Look, if you think you can do a better job, use yourself as a write-in candidate. The point here isn't to get someone elected, it's to draw votes away from the idiot who eventually does win.
Or, hell, run yourself. You won't win the primary if you're not a sell-out, but you might draw a few votes away from the people who do win. If the "winner" of the election only gets 39% of the vote, then they won't feel so much like they have a mandate to rule as they would with 59%, and will at least try to placate the masses instead of trying to work on their ideology.
He tried. The Republicans fillabustered the funding needed to close it, just like they fillabustered the public option in the health care plan. The number of times parlimentary tricks like the fillabuster and the secret hold have been used in the past two years are unprecedented, though in fairness it's what we get for electing exactly 60 Democrats and 40 Republicans (and no, Joe Lieberman does not count as an independent, given how he's voted).
Really, given that for the last two years the Republican agenda has been not to do what is best for the country, but to do everything they can to obstruct and oppose the will of the voters, it's amazing that anything got done at all.
This court is most definitely NOT in his pocket. He's been able to nominate two justices, but the replaced justices were leaned heavily to the left (even if one of the two was appointed by a republican president) and their selection did nothing to change the balance which is currently 5-4 in favor of a more conservative viewpoint. Thus the Heller and McDonald decisions affirming the right of the individual to keep and bear arms. A court in Obama's pockets would most certainly not have ruled that way.
Or, for that matter, Citizen's United. Sure, Obama may not have entirely objected to a "documentary" which openly mocked and derided Hilary Clinton, but he certainly wouldn't have approved of a ruling that says large corporations--which heavily favor Republicans--can spend freely and anonymously on electioneering.
For the curious, Article 2, Section 2: "[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur."
Treaties of the United States have to be ratified by the Senate. This is hardly news.
So if only 3 senators are "present", only 2 need to agree?
By Constitution and by traditional Senate rules, the Senate can't pass anything without a quorum (usually a simply majority) of the Senators present. In theory, that means that a treaty could theoretically be passed with only 34 senators approving (51 present * 2/3), but realistically you're not going to find times where 49 Senators are off screwing around when the Senate is in session.
"Tends to." This sort of thing hasn't yet been fully tested in court yet; it may be that Executive Agreements are inferior to federal law, or it may not. I'm unsure if there has been a single test case yet.
China will never invade Taiwan. China has far too much to gain from Taiwan economically. And, not only that, the current administration of Taiwan has gotten quite friendly with China. Many Taiwanese are more pragmatic and value the money they can make in China more highly than national pride.
The only way China would invade Taiwan is if their economy collapsed, or at least they faced a serious economic downturn which is bound to happen. But by then they may be close enough that a military invasion wont be necessary. And anyway, China has bigger fish to fry.
The reason China will eventually invade Taiwan is to distract the populace from its inherently corrupt one-party rule, similar to the way the US invaded Iraq to distract from Bush's falling approval ratings. As the middle class in China grows, there will be more interest in being able to affect changes in government, which the Communist Party will try to divert into nationalistic pride when it invades one or many of its neighbors over some overblown, imagined, or manufactured sleight.
Is this like you go into the grocery store and eat a few twinkies and the manager bum rushes you and makes you pay? Or, is this like picking up a discarded paper on the ferry and the guy at the news stand demanding you pay him for it?
This is like walking past a newsstand, glancing at a headline, then being told you now owe the newsstand $5 or Bubba the Appellate Court Judge is going to garnish your wages.
They're just taking the new rulings that EULAs are enforceable to their logical conclusion: that the creator of a contract can essentially "force" the other side to sign a contract by doing something other than actually signing a contract. They will proceed to do what the new copyright trolls have been doing for the past few months: sue hundreds of thousands of people in a single court on the other side of the country, and mail extortion letters to all of them.
The step after this is for someone to create a page stating, "By reading this, you agree to pay me $100,000," track the IPs, and cut out the symbolic gesture of even trying to make this seem like something other than a court-supported extortion racket.
Did you read the actual argument, or just Fox New's blatant lying about it? The Solicitor General's arguments were, essentially:
1) The claim being made by the appellant is too broad 2) The court is bound by a century of precedent allowing the government to regulate corporations attempting to buy elections 3) The government cannot prevent individuals from campaign spending, as such would violate the First Amendment. "That is not the case with corporate spending, which does not reflect the personal views of the officers (who cannot appropriately spend corporate money for purposes of personal selfexpression), the customers or shareholders (whose political preferences officers do not and generally cannot ascertain), or the corporation itself (which is an artificial entity that has no “beliefs” to express). Thus, while restrictions on the use of treasury funds for electioneering may prevent corporate officers from utilizing one effective means to further the corporations’ economic interests, those restrictions do not hinder the expression of any natural person’s ideas."
1. Donations to campaigns don't actually require the candidate to do anything in return. There is usually the perception that large donations imply some sort of tit-for-tat, but it isn't always the case. In Obama's case, individual donors, that is, those unaffiliated with any major corporation, contributed more to his campaign, both proportionally and in total than to any other national candidate in history, so if politicians truly are bought purely through money, well, guess who owns him?
What you really have to look at is the secret money, the stuff you don't get to see on campaign disclosure forms. Here I'm talking about all these secret super-PACs and lobbyists and such, where the money and who's donating it tends to get obfuscated by the system. That's where the influence peddling goes on; the stuff made in the public eye is usually for advertisement purposes ("Hey, look at me! I'm supporting Candidate X! Aren't I a good little corporate citizen?").
2. There definitely are differences between Democrats and Republicans. The problem is that Democrats aren't really liberals, and the Republicans aren't really conservatives. sure, they each pretend to lean left or right, to get their respective bases to pay attention, but in reality the Republicans work for the rich, who funnel massive amounts of secret money into their campaigns and bank accounts, and Democrats work for the unions and lawyers, because they're stupid and don't realize that the unions have had all their money taken away over the last thirty years and the lawyers are becoming rich, and therefore turning to the Republicans because the Republicans are pro-rich and anti-everyone else.
I don't know why everyone had a problem with the tunnel, unless you were aiming for the warp point near the end. The snakes are tough, but doable. I could never get past the tower; that boss was EVIL.
I remember another article where the authors defined the term "Nintendo Hard". The thing is, back in the 80s you had to cram all your game data on little tiny ROM cartridges. There was no room for immersive storylines, autosave points, internet multiplayer, and all these other things we have today; the only way you could give your games replay value was to make them so f-ing hard that you never finish in the first place.
Have you ever seen someone high on pot drive? they are worse than drunks. A drunk serves because he doesn't have fine control of his body, someone on pot serves cause that's a pretty shade of yellow in the other lane.
So then you do the smart thing and make driving under the influence illegal... oh wait it already is, and under a separate part of the law that isn't affected by legalizing pot! Next issue please.
Given that you have to give either a social security number or a driver's license number, I don't see the problem. A fake ID is easier to make than an entry in the state's DMV system, or in the SSA.
You can register without an ID for the same reason that we don't have a national ID card: people are understandably nervous about being "forced" to show their papers wherever they go. That's not the kind of thing you encourage in a free society.
I don't know about Iowa, but in California you can only cast a provisional ballot; your vote doesn't get counted until your registration checks out (which usually means the electin is decided before they get around to counting your vote.)
If the government 'controlled' the growth of cannabis, how come there hasn't been a reduction in availability?
Right, because the government is too incompetent to even get rid of fucking kudzu.
Hey, they've done a great job making it more expensive: as an illegal drug its street value is roughly five times what it would be if it were legalized. Gotta keep those cartels in business; without marijuana their annual profit would be about 20-25% lower than it is.
Support Mexican Cartel violence! Keep Marijuana Illegal! (Paid for by police chiefs far away from the border)
Random chance. Essentially, you start by having everyone in America take a test, to see if they're breathing and graduated high school and the like, then you choose say seven people at random and they get to be President for the next four years.
The problem is that there aren't any other rare earth mines around, and they take a while to dig and bring online--ten years, from what I've read.
Consider having to go without new hard drives for ten years, and you know why people are suddenly becoming nervous about China suddenly deciding to embargo Japan.
Drugs lead to increased rates of other crimes. Heavy trucks just raise taxes (via deteriorating roads).
Sounds to me like the police are putting money into protecting people, rather than just imposing fines on otherwise-harmless businesses.
Illegal drugs lead to increased rates of other crimes. This is why Prohibition was such a disaster: by making alcohol an illegal drug, the US gave rise to crime families making hundreds of millions of dollars in supply, committing crimes to do so, and getting people used to violating the law for fun and profit, and in some cases, survival (a convicted criminal, even for something as stupid as a drug charge, is forever barred from the world of work, save for menial labor and crime. Guess which one pays better?)
Many think that the war on drugs is both worthwhile and effective, but the facts do not agree. Combine this with the further history lesson that marijuana was originally outlawed due to financial pressure from the tobacco lobby, and continues to stay on the list of drugs with "no known medial use" despite dozens of clear examples where it is useful (increasing appetite for cancer patients, reducing swelling for people with glaucoma, etc) due to the same lobbyists, it becomes clear that those who do still believe that drugs, and marijuana in particular, should remain illegal have fallen victim to generations worth of marketing hype, and haven't bothered to readjust their opinions to match a century of new facts.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” --John Keynes
Fines are not good enough, they only make it so the rich can break the law with impunity. Jail time or community service for the client and the lawyer is the only fair solution. They might have more money than most, but we each only get so much time.
Only problem of that is that then all possibly controversial takedown notices will then be done by corporations. Who are persons, but have additional rights, like the ability to spend as much money as they like on political campaigns (unlike humans, who have sharp limits), cannot be imprisoned, cannot be drafted, and pay lower taxes.
So, does this mean that Microvision finally solved the green laser issue?
Well, last year-ish was when researchers finally made a true green laser diode; hopefully by now that means they've increased the efficiency so that it's actually practical.
Not if it's done right. The way it works is you add in a corporate profits tax--you know, the kind of tax that paid for all our previous wars, before Bush decided we can fund these ones on our Chinese credit card instead--but allow a deduction for domestic workers' salaries. Use the proceeds to lower the deficit, or maybe to fix our decaying roads and bridges.
I'm actually kind of surprised no Congresscritter has thought of this. We're in a unique position these days: corporations are declaring record profits, and funneling those profits into mergers, acquisitions and lobbying for Republicans, while unemployment is high. Engineering a good tax incentive could possibly change all of that.
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Look, if you think you can do a better job, use yourself as a write-in candidate. The point here isn't to get someone elected, it's to draw votes away from the idiot who eventually does win.
Or, hell, run yourself. You won't win the primary if you're not a sell-out, but you might draw a few votes away from the people who do win. If the "winner" of the election only gets 39% of the vote, then they won't feel so much like they have a mandate to rule as they would with 59%, and will at least try to placate the masses instead of trying to work on their ideology.
He tried. The Republicans fillabustered the funding needed to close it, just like they fillabustered the public option in the health care plan. The number of times parlimentary tricks like the fillabuster and the secret hold have been used in the past two years are unprecedented, though in fairness it's what we get for electing exactly 60 Democrats and 40 Republicans (and no, Joe Lieberman does not count as an independent, given how he's voted).
Really, given that for the last two years the Republican agenda has been not to do what is best for the country, but to do everything they can to obstruct and oppose the will of the voters, it's amazing that anything got done at all.
This court is most definitely NOT in his pocket. He's been able to nominate two justices, but the replaced justices were leaned heavily to the left (even if one of the two was appointed by a republican president) and their selection did nothing to change the balance which is currently 5-4 in favor of a more conservative viewpoint. Thus the Heller and McDonald decisions affirming the right of the individual to keep and bear arms. A court in Obama's pockets would most certainly not have ruled that way.
Or, for that matter, Citizen's United. Sure, Obama may not have entirely objected to a "documentary" which openly mocked and derided Hilary Clinton, but he certainly wouldn't have approved of a ruling that says large corporations--which heavily favor Republicans--can spend freely and anonymously on electioneering.
For the curious, Article 2, Section 2:
"[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur."
Treaties of the United States have to be ratified by the Senate. This is hardly news.
So if only 3 senators are "present", only 2 need to agree?
By Constitution and by traditional Senate rules, the Senate can't pass anything without a quorum (usually a simply majority) of the Senators present. In theory, that means that a treaty could theoretically be passed with only 34 senators approving (51 present * 2/3), but realistically you're not going to find times where 49 Senators are off screwing around when the Senate is in session.
"Tends to." This sort of thing hasn't yet been fully tested in court yet; it may be that Executive Agreements are inferior to federal law, or it may not. I'm unsure if there has been a single test case yet.
China will never invade Taiwan. China has far too much to gain from Taiwan economically. And, not only that, the current administration of Taiwan has gotten quite friendly with China. Many Taiwanese are more pragmatic and value the money they can make in China more highly than national pride.
The only way China would invade Taiwan is if their economy collapsed, or at least they faced a serious economic downturn which is bound to happen. But by then they may be close enough that a military invasion wont be necessary. And anyway, China has bigger fish to fry.
The reason China will eventually invade Taiwan is to distract the populace from its inherently corrupt one-party rule, similar to the way the US invaded Iraq to distract from Bush's falling approval ratings. As the middle class in China grows, there will be more interest in being able to affect changes in government, which the Communist Party will try to divert into nationalistic pride when it invades one or many of its neighbors over some overblown, imagined, or manufactured sleight.
Is this like you go into the grocery store and eat a few twinkies and the manager bum rushes you and makes you pay? Or, is this like picking up a discarded paper on the ferry and the guy at the news stand demanding you pay him for it?
This is like walking past a newsstand, glancing at a headline, then being told you now owe the newsstand $5 or Bubba the Appellate Court Judge is going to garnish your wages.
They're just taking the new rulings that EULAs are enforceable to their logical conclusion: that the creator of a contract can essentially "force" the other side to sign a contract by doing something other than actually signing a contract. They will proceed to do what the new copyright trolls have been doing for the past few months: sue hundreds of thousands of people in a single court on the other side of the country, and mail extortion letters to all of them.
The step after this is for someone to create a page stating, "By reading this, you agree to pay me $100,000," track the IPs, and cut out the symbolic gesture of even trying to make this seem like something other than a court-supported extortion racket.
So the Supreme Court should have refused to hear the case and kicked it back to the legislature?
Yeah, pretty much.
Did you read the actual argument, or just Fox New's blatant lying about it? The Solicitor General's arguments were, essentially:
1) The claim being made by the appellant is too broad
2) The court is bound by a century of precedent allowing the government to regulate corporations attempting to buy elections
3) The government cannot prevent individuals from campaign spending, as such would violate the First Amendment. "That is not the case with corporate spending, which does not reflect the
personal views of the officers (who cannot appropriately spend corporate money for purposes of personal selfexpression), the customers or shareholders (whose political preferences officers do not and generally cannot ascertain), or the corporation itself (which is an artificial
entity that has no “beliefs” to express). Thus, while restrictions on the use of treasury funds for electioneering may prevent corporate officers from utilizing one effective means to further the corporations’ economic interests, those restrictions do not hinder the expression of
any natural person’s ideas."
Nothing about "We can ban books" at all.
(Full coverage of Citizen's United on SCOTUSblog
1. Donations to campaigns don't actually require the candidate to do anything in return. There is usually the perception that large donations imply some sort of tit-for-tat, but it isn't always the case. In Obama's case, individual donors, that is, those unaffiliated with any major corporation, contributed more to his campaign, both proportionally and in total than to any other national candidate in history, so if politicians truly are bought purely through money, well, guess who owns him?
What you really have to look at is the secret money, the stuff you don't get to see on campaign disclosure forms. Here I'm talking about all these secret super-PACs and lobbyists and such, where the money and who's donating it tends to get obfuscated by the system. That's where the influence peddling goes on; the stuff made in the public eye is usually for advertisement purposes ("Hey, look at me! I'm supporting Candidate X! Aren't I a good little corporate citizen?").
2. There definitely are differences between Democrats and Republicans. The problem is that Democrats aren't really liberals, and the Republicans aren't really conservatives. sure, they each pretend to lean left or right, to get their respective bases to pay attention, but in reality the Republicans work for the rich, who funnel massive amounts of secret money into their campaigns and bank accounts, and Democrats work for the unions and lawyers, because they're stupid and don't realize that the unions have had all their money taken away over the last thirty years and the lawyers are becoming rich, and therefore turning to the Republicans because the Republicans are pro-rich and anti-everyone else.
I don't know why everyone had a problem with the tunnel, unless you were aiming for the warp point near the end. The snakes are tough, but doable. I could never get past the tower; that boss was EVIL.
I remember another article where the authors defined the term "Nintendo Hard". The thing is, back in the 80s you had to cram all your game data on little tiny ROM cartridges. There was no room for immersive storylines, autosave points, internet multiplayer, and all these other things we have today; the only way you could give your games replay value was to make them so f-ing hard that you never finish in the first place.
Have you ever seen someone high on pot drive? they are worse than drunks. A drunk serves because he doesn't have fine control of his body, someone on pot serves cause that's a pretty shade of yellow in the other lane.
So then you do the smart thing and make driving under the influence illegal... oh wait it already is, and under a separate part of the law that isn't affected by legalizing pot! Next issue please.
Given that you have to give either a social security number or a driver's license number, I don't see the problem. A fake ID is easier to make than an entry in the state's DMV system, or in the SSA.
You can register without an ID for the same reason that we don't have a national ID card: people are understandably nervous about being "forced" to show their papers wherever they go. That's not the kind of thing you encourage in a free society.
I don't know about Iowa, but in California you can only cast a provisional ballot; your vote doesn't get counted until your registration checks out (which usually means the electin is decided before they get around to counting your vote.)
If the government 'controlled' the growth of cannabis, how come there hasn't been a reduction in availability?
Right, because the government is too incompetent to even get rid of fucking kudzu.
Hey, they've done a great job making it more expensive: as an illegal drug its street value is roughly five times what it would be if it were legalized. Gotta keep those cartels in business; without marijuana their annual profit would be about 20-25% lower than it is.
Support Mexican Cartel violence! Keep Marijuana Illegal! (Paid for by police chiefs far away from the border)
What criteria would you suggest?
Random chance. Essentially, you start by having everyone in America take a test, to see if they're breathing and graduated high school and the like, then you choose say seven people at random and they get to be President for the next four years.
The problem is that there aren't any other rare earth mines around, and they take a while to dig and bring online--ten years, from what I've read.
Consider having to go without new hard drives for ten years, and you know why people are suddenly becoming nervous about China suddenly deciding to embargo Japan.
Drugs lead to increased rates of other crimes. Heavy trucks just raise taxes (via deteriorating roads).
Sounds to me like the police are putting money into protecting people, rather than just imposing fines on otherwise-harmless businesses.
Illegal drugs lead to increased rates of other crimes. This is why Prohibition was such a disaster: by making alcohol an illegal drug, the US gave rise to crime families making hundreds of millions of dollars in supply, committing crimes to do so, and getting people used to violating the law for fun and profit, and in some cases, survival (a convicted criminal, even for something as stupid as a drug charge, is forever barred from the world of work, save for menial labor and crime. Guess which one pays better?)
Many think that the war on drugs is both worthwhile and effective, but the facts do not agree. Combine this with the further history lesson that marijuana was originally outlawed due to financial pressure from the tobacco lobby, and continues to stay on the list of drugs with "no known medial use" despite dozens of clear examples where it is useful (increasing appetite for cancer patients, reducing swelling for people with glaucoma, etc) due to the same lobbyists, it becomes clear that those who do still believe that drugs, and marijuana in particular, should remain illegal have fallen victim to generations worth of marketing hype, and haven't bothered to readjust their opinions to match a century of new facts.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” --John Keynes
Fines are not good enough, they only make it so the rich can break the law with impunity. Jail time or community service for the client and the lawyer is the only fair solution. They might have more money than most, but we each only get so much time.
Only problem of that is that then all possibly controversial takedown notices will then be done by corporations. Who are persons, but have additional rights, like the ability to spend as much money as they like on political campaigns (unlike humans, who have sharp limits), cannot be imprisoned, cannot be drafted, and pay lower taxes.
So, does this mean that Microvision finally solved the green laser issue?
Well, last year-ish was when researchers finally made a true green laser diode; hopefully by now that means they've increased the efficiency so that it's actually practical.
And provided you have competing ISPs / alternative plans available in case you want to jump ship to a different traffic management scheme.
Not if it's done right. The way it works is you add in a corporate profits tax--you know, the kind of tax that paid for all our previous wars, before Bush decided we can fund these ones on our Chinese credit card instead--but allow a deduction for domestic workers' salaries. Use the proceeds to lower the deficit, or maybe to fix our decaying roads and bridges.
I'm actually kind of surprised no Congresscritter has thought of this. We're in a unique position these days: corporations are declaring record profits, and funneling those profits into mergers, acquisitions and lobbying for Republicans, while unemployment is high. Engineering a good tax incentive could possibly change all of that.
I work for local government, and had my pay cut last year (furloughs), and looks like it will be cut again this year (increase health care costs)
Flat pay happens to other people.
And considering they are only where NASA was 50 years ago,
To be fair, the Shuttle is where NASA was 30 years ago