No, what I said was factually correct. According to the PDF from the CDC's website that was linked earlier in the thread,
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States.
.
The CDC exists to study health concerns. Because guns are not a health concern, guns are out of their scope.
The domain of the CDC explicitly, by law excludes guns. There are people, including you, who wish otherwise. And if you want to campaign to change that law, you can do that. But the reason the law was changed to take this away from the CDC was because of an attempt to have the CDC produce politicized results for a crusade.
It's also dishonest for people like John Oliver (who was the example cited earlier in this thread, although he's not alone) to claim that the CDC isn't allowed to collect gun crime statistics and imply that the rest of the government isn''t allowed to do so either. The FBI has the statistics that Oliver, et al, are looking for. However, in addition to those, they have other statistics that undermine Oliver's point, which is why he wants the politicized stats from the CDC.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are two different rights. (They are both among the six rights that the Federal Government is obliged to respect by the First Amendment.) "Congress shall make no law... abridging" either of them, but they are two separate rights.
So what is your cut off for number of deaths before something is worthy of the CDC looking into it?
The cutoff isn't "number of deaths." The cutoff is "is this actually a disease?" Since owning a gun ISN'T a disease, it's outside the CDC's purview.
If the problem is guns, and the only solution is banning law abiding people from owning guns, you're the problem. You don't get to use the machinery of the federal government for your political crusade.
On the other hand, if the problem you want to solve is reducing gun crimes that's different. Law enforcement sources, notably the FBI, track gun crimes at the national level. The "problem" with the FBI statistics is that they differentiate between "self defense" and "crime," rather than "It's all gun violence." (Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun grabber group, includes one of the Boston Marathon Bombers as a "victim of gun violence.") The other problem that the FBI statistics have is that they contextualize the information: The FBI statistics make it clear that there's much more "violence" than "gun violence" and that long guns (including the AR15) are a tiny percentage of the weapons used to commit crimes.
So there ARE statistics. It's kind of curious why people want it assigned to a different government agency than the one currently doing it.
New START is a failure. Israel and Hamas remain at war. The shitty places in the world continue to oppress women and minorities despite Clinton's speeches. All you havesis "Madeleine Albright, who got a job from Hillary Clinton's husband, says Hillary Clinton improved the US's reputation in some nebulous manner."
A successful foreign policy means that your allies can trust you, you enemies have to fear you, and everyone wants to trade with you. The Obama foreign policy is a failure, and it's one for which Hillary Clinton is partially responsible for.
she has served as a Senator and served in Cabinet. That seems a perfectly applicable set of qualifications to me.
Yes, she held those jobs. But she was shitty at both of them. In the real world, just holding a job isn't enough to merit a promotion. You have to be good at it.
If one uses your versions of things, then a legitimate victim can't get restitution unless they have a billionaire backing them?
I'm not sure why you think that Hogan isn't a legitimate victim. But setting that aside, in your version of things, legitimate victims can't get restitution at all, even if they have a billionaire backing them. That's even less just.
Justice may be blind, but she sure is greedy. Not that I'm a huge gawker fan, but clearly having a billion dollars lets you have your way in the courts. Had they posted a sex tape of some average Joe and/or not somehow pissed off Thiel, Mr. Average Joe would just have to live with it because he wouldn't have the money to fight it in court.
I don't think you understand the argument you think you're making.
Thiel thinks Gawker is a horrible and scummy organization because they invaded his privacy. (Thiel is gay, and Gawker outed him.) So Thiel is paying the legal bills for several plantiffs (most prominently Hogan) who are suing Gawker because Gawker also invaded their privacy. If Thiel destroys Gawker, they won't be able to violate anyone's privacy, whether they're rich like Thiel or poor like "Mr. Average Joe" or some of the plaintiffs Thiel is funding.
The argument I think you're trying to make is that Gawker's conduct should be protected by the First Amendment, and because Hogan's lawyers were being paid by a rich guy (Thiel), Hogan won anyway. The thinking here would be that any chip in the First Amendment weakens it, so the courts can't punish Gawker for posting an illicitly recorded sex tape that doesn't have news value.
But the way you said it the first time makes it sound like you think the problem is Thiel is treating Gawker's victims unfairly by picking and choosing which ones to bankroll. Rather than, you know, Gawker treating its victims unfairly by posting illicitly recorded sex tapes of them.
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
First off, the original article was a stupid thing to post on Slashdot because it was clearly biased. You could tell because of the article's use of loaded language. (If you want to use unbiased language, the phrases that everyone seems to agree on are "pro-life" and "pro-choice.") Most of Slashdot would be opposed to geo-gating ads from Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers as well, because one of the things Slashdot discusses is geo-gating ads. The site the article came from opposes everything Crisis Pregnancy Centers do.
Secondly, if you're a zealot and demand to use the term "anti-choice," in order to be accurate, you have to use it to describe people who are actually restricting other people's choices. CPCs DON'T ACTUALLY DO THAT. Abortion providers provide one choice, and CPCs provide the other. It could be accurate to describe some pro-life protesters (who are campaigning to ban abortion) as "anti-choice" (although you're still a dope using loaded language), but the phrase is 100% inaccurate when applied to CPCs.
Finally, plenty of deception and emotional manipulation goes on at Planned Parenthood too.
One of the big things Obamacare did was expand medicaid so those people that qualified actually received healthcare.
This is the opposite of true. Medicaid is, and always has been, government-paid healthcare for poor people. The "Medicaid Expansion" in Obamacare refers to a redefinition of the word "poor." Since Obamacare was enacted, people with more money than the pre-obamacare limit qualify for Medicaid. This cohort is by far the largest group of "newly-ensured" people helped by Obamacare.
An issue that Medicaid has always had are its price controls. Like all large healthcare providers, Medicaid pays all the doctors that provide a specific service the same amount. However, Medicaid payment rates are much lower than those of private insurers, so many doctors refuse to take Medicaid patients. Obamacare didn't create this problem. But by increasing the number of people with Medicaid (some of whom had private insurance before) Obamacare has made this problem slightly worse. When people say that Obamacare made it harder for Medicaid patients to find doctors, that's what they're referring to.
Everyone's beef was using the individual mandate to make it happen (ask congress for $100B to give more poor people insurance? yeah that would have worked out so much better).
This is also false. At the time Obamacare was proposed, the competing Republican plan was to do a Medicaid expansion (similar to what the Obamacare expansion ended up being) but to leave private insurance alone. There wouldn't have been the exchanges, the mandatory coverage standards at the federal level, or any of those parts. The Democrats shot down just a Medicaid expansion so they could run on "Republicans hate poor people."
"anti-choice" is an insane way to describe anti-abortion activists. (It's also inaccurate in this story. The ads were sold to Crisis Pregnancy Centers, which help women in need have their baby.)
That said, "anti-choice" only appears in a direct quote from the ridiculous article. VoiceOfDoom uses the phrase "anti-abortion."
You're a fundamentally stupid person. The conservative position is that privately funded news outlets are ALLOWED to be biased, but it's OK for people to point out that a specific source is biased, and so everyone should take that source with a grain of salt.
Facebook is saying, in essence, "We used to be biased, but we made changes and so should be taken with fewer grains of salt.
The difference: Congressional Republicans demanded that Nixon resign. They voted, along with Congressional Democrats, in favor of articles of impeachment. Had Nixon not resigned, he would have been impeached and convicted with support from Democrats and Republicans.
There wasn't any of the wagon-circling you saw with Clinton or Obama's DOJ, IRS, or EPA chiefs.
Because Republicans hate us and want us to die... or something.
The author of that article is a fundamentally stupid person. The court needs the names so it can revoke the permits that the Federal government would have been enjoined from granting if they had acted ethnically.
OBVIOUSLY, the DOJ isn't trusted to actually revoke the permits.
The list is also being submitted under seal, which means that, contrary to the DailyKos's fear mongering, it isn't being distributed outside the court.
The bakers opposed to gay marriage refuse to sell cakes for purposes of a gay marriage. If a straight intermediary was buying the cake for a gay couple, the baker would still object. Conversely, they'd be cool with a gay intermediary buying a cake for a straight couple.
The purpose, and not the person, is what these people are objecting to.
He can run that trending thing however the fucking company wants under current law.
You're correct on this point, although the rest of post is bullshit.
Statistically speaking, all conservatives realize that CBS, NBC, and ABC are biased against conservatives and Republicans at least 90% of the time. Also statistically speaking, no conservative wants some kind of government mandate for them to cut it out. They're private businesses and can do what they want. (PBS and NPR are different because they're taxpayer funded.)
Facebook is also a private business and also shouldn't be mandated by the government to change how Trending Topics work. The reason the story is important is because people need to know that Trending Topics are full of shit in the same way the network news is.
Regardless of what some dickhead wrote on Wikipedia, that's not what happened. Existing tax exempt liberal groups were investigated for violations of law, and either cleared or charged at the end of the investigation. Newly-formed conservative groups were subjected to "investigation" which were designed to be onerous and unending, thus preventing them from getting tax exemption in the first place. The conservative groups were "suspected of" being prone to violate laws WHICH HAD ALREADY BEEN STRUCK DOWN AS UNCONSTITUTIONAL and thus were no longer in force.
Lumping the two together is a red herring used by the IRS and its liberal defenders to cover up the fact that the Obama Administration used the machinery of government to harass their political opponents.
I've heard that suicide is illegal in some places but I've never understood how it would be penalized.
It's not difficult. If the cops get a tip that you're going to murder Mr. X at 5:00 when he leaves his office, they can show up to his office at 4:45 and arrest you when you show up with a gun. Right?
With law enforcement intervention in suicide, it's the same thing, except you are Mr. X.
As far as the "penalty" for attempted suicide, the idea is that they get you into a mental hospital so you can get treatment for your suicidal tendencies. They can't commit you to a mental hospital involuntarily unless you committed a crime, thus, suicide is illegal.
You do realize that making tax avoidance illegal is really quite simple.
Tax avoidance tautologically can't be made illegal because tax avoidance simply means "using legal means to minimize a tax bill." Once you start concealing assets (or lying about their nature to get them taxed at a lower rate), you're committing tax fraud, which is already illegal.
But that reminds me of what was probably the most popular turn-based RPG in history: Pokemon. A little too new for this year's inductees, but it reminds me that a whole new generation came to love a turn-based RPG with basically all-text combat,
The first generation Pokemon games were nominated, but not selected yet, both years they've done this. They'll get there.
What really troubles me is what happens after the election. 40 years of anti-intellectualism and pandering to prejudice and we got a significant part of the country voting for someone who really would not have been good for the country.
Yeah. That's horrible, especially when you combine it with the fact that a second significant group of Americans voted for Donald Trump.
Slashdot Mirror
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and health education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States.
. The CDC exists to study health concerns. Because guns are not a health concern, guns are out of their scope.
The domain of the CDC explicitly, by law excludes guns. There are people, including you, who wish otherwise. And if you want to campaign to change that law, you can do that. But the reason the law was changed to take this away from the CDC was because of an attempt to have the CDC produce politicized results for a crusade.
It's also dishonest for people like John Oliver (who was the example cited earlier in this thread, although he's not alone) to claim that the CDC isn't allowed to collect gun crime statistics and imply that the rest of the government isn''t allowed to do so either. The FBI has the statistics that Oliver, et al, are looking for. However, in addition to those, they have other statistics that undermine Oliver's point, which is why he wants the politicized stats from the CDC.
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are two different rights. (They are both among the six rights that the Federal Government is obliged to respect by the First Amendment.) "Congress shall make no law... abridging" either of them, but they are two separate rights.
So what is your cut off for number of deaths before something is worthy of the CDC looking into it?
The cutoff isn't "number of deaths." The cutoff is "is this actually a disease?" Since owning a gun ISN'T a disease, it's outside the CDC's purview.
If the problem is guns, and the only solution is banning law abiding people from owning guns, you're the problem. You don't get to use the machinery of the federal government for your political crusade.
On the other hand, if the problem you want to solve is reducing gun crimes that's different. Law enforcement sources, notably the FBI, track gun crimes at the national level. The "problem" with the FBI statistics is that they differentiate between "self defense" and "crime," rather than "It's all gun violence." (Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun grabber group, includes one of the Boston Marathon Bombers as a "victim of gun violence.") The other problem that the FBI statistics have is that they contextualize the information: The FBI statistics make it clear that there's much more "violence" than "gun violence" and that long guns (including the AR15) are a tiny percentage of the weapons used to commit crimes.
So there ARE statistics. It's kind of curious why people want it assigned to a different government agency than the one currently doing it.
A successful foreign policy means that your allies can trust you, you enemies have to fear you, and everyone wants to trade with you. The Obama foreign policy is a failure, and it's one for which Hillary Clinton is partially responsible for.
Politifact is well known for using a double standard where they treat you with kid gloves if you have a D after your name.
she has served as a Senator and served in Cabinet. That seems a perfectly applicable set of qualifications to me.
Yes, she held those jobs. But she was shitty at both of them. In the real world, just holding a job isn't enough to merit a promotion. You have to be good at it.
Really adds to the conversation if you ask me.
Yeah yeah. Republicans hate us and want us to die. We know, dude.
If one uses your versions of things, then a legitimate victim can't get restitution unless they have a billionaire backing them?
I'm not sure why you think that Hogan isn't a legitimate victim. But setting that aside, in your version of things, legitimate victims can't get restitution at all, even if they have a billionaire backing them. That's even less just.
[Thiel is] Involved in some of the scummiest sites on the internet like PayPal & Facebook.
Could be worse. He could be involved with Gawker.
The only Gawker affiliates I have personal knowledge of are Deadspin and Kotaku, which are both trash.
Justice may be blind, but she sure is greedy. Not that I'm a huge gawker fan, but clearly having a billion dollars lets you have your way in the courts. Had they posted a sex tape of some average Joe and/or not somehow pissed off Thiel, Mr. Average Joe would just have to live with it because he wouldn't have the money to fight it in court.
I don't think you understand the argument you think you're making.
Thiel thinks Gawker is a horrible and scummy organization because they invaded his privacy. (Thiel is gay, and Gawker outed him.) So Thiel is paying the legal bills for several plantiffs (most prominently Hogan) who are suing Gawker because Gawker also invaded their privacy. If Thiel destroys Gawker, they won't be able to violate anyone's privacy, whether they're rich like Thiel or poor like "Mr. Average Joe" or some of the plaintiffs Thiel is funding.
The argument I think you're trying to make is that Gawker's conduct should be protected by the First Amendment, and because Hogan's lawyers were being paid by a rich guy (Thiel), Hogan won anyway. The thinking here would be that any chip in the First Amendment weakens it, so the courts can't punish Gawker for posting an illicitly recorded sex tape that doesn't have news value.
But the way you said it the first time makes it sound like you think the problem is Thiel is treating Gawker's victims unfairly by picking and choosing which ones to bankroll. Rather than, you know, Gawker treating its victims unfairly by posting illicitly recorded sex tapes of them.
First off, the original article was a stupid thing to post on Slashdot because it was clearly biased. You could tell because of the article's use of loaded language. (If you want to use unbiased language, the phrases that everyone seems to agree on are "pro-life" and "pro-choice.") Most of Slashdot would be opposed to geo-gating ads from Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers as well, because one of the things Slashdot discusses is geo-gating ads. The site the article came from opposes everything Crisis Pregnancy Centers do.
Secondly, if you're a zealot and demand to use the term "anti-choice," in order to be accurate, you have to use it to describe people who are actually restricting other people's choices. CPCs DON'T ACTUALLY DO THAT. Abortion providers provide one choice, and CPCs provide the other. It could be accurate to describe some pro-life protesters (who are campaigning to ban abortion) as "anti-choice" (although you're still a dope using loaded language), but the phrase is 100% inaccurate when applied to CPCs.
Finally, plenty of deception and emotional manipulation goes on at Planned Parenthood too.
One of the big things Obamacare did was expand medicaid so those people that qualified actually received healthcare.
This is the opposite of true. Medicaid is, and always has been, government-paid healthcare for poor people. The "Medicaid Expansion" in Obamacare refers to a redefinition of the word "poor." Since Obamacare was enacted, people with more money than the pre-obamacare limit qualify for Medicaid. This cohort is by far the largest group of "newly-ensured" people helped by Obamacare.
An issue that Medicaid has always had are its price controls. Like all large healthcare providers, Medicaid pays all the doctors that provide a specific service the same amount. However, Medicaid payment rates are much lower than those of private insurers, so many doctors refuse to take Medicaid patients. Obamacare didn't create this problem. But by increasing the number of people with Medicaid (some of whom had private insurance before) Obamacare has made this problem slightly worse. When people say that Obamacare made it harder for Medicaid patients to find doctors, that's what they're referring to.
Everyone's beef was using the individual mandate to make it happen (ask congress for $100B to give more poor people insurance? yeah that would have worked out so much better).
This is also false. At the time Obamacare was proposed, the competing Republican plan was to do a Medicaid expansion (similar to what the Obamacare expansion ended up being) but to leave private insurance alone. There wouldn't have been the exchanges, the mandatory coverage standards at the federal level, or any of those parts. The Democrats shot down just a Medicaid expansion so they could run on "Republicans hate poor people."
That said, "anti-choice" only appears in a direct quote from the ridiculous article. VoiceOfDoom uses the phrase "anti-abortion."
Facebook is saying, in essence, "We used to be biased, but we made changes and so should be taken with fewer grains of salt.
There wasn't any of the wagon-circling you saw with Clinton or Obama's DOJ, IRS, or EPA chiefs.
Because Republicans hate us and want us to die... or something.
OBVIOUSLY, the DOJ isn't trusted to actually revoke the permits.
The list is also being submitted under seal, which means that, contrary to the DailyKos's fear mongering, it isn't being distributed outside the court.
The purpose, and not the person, is what these people are objecting to.
He can run that trending thing however the fucking company wants under current law.
You're correct on this point, although the rest of post is bullshit.
Statistically speaking, all conservatives realize that CBS, NBC, and ABC are biased against conservatives and Republicans at least 90% of the time. Also statistically speaking, no conservative wants some kind of government mandate for them to cut it out. They're private businesses and can do what they want. (PBS and NPR are different because they're taxpayer funded.)
Facebook is also a private business and also shouldn't be mandated by the government to change how Trending Topics work. The reason the story is important is because people need to know that Trending Topics are full of shit in the same way the network news is.
Lumping the two together is a red herring used by the IRS and its liberal defenders to cover up the fact that the Obama Administration used the machinery of government to harass their political opponents.
I've heard that suicide is illegal in some places but I've never understood how it would be penalized.
It's not difficult. If the cops get a tip that you're going to murder Mr. X at 5:00 when he leaves his office, they can show up to his office at 4:45 and arrest you when you show up with a gun. Right?
With law enforcement intervention in suicide, it's the same thing, except you are Mr. X.
As far as the "penalty" for attempted suicide, the idea is that they get you into a mental hospital so you can get treatment for your suicidal tendencies. They can't commit you to a mental hospital involuntarily unless you committed a crime, thus, suicide is illegal.
You do realize that making tax avoidance illegal is really quite simple.
Tax avoidance tautologically can't be made illegal because tax avoidance simply means "using legal means to minimize a tax bill." Once you start concealing assets (or lying about their nature to get them taxed at a lower rate), you're committing tax fraud, which is already illegal.
But that reminds me of what was probably the most popular turn-based RPG in history: Pokemon. A little too new for this year's inductees, but it reminds me that a whole new generation came to love a turn-based RPG with basically all-text combat,
The first generation Pokemon games were nominated, but not selected yet, both years they've done this. They'll get there.
What really troubles me is what happens after the election. 40 years of anti-intellectualism and pandering to prejudice and we got a significant part of the country voting for someone who really would not have been good for the country.
Yeah. That's horrible, especially when you combine it with the fact that a second significant group of Americans voted for Donald Trump.