with enough money, who generally want to use this to support canidates to further remove the people who aren't making as much's ability to buy canidates of their own by removing more of their money.
I hope Republicans enact school choice legislation in your area soon so you won't be doomed to a life of people thinking you're dumb because you can't put a sentence together.
If I understand what you mean correctly, you're saying that in the post-Citizens United world, only billionaire Republicans are able to start PACs and run ads. This is incredibly dishonest.Plenty of liberal billionaires are out there supporting liberal candidates and liberal causes, notably Mike Bloomberg and his anti-gun group, Tom Steyer and his anti-fracking group, and George Soros and his laundry list of liberal groups. The difference between what liberal groups spend and what conservative groups spend is ultimately a rounding error. Both sides are ultimately funding their own infrastructures to convince people that their ideas are correct. Lessig's group is trying to take that ability away from one side.
May first is a socialist holiday true...
My thesis is that Lessig's candidates lost in part because the freedom of speech restrictions he wants to enact are unpopular with voters. Another thing that's currently extremely unpopular with voters is Communism. All I said was that part of the reason for Lessig's failure is that he named it after a Communist holiday. That's true regardless of how much you think people should celebrate an incident where anarchists killed a bunch of people at a "peaceful protest."
For example, Chris Dodd's donations to the Obama campaign to pass more copyright laws may not have made the voters change their mind, but it might have convinced Obama that he needs to push for legislation in the MPAA's favor.
If the later scenario is the case, then Lessig is really doing it wrong.
And now, just to bring it full circle, remember that Lessig's PAC itself doesn't exist to convince people to support campaign finance restrictions. It exists to convince legislators to enact restrictions Lessig supports.
No, the restrictions on who can run campaign advertisements are the free speech restrictions that cause people to oppose Lessig's group (and other groups, like Wolf PAC, which have the same goals.)
You talk about free speech and yet you seem to ignore the history that brought us the previous limits on such "speech."
The history of previous limits on limits on speech? In this country, I believe it started with the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams. It was illegal to criticize the draft during Wold War I. The so-called Fairness Doctrine. Exploiting tax records to intimidate opponents in California, Wisconsin and Houston.
The history of limiting free speech in this country is a series of regrettable mistakes. I'd prefer not to continue the trend.
The numbers are very clear. House and Senate Republicans got significantly less from small donors this mid-term cycle. House Democrats got less from small donors and (seemingly a lot) less from large donors. Senate Democrats got a lot more from small donors.
You can't draw any clear line between these numbers and what voters think of MAYDAY PAC, but it does seem to show that small donors (aka the average voter) were significantly less interested in supporting the winners this election cycle.
I didn't check the accuracy of the numbers in terms of whether the Center for Responsive Politics' numbers are true, but they don't mean what you say they do. The numbers you are quoting are for individual donors. To my knowledge, Lessig's group isn't concerned with individual donors. He's only concerned with Political Action Committees, or PACs.
In terms of the impact of PACs vs. individuals, your source, the CRP, says
Of the money raised by Senate and House campaigns, CRP’s analysis shows, the bulk still came from individual donors (as opposed to PACs)
The CRP is a lefty anti-"bad" money in politics group. They're against PACs too. If they had a way to make the data seem like PACs were worse, they would have said so, but their data doesn't support that, and so they don't make the claim.
You and Lessig are making two different points. Because you're using $200 as the dividing line between big money and small money, and you're against big money, it seems like you want to ban political donations of greater than $200 from individuals. Lessig's dividing line is "If the money came from a PAC, it's big money," so he wants to ban PACs.
Personally, I'm in the camp that lets groups of people buy advertising space to say whatever they want about political candidates. I'm pro-free speech. The cure to bad speech is MORE speech.
Is there some non-campaign finance related restrictions on speech that they're endorsing? If so, I'm not aware of it and I'd like to know more.
No, the restrictions on who can run campaign advertisements are the free speech restrictions that cause people to oppose Lessig's group (and other groups, like Wolf PAC, which have the same goals.)
Think about it like this. Think about the percentage of "straight news" stories that are in fact supporting one candidate or opposing the other. Most of them, right?
That's the media. Those stories don't get covered by Lessig's restrictions, but ads in favor of the guy the media opposes are restricted. That's the big problem with Mayday style free speech restrictions. It lets some people and some corporations (media corporations and the people who run them) are allowed to say, print, or broadcast whatever they want to affect the election, but everyone else will get penalized by the government for trying to affect the election.
Lessig's big bet is that the media will agree with him and support his guys more often. That's the problem with Mayday.
I mean the two that Lessig's camp won...how easy would it be to argue that Lessig's camp CAUSED them to win?
I thought they were pretty safe incumbents, so I don't think Lessig mattered much there.
Tom Steyer gave a whole ton of money to get politicians to give speeches in support of his cause. (And they did it on the floor of the Senate in lieu of, you know, running the country. Talk about gridlock.) If you're against money in politics, regardless of who the money is going to, like Lessig claims to be, you should be against Steyer.
No, Citizens United was a front group. It used the whole group of citizens argument as an excuse to push their agenda through, which was to open the door for unfettered corporate spending.
I have yet to see any credible evidence that citizens were ever denied participation in the political process.
Citizens United is a group of citizens. It's a small one. It may not be as large as you'd like, but it IS a group of citizens who spent their money in concert with each other.
My examples of a "a horrible one party dictatorship" were Iran and the USSR, by the way. I'm not accusing Lessig or Democrats or whoever of trying to deny people participation in the political process.
What 2014 shows most clearly is the power of partisanship in our elections. Whatever else voters wanted, they wanted first their team to win.
Maybe they showed that. Or maybe they showed that the voters don't want to put Lawrence Lessig in charge of determining who gets free speech and who does not. Maybe the voters think that individuals shouldn't lose their right to express their support for a candidate financially just because they're acting in a group. Maybe the voters think that the voters should be exposed to more information on a candidate than just what the news shows them, because the news goes out of its way to favor certain candidates and certain policies. Maybe the voters think that campaign finance laws invariably turn into incumbent protection schemes, and they think there's a lot of crappy incumbents. In short, maybe the voters rejected Lessig's idea because they think it's a bad idea.
Also, this was a wave election for Republicans. I wouldn't expect anyone using Communist imagery (and who launched on a Communist holiday*) to do well in this environment.
*If a leftist wants to convince me that his organization, which is named after a website URL and so can't contain a space, should be interpreted as "Mayday" rather than "May Day," there are 364 better days to launch the organization on than May 1st. You'll note Wolf PAC doesn't have this problem.
If Citizens United sought to disenfranchise voters as much as possible from the election process...
Citizens United is a group (of citizens, who are also presumably voters) that runs ads to convince voters to vote for candidates that support specific policies. Citizens United is effective because people have the franchise.
If we lived in a horrible dictatorship where there was one party rule, and being a member of the other party was a crime (think North Korea or the old Soviet Union or something), running ads saying "Vote against the guy in power" wouldn't work.
As a rule, U.S. conservatives have been against birth control. The recent turn appears to be motivated by preventing them from having to pay for it, and decreasing access (by making it more expensive for the consumer)
Nice talking point, but it's inaccurate. There's a huge difference between being against people using birth control and being against paying for someone else's birth control.
The Pill costs about $8 for a month's supply without a prescription, and it isn't free with the copay required with insurance. Making it OTC would lower the cost from $8/month. Also, making it OTC removes the cost of a doctor's visit as well as the opportunity cost of missing a day of work. (Liberals are against removing the doctor's visit because a large number of poor women get their prescription through Planned Parenthood, which is one of the larger donors to the Democratic party.) Taking something that costs less than $10 per month and removing an upfront cost is NOT "reducing access" in any meaningful way.
Face it. Any adult in this country who wants to be taking the pill already has access to it. All you're doing is scaremongering, and luckily people have wised up to your ruse. Look at Mark Udall's campaign to see how well this War on Women nonsense is working for your guys,
I don't think anyone would argue against their right to say it - making it not a first amendment issue...
Let me educate you. The First Amendment recognizes six rights. The Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." These two prohibitions (which are commonly summarized as "freedom of religion") are just as much a part of the First Amendment as freedom of speech is.
what's being argued is that they may not have the right to continue to claim the right to avoid both taxes and financial disclosure while at the same time saying what they're saying
The Establishment Clause of the Constitution (the first of those recognized rights) means that the Government (through incorporation, the First Amendment applies to states and municipalities as well as the Federal Government) isn't allowed to have one set of tax laws for religions whose leaders support the mayor and a second set for religions whose leaders oppose the mayor.
Also, that isn't even what's being argued. The definition of tax exempt organization is a federal decision and this is a municipal matter. Religious leaders circulated a petition to have a question placed on the ballot to repeal a law that they opposed, but they mayor supported. The municipal government claims that some of the signatures on the petition are improper and so are refusing to place the question on the ballot. Supporters of the initiative are suing to have the signatures ruled valid and the question ordered onto the ballot. Since the city is being sued, it gets to request RELEVANT documents from the plaintiffs (this is called "discovery.") The mayor's office filed papers claiming that the sermons were relevant. When the subpoenas were revealed to the media, there was a shitstorm, leading the mayor's office to claim that the subpoenas were pro forma and ultimately that the sermons were requested by mistake. Nobody really believes them (especially because they are still demanding most of the same information,) but according EVEN TO THE MAYOR OF HOUSTON, the mayor's office shouldn't be requesting this kind of stuff.
The churches in Houston are NOT actually being accused of tax evasion. This is a dopey fishing trip designed to punish the political opponents of an elected Democrat. The sole purpose here is to scare the pastors' allies and the mayor's enemies. Which all plays into my thesis that Democrats are willing to ignore the First Amendment to the Constitution if it prohibits them from a "Big Government" goal, just like they're willing to ignore any other part of the Constitution that gets in their way.
I left out the subpoenas in Houston simply because the list was too long, but yeah, that's another example of the phenomenon. Democrats are remarkably self-consistent on "expanding government" when it comes to First Amendment issues.
But not birth control. The birth control pill itself costs about $8 per month without insurance paying for it. It would almost definitely come down from there if it doesn't require a prescription.
The biggest part of the cost for birth control pills is the doctor's visit required to get it (and the opportunity cost, i.e. taking off work to see a doctor). You'll note that a charitable reading of Obamacare shows that it does NOTHING to affect this cost. (An uncharitable, or "accurate", reading of the law shows that Obamacare makes this cost worse.) This is the part that some Republicans are trying to eliminate in order to bring costs down.
The first amendment is one notable thing where this doesn't hold true, however. On that, the parties are inconsistent with their systems of thought.
How so? From my perspective, the self-consistent Democrat view towards "fixing things" via the first Amendment would have them doing things like limiting how people can ask for redress of grievances by slow walking tax exemption applications.Or by using a state tax service as a tool to conduct a secret investigation into an opponent's donors, thus making it difficult for the opponent to get donors. Or by hassling Christians whose exercise of religion extends to providing logistical support to weddings. Or by instituting "speech codes" on campus. Or by mandating that every citizen who pays income tax pay for two government news services (one on TV, one on radio) that don't even pretend to give a non-Big Government view.
In many other countries, teens have access to (oral) contraceptives.
Interesting, then, that only Republican candidates are talking about making The Pill available over the counter. Democrats are against the idea because apparently a lot of women go to Planned Parenthood specifically to get prescriptions for The Pill, and Planned Parenthood is a huge Democrat donor.
Further, if the facility exists, anyone can turn the jitter back on. It's no different from what we've been saying about backdoors - once they exist, anyone can use them. There's also risks of social engineering attacks against those running satellites.
Satellites launched since 2000 (roughly half the current constellation) lack the necessary transmitters to rebroadcast the jitter, and currently slated replacement satellites will also lack that transmitter. If the federal government wanted to reintroduce the jitter, they would have to replace most of the constellation. At that point, it's pretty much no longer GPS.
Maybe I wasn't clear there. I meant that most people in the US who are centrists are called socialists or communists because politics in the US have moved so far to the right. They aren't actually socialists, they only seem to be when viewed from the far right. Truly far left politicians are very rare, if not practically non-existent, in the US.
I understood what you said the first time, I just assert your claim is false.
So I repeat myself. Name a far-left politician. They don't have to be from the US. Just give me a name and, ideally, some sort of profile so I can read up on what a real "far leftist" believes that the US variety does not.
AARP membership: 37M. Facebook U.S. users: 150M.
AARP members who believe their interests are aligned with the organization: Millions. Facebook users who give a rats ass about Facebook's corporate opinion: 0
Right, but there probably ARE more Facebook users whose views align with Facebook Corporate than there are AARP members whose views align with AARP corporate.
The GPS specification is public and known 100%. In the early days of the GPS system, there was a random error introduced deliberately that could only be filtered out with a military receiver. The Federal Government stopped including the random error in the early 90s, and made it against the law for them to turn the random error back on in 2000. Modern GPS satellites don't even have the capability of transmitting the error signal.
Also, if you're an American and you wish to renounce your citizenship, you do so through the State Department. This too creates a paper trail.
TLDR: The government has a record of everyone who is a citizen.
Texas executes hundreds,but bans abortion.
This is 100% false. There is nowhere in the United States with an abortion ban. Texas has restrictions on the procedure, and recently changed the inspection practices for abortion clinics to bring them in line with other similar ambulatory surgery centers. That's not the same thing as banning abortion.
Actual centrists (who, around here, are usually called socialists or communists) have very little representation in the federal government.
You have an insane perception of the political scale. I'd love to hear more about it. If socialists and communists, as they exist in the USA, don't constitute the "far left," can you give an example of a far left politician?
Then media consolidation happened, the fairness doctrine was tossed and newsrooms nationwide were expected to turn a profit. It is that, not the audience, that caused the decline of in-depth reporting.
Regardless of the merits of the fairness doctrine, by the mid 80's when it was repealed, it was NOT ensuring a non-biased media.
There's a difference between "I support Shell" and "I oppose dopey pressure tactics." Shell's 87 octane gas burns in my car the same as anyone else's 87 octane, and that's pretty much my relationship with Shell. (A pro-Shell zealot would praise the quality of the fuel additives that make Shell gas burn cleaner than Exxon or Texaco or whoever.) However, it is wrong for dopey environmental activists to SCARE CHILDREN in an attempt to keep business partners away from Shell. Slashdot should not be pretending that Greenpeace is in the right here, and neither should you.