Are you implying FEMA was in some sort of competition with Musk to power this one hospital?
So while the government teams and the local power company were restoring power to just under a quarter of the island they should have also sent people over to this hospital that already had a team of engineers working on power restoration? For what reason? To hog the credit?
One of the primary functions of FEMA after an emergency like this is to distribute aid where needed. If an external organization is offering to provide additional legitimate aid and they aren't getting in the way it just makes sense from a planning perspective to let them help while you focus resources elsewhere.
The real scandal would have been if they had pulled resources from other primary targets (other hospitals for example) to send a team specifically to this hospital which already had the help they needed.
It's like claiming you do more for the homeless than say the Salvation Army because you once gave a guy on the street a sandwich.
Saw a video not too long ago from a news crew who had an ex-thief breaking into houses by just wearing a tool belt and some paint smattered overalls. He just walked to the back or side door of each target house and broke in by either breaking a window (if none were already open) or forcing the door. At one point he even used a extension ladder to get into a second floor window. No one questions a handy-man type stranger milling about. No need for any high tech gadgets or a lot of work. Just find an empty driveway and look like you have a purpose and most people will ignore you.
Trying to hack a system which by definition has a security camera and most likely notifies the owner when it's being triggered is much more hassle than it's worth for any self respecting thief.
Legally it's pretty cut and dried; the AHA sets forth the mechanism for the CSRs but never appropriates the monies to pay for them. The reasons for this type of legislative trickery varies but more often than not it's simply to hide the true cost. With the bill being paid from a separate piece of legislation when they send it off to the CBO for review the full cost is excluded. Both parties do this all the time.
Even Obama's own administration agreed with that and made the request for the money from Congress which they never acted on so he took it upon himself to make the payments anyway. That is where it violated the law. The Executive Branch simply doesn't have the legal authority to appropriate money not given to them by the Congress.
The CSRs have already been found to be in violation of the law by a Federal Court. They were only allowed to continue because the ruling has been under appeal since it was made last year.
Appropriations for the CSR was never part of the ACA and by law, and yes the constitution, only the legislative branch can appropriate the money to pay for them and thus far they have declined (both Dems and Reps). Obama used his 'pen and phone' powers (I can't seem to find those defined in the constitution but apparently you have a different copy) to use a completely different fund to make the payments, Trump is simply putting an end to that practice.
At any time Congress can actually pass real legislation to appropriate money for the CSR payments and then they would be perfectly legal. There has been some movement in that direction, but as of today, as they have been since most of the time the AHA has been active, they are a complete fabrication of the Executive branch and have no legal standing.
That's true to a point as long as you do a few things:
1) Group all anti-government, non-Muslim religious based attacks as well as white supremacist attacks into the far-right category while at the same time often miscategorizing other attacks such as classifying Fort Hood as 'workplace violence' even with Hasan's confession about his motivations. That actually required an act of Congress to have to the dead and wounded be recognized as victims of a terrorist attack and awarded Purple Hearts.
2) Assign political motivations to non-political attacks. Not all attacks by right wingers are motivated by their ideology in the same way not all attacks by left wingers or Jihadists are motivated by theirs; sometimes an attack in a parking lot is just road rage with no deeper meaning.
3) Start tracking after 2001 and stop tracking after 2015.
4) Change the definition of threat as it suits your needs. In some reports "threat" is based off of actual deaths and in others it's by incident. So when you need a bigger number you count the 5 times someone was harassed on the street (with no injury) and say that is a bigger threat than a single shooting that killed multiple people.
There is also the fact that many Jihadist plots are stopped before the threat ever materializes due to the massive manpower dedicated to just that while far right attacks are not due to their limited nature and next to no dedicated special policing (they seem to be mostly of the "lone gunman", small or single target variety which are very difficult to prevent) . i.e. it's hard to stop a crazy person with a knife until the attack starts vs someone trying to buy large quantities of explosives.
It's just another case of statistics telling you whatever you want them to and not necessarily the truth.
That's the purpose of the judges order; he wants the DoJ to limit their search criteria to skip over casual readers and focus on the people who may have actually used the site to help organize the riots.
There are 200+ people charged and at least 1 felony conviction for activities during the inauguration; this all stems from those investigations.
The DoJ contends that while most people using the site were legitimate protestors or just people wondering what type of anti-Trump activities were planned a small group of people used the site to organize premeditated riots.
These types of warrants are requested and granted all the time and the only thing making this come back into the headlines is the sheer number of records Dreamhost retained. DoJ investigators have already stated they were not expecting that many records from their initial request. In most cases if the numbers are low the warrant is served and replied to with little fuss but when over a million users information is at stake when admittedly the number of actual suspects is a fraction of a percent of those then Dreamhost felt they needed to push back.
So basically we're just at the stage where the DoJ has to set forward the criteria they want to search for to try and identify the actual suspects and the judge granting the warrant wants to ensure it's not too broad as to get too many innocent users. It's all pretty sop.
Yes but in Canada their are Human Rights Commissions whose purpose is to 'prosecute' wrongthink so we don't have to bother with such outdated concepts as "courts" or "laws".
Until recently many of these commissions had near 100% 'conviction' rates and while, to the best of my knowledge, they could not impose any jail time they could in fact bankrupt the accused. They are pretty much the definition of kangaroo courts where 'truth' is not considered a defense.
The HRCs in Canada were so bad that one lawyer (a former Canadian HRC member) was responsible for over half the hate speech complaints and in some cases was shown to actually have commented on the sites he complained about under a pseudonym to help drum up more racist comments to then complain about.
Could you point out the "hate speech" exception in the first amendment because I'm not seeing it?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
His "assertions were abusive towards women" because the PC police and a lot of illiterate journalists looking for clickbait decided they were, NOT because of what he wrote.
What he wrote was about the fact that there are several ways to create jobs or revamp existing ones that would make them more appealing to a wider group of women which would in turn make Google more productive and an overall better place to work. While acknowledging that there is a wide overlap of traits and skills shared by both men and women there are still certain traits generally favored by women and others by men (either due to genetics or social constructs).
In other words, if 70% of men and only 35% of women share a trait then it is counterintuitive and anti-productive to try and force a 50/50 split in men/women working in a job or style that favors that trait. Instead it would be better to find traits which have a more even split or even favor women and create more of those jobs. One of his example is that they could expand their pair programming efforts as women tend to have better social aptitude and work well in groups.
He created a hostile work environment in much the same way someone who admits they're a Red Sox fan in a Yankee friendly bar. And not even someone wearing a Sox hat or jersey, just a guy having a personal conversation in a corner booth being asked what his favorite team is.
He wrote a post in a internal forum used to discuss ways to make the company better that discussed issues with their hiring practices and methodology being used to up certain groups numbers. He proposed solutions that he believed would better attain the stated hiring goals and that he also believed would be more natural and both increase attractiveness to the target group but also be more fair to everyone else at the company.
In response to this memo being reposted outside of the forum (and not by him) and then terribly mischaracterized by people that made no attempt to understand it he was physically threatened and several employees made public statements about wishing him harm and/or wanting him fired.
The ONLY people making Google a hostile work environment are the people overreacting to what was generally a very neutral, fairly well researched memo. I'm sure most of the people at Google don't even care and there are probably a significant number that agree with him but seeing how the extreme PCers are acting about this they would never speak up and dare have the mobs wrath turned on them (which also happened to be a point he made).
Leno's type of neutral humor played well at 11:30 but Letterman and later Conan were generally much edgier and better suited for 12:30; it's hard for the nightly news to lead directly into the Masturbating Bear.
The taming down of their jokes and skits just took most of the funny out of their comedy. I actually think Conan made a better transition but it still wasn't as great as his 12:30 stuff. Ferguson seems to have understood that the same would happen to him so when the shakeups started happening at CBS he just took his cash payout and walked away instead of trying to fight for the 11:30 slot (which apparently his contract gave him first rights to).
In later years Letterman just because a bitter old man whose monologues consisted of muttering to Paul and having him nod back. With the time off and the unrestricted nature of Netflix there is hope the old Late Night Dave will make a comeback.
Only when applying your own bias to your selection of 'everything' and your own definition of 'true'.
Most of the 'leaked' stories are about internal disagreements and how person A is forcing person B out of power and how person B will soon be gone. The following week the A and B are reversed. Even stories like this one rarely have a follow up so there is no way to judge the veracity of the original claim. And then there's the insider leaks that are directly contradicted a day or two later.
Lately anonymous sources have had a bad track record in this administration. The problem may lie with the over abundance of sources willing to talk (a signifigant percentage of Federal employees tend to be Democrat supporters and therefore generally anti-Trump) or it may lie with the current medias trend of wanting to get the story first which removes almost any process of corroboration.
The problem with that assertion is that the megabucks (corporate and private) were almost all on the losing side.
By pretty much every measure the Dems spent more money that Republicans (direct campaign spending, national level Party spending, Super PACs, etc..) and failed to hold or get control in every federal category (House, Senate and President).
During the Presidential campaign they even had huge corporate donations in kind by most of the media which ran anti-Trump stories almost 24/7 after it because clear he would be the Republican nominee (not completely undeserved but even with Trumps unfiltered talking style they went way too far).
The amount of money wasted in the last election cycle is simply staggering; especially considering the results. If anything it seems the amount of money spent doesn't seem to directly impact the results, just makes a local matter into a national one but it's really of little use to a Congressional candidate to be nationally know when the only votes that count are in his or her district. It's like a real estate agent in Portland running ads in Washington, DC.
One problem lies in the fact that in many government agencies there are strict regulations about data sharing. If data was collected for purpose A it cannot be shared with another government entity for purpose B without new legislation (and the hundreds of Federal lawsuits that follow). So if any new program, such as this federal audit of voters, requires data it essentially has to collect it all from scratch.
They could have offices in the same building as the Social Security Administration or the IRS but cannot legally ask them for any direct data. Instead they have to go to the States to ask them for anything they can give them.
On Monday, KFile attempted to contact the man by email and phone but he did not respond. On Tuesday, "HanA**holeSolo" posted his apology on the subreddit/The_Donald and deleted all of his other posts.
There was no question that at the time of the apology he knew CNN knew his identity.
I wouldn't even consider it a critical comment; it was a joke meme that happened to be tweeted out by the POTUS.
I would at least give them some credit for accidently performing some semblance of investigative journalism in finding out the users real identity except A) his identify was never an important part of the story and B) their own description of the process sounds like they just asked a recently dumped reporter to use focus his cyberstalking skills on this reddit poster instead of his ex.
I know this isn't the most trustworthy news source, but here it is:
CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.
CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.
The first part of that statement is fine but that second part is as clear a theat as you'll likely ever see printed by a (once) reputable news agency.
It could have been something as arbitrary as a misspelling of a home address on a form or as serious as a close relative of one of the applicants being on some watch list but to far too many people all they see is some bright young girls being picked on by the POTUS and then they run with the narrative that Trump is mean to little girls.
Visa denial are pretty SOP regardless of who is in the oval office.
To be fair, the politicians are being hypocritical (loving taxes off oil sales) while the general Norwegian isn't. Their electric car adoption has little to do with actively choosing to buy EVs and much more to do with legislation (like this oil ban) which causes ICE vehicles to cost 50% more than an electric plus exempts electrics from the majority of other driving expenses (parking, tolls, etc..).
Once Denmark announced the end of their similar programs the sales of EVs plummeted so hard they had to reinstate the program with a extended phase out period.
The people are more than happy to buy gas powered cars and probably more than happy to continue buying heating oil; the politicians, on the other hand, are quite willing to tax everything oil related out of existence all the while making billions off of exporting it.
This has been polled for at least a decade and the numbers never change much. Even during the height of the lawsuit over trademark I believe the highest they could ever get for Natives being offended by the name is 9%. 80% said they wouldn't even be offended if they were personally called Redskin by a non-native. It's just not considered a pejorative by most Natives but that's not good for the professional offence takers so they keep trying to make it something every few years.
Like most of these campaigns I'd guess 80-90% of those actively fighting against the use of the term are as white as you can possibly get and are just trying to earn their social justice street cred by being offended on someone else's behalf.
As soon as you nationalize the vote you will nationalize the recounts. There is no reason to consider a vote in Maine any different from a vote in Nevada; they are effectively part of the same pool so any close elections will automatically cause both parties to start fishing for votes in whatever areas they favor. There is absolutely no reason a State would still restrict recount laws to their borders once the pool was nationalized; at that point their borders are irrelevant. And yes all recounts would be done in parallel but the shear number of court filings filed by both parties would clog up courts nationwide and slow everything down. It's bad enough when that limited to a single state (even then usually only a few districts) or even 2 but a national vote means all 50 states are automatically in play.
As for the EC being worse, by design it limits what any single state can do. Even a swing state like Florida can't exceed it's 29 votes. It's really only a "swing state" because it can easily swap from R to D on any given election; it can't on its own do much unless the election is close. In the last election even if Florida has gone D it still wouldn't have changed the outcome.
Recounts would still be done at the state level, if needed.
Yes, but the problem would be that in a pure popular vote that recount would be done at the State level IN EVERY STATE. There would be no just fighting over Florida's recount procedures (which was a headache no one wants to repeat) you'd instead have people fighting over the recount procedures of every single electoral district in the country. With the 0.5% difference in popular vote in 2000, according to several State legislature laws, that would have triggered a mandatory recount. So you'd have State where the Statewide winner was never in doubt forced to do a recount of every ballot. To make it more painful in many cases recounts have to be done by hand and potentially verified by a ballot worker and a rep from each interested party.
As for the voter fraud, I should have been more general and include all voter suppression/allowances, once again using Florida as an example of how one area could screw everyone. During the lovely 2000 election the rolls for felons they originally used to eliminate voters was so flawed that in the end many if not most districts simply took it upon themselves to ignore them altogether. So you went from an example where the State could eliminate your right to vote to a case where they were letting people not legally allowed to vote all in the same election.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you implying FEMA was in some sort of competition with Musk to power this one hospital?
So while the government teams and the local power company were restoring power to just under a quarter of the island they should have also sent people over to this hospital that already had a team of engineers working on power restoration? For what reason? To hog the credit?
One of the primary functions of FEMA after an emergency like this is to distribute aid where needed. If an external organization is offering to provide additional legitimate aid and they aren't getting in the way it just makes sense from a planning perspective to let them help while you focus resources elsewhere.
The real scandal would have been if they had pulled resources from other primary targets (other hospitals for example) to send a team specifically to this hospital which already had the help they needed.
It's like claiming you do more for the homeless than say the Salvation Army because you once gave a guy on the street a sandwich.
Saw a video not too long ago from a news crew who had an ex-thief breaking into houses by just wearing a tool belt and some paint smattered overalls. He just walked to the back or side door of each target house and broke in by either breaking a window (if none were already open) or forcing the door. At one point he even used a extension ladder to get into a second floor window. No one questions a handy-man type stranger milling about. No need for any high tech gadgets or a lot of work. Just find an empty driveway and look like you have a purpose and most people will ignore you.
Trying to hack a system which by definition has a security camera and most likely notifies the owner when it's being triggered is much more hassle than it's worth for any self respecting thief.
Legally it's pretty cut and dried; the AHA sets forth the mechanism for the CSRs but never appropriates the monies to pay for them. The reasons for this type of legislative trickery varies but more often than not it's simply to hide the true cost. With the bill being paid from a separate piece of legislation when they send it off to the CBO for review the full cost is excluded. Both parties do this all the time.
Even Obama's own administration agreed with that and made the request for the money from Congress which they never acted on so he took it upon himself to make the payments anyway. That is where it violated the law. The Executive Branch simply doesn't have the legal authority to appropriate money not given to them by the Congress.
The CSRs have already been found to be in violation of the law by a Federal Court. They were only allowed to continue because the ruling has been under appeal since it was made last year.
Appropriations for the CSR was never part of the ACA and by law, and yes the constitution, only the legislative branch can appropriate the money to pay for them and thus far they have declined (both Dems and Reps). Obama used his 'pen and phone' powers (I can't seem to find those defined in the constitution but apparently you have a different copy) to use a completely different fund to make the payments, Trump is simply putting an end to that practice.
At any time Congress can actually pass real legislation to appropriate money for the CSR payments and then they would be perfectly legal. There has been some movement in that direction, but as of today, as they have been since most of the time the AHA has been active, they are a complete fabrication of the Executive branch and have no legal standing.
That's true to a point as long as you do a few things:
1) Group all anti-government, non-Muslim religious based attacks as well as white supremacist attacks into the far-right category while at the same time often miscategorizing other attacks such as classifying Fort Hood as 'workplace violence' even with Hasan's confession about his motivations. That actually required an act of Congress to have to the dead and wounded be recognized as victims of a terrorist attack and awarded Purple Hearts.
2) Assign political motivations to non-political attacks. Not all attacks by right wingers are motivated by their ideology in the same way not all attacks by left wingers or Jihadists are motivated by theirs; sometimes an attack in a parking lot is just road rage with no deeper meaning.
3) Start tracking after 2001 and stop tracking after 2015.
4) Change the definition of threat as it suits your needs. In some reports "threat" is based off of actual deaths and in others it's by incident. So when you need a bigger number you count the 5 times someone was harassed on the street (with no injury) and say that is a bigger threat than a single shooting that killed multiple people.
There is also the fact that many Jihadist plots are stopped before the threat ever materializes due to the massive manpower dedicated to just that while far right attacks are not due to their limited nature and next to no dedicated special policing (they seem to be mostly of the "lone gunman", small or single target variety which are very difficult to prevent) . i.e. it's hard to stop a crazy person with a knife until the attack starts vs someone trying to buy large quantities of explosives.
It's just another case of statistics telling you whatever you want them to and not necessarily the truth.
And based on your political leanings the two parties referenced in your statement are completely interchangeable.
That's the purpose of the judges order; he wants the DoJ to limit their search criteria to skip over casual readers and focus on the people who may have actually used the site to help organize the riots.
There are 200+ people charged and at least 1 felony conviction for activities during the inauguration; this all stems from those investigations.
The DoJ contends that while most people using the site were legitimate protestors or just people wondering what type of anti-Trump activities were planned a small group of people used the site to organize premeditated riots.
These types of warrants are requested and granted all the time and the only thing making this come back into the headlines is the sheer number of records Dreamhost retained. DoJ investigators have already stated they were not expecting that many records from their initial request. In most cases if the numbers are low the warrant is served and replied to with little fuss but when over a million users information is at stake when admittedly the number of actual suspects is a fraction of a percent of those then Dreamhost felt they needed to push back.
So basically we're just at the stage where the DoJ has to set forward the criteria they want to search for to try and identify the actual suspects and the judge granting the warrant wants to ensure it's not too broad as to get too many innocent users. It's all pretty sop.
so that's a 'no' than.
Yes but in Canada their are Human Rights Commissions whose purpose is to 'prosecute' wrongthink so we don't have to bother with such outdated concepts as "courts" or "laws".
Until recently many of these commissions had near 100% 'conviction' rates and while, to the best of my knowledge, they could not impose any jail time they could in fact bankrupt the accused. They are pretty much the definition of kangaroo courts where 'truth' is not considered a defense.
The HRCs in Canada were so bad that one lawyer (a former Canadian HRC member) was responsible for over half the hate speech complaints and in some cases was shown to actually have commented on the sites he complained about under a pseudonym to help drum up more racist comments to then complain about.
Could you point out the "hate speech" exception in the first amendment because I'm not seeing it?
His "assertions were abusive towards women" because the PC police and a lot of illiterate journalists looking for clickbait decided they were, NOT because of what he wrote.
What he wrote was about the fact that there are several ways to create jobs or revamp existing ones that would make them more appealing to a wider group of women which would in turn make Google more productive and an overall better place to work. While acknowledging that there is a wide overlap of traits and skills shared by both men and women there are still certain traits generally favored by women and others by men (either due to genetics or social constructs).
In other words, if 70% of men and only 35% of women share a trait then it is counterintuitive and anti-productive to try and force a 50/50 split in men/women working in a job or style that favors that trait. Instead it would be better to find traits which have a more even split or even favor women and create more of those jobs. One of his example is that they could expand their pair programming efforts as women tend to have better social aptitude and work well in groups.
He created a hostile work environment in much the same way someone who admits they're a Red Sox fan in a Yankee friendly bar. And not even someone wearing a Sox hat or jersey, just a guy having a personal conversation in a corner booth being asked what his favorite team is.
He wrote a post in a internal forum used to discuss ways to make the company better that discussed issues with their hiring practices and methodology being used to up certain groups numbers. He proposed solutions that he believed would better attain the stated hiring goals and that he also believed would be more natural and both increase attractiveness to the target group but also be more fair to everyone else at the company.
In response to this memo being reposted outside of the forum (and not by him) and then terribly mischaracterized by people that made no attempt to understand it he was physically threatened and several employees made public statements about wishing him harm and/or wanting him fired.
The ONLY people making Google a hostile work environment are the people overreacting to what was generally a very neutral, fairly well researched memo. I'm sure most of the people at Google don't even care and there are probably a significant number that agree with him but seeing how the extreme PCers are acting about this they would never speak up and dare have the mobs wrath turned on them (which also happened to be a point he made).
Leno's type of neutral humor played well at 11:30 but Letterman and later Conan were generally much edgier and better suited for 12:30; it's hard for the nightly news to lead directly into the Masturbating Bear.
The taming down of their jokes and skits just took most of the funny out of their comedy. I actually think Conan made a better transition but it still wasn't as great as his 12:30 stuff. Ferguson seems to have understood that the same would happen to him so when the shakeups started happening at CBS he just took his cash payout and walked away instead of trying to fight for the 11:30 slot (which apparently his contract gave him first rights to).
In later years Letterman just because a bitter old man whose monologues consisted of muttering to Paul and having him nod back. With the time off and the unrestricted nature of Netflix there is hope the old Late Night Dave will make a comeback.
Only when applying your own bias to your selection of 'everything' and your own definition of 'true'.
Most of the 'leaked' stories are about internal disagreements and how person A is forcing person B out of power and how person B will soon be gone. The following week the A and B are reversed. Even stories like this one rarely have a follow up so there is no way to judge the veracity of the original claim. And then there's the insider leaks that are directly contradicted a day or two later.
Lately anonymous sources have had a bad track record in this administration. The problem may lie with the over abundance of sources willing to talk (a signifigant percentage of Federal employees tend to be Democrat supporters and therefore generally anti-Trump) or it may lie with the current medias trend of wanting to get the story first which removes almost any process of corroboration.
The problem with that assertion is that the megabucks (corporate and private) were almost all on the losing side.
By pretty much every measure the Dems spent more money that Republicans (direct campaign spending, national level Party spending, Super PACs, etc..) and failed to hold or get control in every federal category (House, Senate and President).
During the Presidential campaign they even had huge corporate donations in kind by most of the media which ran anti-Trump stories almost 24/7 after it because clear he would be the Republican nominee (not completely undeserved but even with Trumps unfiltered talking style they went way too far).
The amount of money wasted in the last election cycle is simply staggering; especially considering the results. If anything it seems the amount of money spent doesn't seem to directly impact the results, just makes a local matter into a national one but it's really of little use to a Congressional candidate to be nationally know when the only votes that count are in his or her district. It's like a real estate agent in Portland running ads in Washington, DC.
One problem lies in the fact that in many government agencies there are strict regulations about data sharing. If data was collected for purpose A it cannot be shared with another government entity for purpose B without new legislation (and the hundreds of Federal lawsuits that follow). So if any new program, such as this federal audit of voters, requires data it essentially has to collect it all from scratch.
They could have offices in the same building as the Social Security Administration or the IRS but cannot legally ask them for any direct data. Instead they have to go to the States to ask them for anything they can give them.
By CNN's own description of the timeline the apology came AFTER they attempted to contact him several times, including directly by phone.
There was no question that at the time of the apology he knew CNN knew his identity.
I wouldn't even consider it a critical comment; it was a joke meme that happened to be tweeted out by the POTUS.
I would at least give them some credit for accidently performing some semblance of investigative journalism in finding out the users real identity except A) his identify was never an important part of the story and B) their own description of the process sounds like they just asked a recently dumped reporter to use focus his cyberstalking skills on this reddit poster instead of his ex.
I know this isn't the most trustworthy news source, but here it is:
The first part of that statement is fine but that second part is as clear a theat as you'll likely ever see printed by a (once) reputable news agency.
It could have been something as arbitrary as a misspelling of a home address on a form or as serious as a close relative of one of the applicants being on some watch list but to far too many people all they see is some bright young girls being picked on by the POTUS and then they run with the narrative that Trump is mean to little girls.
Visa denial are pretty SOP regardless of who is in the oval office.
To be fair, the politicians are being hypocritical (loving taxes off oil sales) while the general Norwegian isn't. Their electric car adoption has little to do with actively choosing to buy EVs and much more to do with legislation (like this oil ban) which causes ICE vehicles to cost 50% more than an electric plus exempts electrics from the majority of other driving expenses (parking, tolls, etc..).
Once Denmark announced the end of their similar programs the sales of EVs plummeted so hard they had to reinstate the program with a extended phase out period.
The people are more than happy to buy gas powered cars and probably more than happy to continue buying heating oil; the politicians, on the other hand, are quite willing to tax everything oil related out of existence all the while making billions off of exporting it.
This has been polled for at least a decade and the numbers never change much. Even during the height of the lawsuit over trademark I believe the highest they could ever get for Natives being offended by the name is 9%. 80% said they wouldn't even be offended if they were personally called Redskin by a non-native. It's just not considered a pejorative by most Natives but that's not good for the professional offence takers so they keep trying to make it something every few years.
Like most of these campaigns I'd guess 80-90% of those actively fighting against the use of the term are as white as you can possibly get and are just trying to earn their social justice street cred by being offended on someone else's behalf.
As soon as you nationalize the vote you will nationalize the recounts. There is no reason to consider a vote in Maine any different from a vote in Nevada; they are effectively part of the same pool so any close elections will automatically cause both parties to start fishing for votes in whatever areas they favor. There is absolutely no reason a State would still restrict recount laws to their borders once the pool was nationalized; at that point their borders are irrelevant. And yes all recounts would be done in parallel but the shear number of court filings filed by both parties would clog up courts nationwide and slow everything down. It's bad enough when that limited to a single state (even then usually only a few districts) or even 2 but a national vote means all 50 states are automatically in play.
As for the EC being worse, by design it limits what any single state can do. Even a swing state like Florida can't exceed it's 29 votes. It's really only a "swing state" because it can easily swap from R to D on any given election; it can't on its own do much unless the election is close. In the last election even if Florida has gone D it still wouldn't have changed the outcome.
Recounts would still be done at the state level, if needed.
Yes, but the problem would be that in a pure popular vote that recount would be done at the State level IN EVERY STATE. There would be no just fighting over Florida's recount procedures (which was a headache no one wants to repeat) you'd instead have people fighting over the recount procedures of every single electoral district in the country. With the 0.5% difference in popular vote in 2000, according to several State legislature laws, that would have triggered a mandatory recount. So you'd have State where the Statewide winner was never in doubt forced to do a recount of every ballot. To make it more painful in many cases recounts have to be done by hand and potentially verified by a ballot worker and a rep from each interested party.
As for the voter fraud, I should have been more general and include all voter suppression/allowances, once again using Florida as an example of how one area could screw everyone. During the lovely 2000 election the rolls for felons they originally used to eliminate voters was so flawed that in the end many if not most districts simply took it upon themselves to ignore them altogether. So you went from an example where the State could eliminate your right to vote to a case where they were letting people not legally allowed to vote all in the same election.