Each year the debt increased because each year a deficit was run. Including 2000, Clinton's claimed 'surplus year'.
You're attacking a point that is at best tangential to my contention: that the GOP is the party of debt. Your own figures illustrate my point perfectly - look at the derivative of the debt figures you provide (just subtract one from the next, to find the deficit), and you'll see that the growth of the debt is shrinking, on average, throughout Clinton's administration. By your numbers, at the beginning, the deficit inherited from GHWB was adding ~$400B/yr to the national debt. At the end of Clinton's administration, the deficit was reduced to 1/4th of that. Look at the figures for Reagan, GWB, or now Trump, and you'll see the opposite trend - higher and higher deficits every year. Obama inherited a truly massive deficit, and once again lowered it dramatically over the course of his two terms.
If you care about the national debt, you should never, ever vote a Republican into the Oval Office. Their stated goal ("starve the beast" philosophy) is to increase the debt to try to force the government to shrink. Like increasing your credit card debt to force yourself to be more frugal.
It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it.
If you actually read what I wrote, you'll notice that I made a claim regarding deficits, not debt. Debt tells you very little about a given president's influence - because frequently a president inherits a massive deficit, so it's more or less a given that the debt will increase under their tenure. What you should really look at is whether the deficit is increasing, which tells us whether the president is moving the trend towards a balanced budget, or turning towards higher levels of debt. Republican presidents for the last few decades have increased the deficit, increasing the rate at which the debt grows, while Democratic presidents have decreased the deficit, or even moved us into a surplus, in Clinton's case.
If you care about the national debt, voting for a Republican president is, historically speaking, a terrible move. We can see that playing out in Washington right now. Anybody who thinks the GOP is fiscally conservative hasn't been paying attention for a very long time.
Democrats don't hold a candle to Republicans when it comes to increasing national debt. It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it. Reagan started what's now a time-honored tradition of Republican presidents dicking over the next generation by driving up the deficit through some combination of unfunded tax cuts and increased spending.
Dispute this with "alternative facts" all you want, but there's nothing tricky about the math - just look at the chart. And the thing is, it is DELIBERATE on the part of the "conservatives"... they decided to institute a "starve the beast" philosophy in the Reagan era, where they intentionally drive up debt to try to force government spending down. Similar to charging up your credit cards to try to force yourself to be more frugal.
Just spend 2 minutes actually reading and you'll see. The GOP has become the debt party and the instant gratification party, and this latest move of massive spending ceilings and unfunded tax cuts is just more of the same. The biggest shame is that Schumer's no better in this case, he's crowing right along with them about selling out our grandkids.
What they're *not* free to do however is to enforce policies, terms, and rules arbitrarily, unequally, and unfairly.
Outside of a few protected classes, they absolutely are. Businesses commonly refuse service because of clothing, which is pretty damn arbitrary (no shoes, no shirt, no service?).
But hey, not everyone can pass the marshmallow test like Northern Europeans I suppose. So they blame Northern Europeans for climate change and demand cash.
The U.S. is failing the marshmallow test as we speak - huge tax cuts and massive spending increases at a time when the economy is already strong, and the GOP controls ALL branches of government. Apparently there are no longer any adults in charge who realize that if you don't pay down your debt during the good times, things will get really ugly in the bad times.
A simple, idealized model isn't hard. Suppose a 99% chance of success (no explode) per engine.
The raw probability of a vehicle NOT having an engine failure is just P^n in this case, which means that you have a 99% chance of a problem-free flight with one engine, but a 95.1% chance with 5 engines, and only a 91% chance with 9 engines... all the way down to 76% chance of no failure at 27 engines. Thankfully, real rocket engines are much better than 99% reliable.
So, the chance of at least one failure increases dramatically as your engine count goes up - however, if you can still succeed with one engine out, that means that you only fail when 2 or more engines go out. This is a very unlikely event (1% * 1% chance, roughly, although there are 10 different "pairs" of engines that could go out in a 5 engine rocket) so that means that while you have a 95.1% chance of flying without an engine failure, you have a 99.9% chance of making it to orbit.
With 9 engines and 1-engine out capability, you have a 99.6% chance of mission success, and with 27 engines, assuming that 3 can go out, you have a 99.98% chance of completing the mission.
This is the most simplistic, idealized model, but it shows the basic principal - engine-out capability does a LOT for you, in terms of reliability. However, there is a no-mans land between 1 engine and 5 engine designs where chance of failure is going up linearly but you haven't yet achieved engine-out capability, so a 2, 3, or 4 engine designs aren't well optimized in that one, limited sense.
In that particular case, there's no real doubt about the groping - he's a well-known lecherous geezer who makes a joke about "David Cop-A-Feel" before grabbing someone's ass, and that was consistent with the claim - he admitted as much and apoligized. It really just proves my point though - that in the vast majority of cases, claims are not manufactured, and when they are, they are usually easy to disprove. (There was one politician where claims were made recently, but he had solid proof that he wasn't even in the same state during the dates in question).
Whether or not something is actionable in a legal sense has nothing to do with whether it is moral or not - a murder is a murder, even 20 years after the fact, and a rape or any other kind of sexual crime continues to be morally wrong, whether it has been 1 year or 30. It's also directly relevant to concerns about the character of political aspirants, or at least it ought to be. It's tragic that the party that used to stand on "family values" and morals has been furiously defending adultery, sexual assault and pedophilia in its candidates.
You all will be screaming about abuse of power by Trump as the 15 actually corrupt FBI and DOJ officials are frog marched out, tried and convicted of actual crimes.
I was screaming about abuse of power by Trump before he was even elected, when it was painfully clear from his own statements that he's an authoritarian wannabe dictator, who can't tell you the first thing about the constitution. He's happy to discriminate based on religion, he wants limits on free speech, and he's transparently using Soviet-era techniques to demonize his opponents... he happily called democrats treasonous for NOT CLAPPING. That's downright Orwellian. It's not like his tweets are filtered by the "MSM" - I can just read his opinions for myself, and see that he's the kind of guy I wouldn't hang out with, hire, work for, or associate with on any level if I could help it - he's an untrustworthy narcissist.
It's honestly just sad for me to see how willing people are to follow him. Your very use of the "alt-left" terminology shows that you're playing into the fake news... because the "alt-left" only exists as a term since Trump made it up. It's not in any way comparable to the alt-right, which is a movement that actually named itself, and which has many different players and ideological branches, and a substantial online community. Leftist extremists do exist, but the ones that exist in government are the people like Bernie.
The level of cognitive dissonance I see makes me suspect that there is no evidence whatsoever that would ever convince you that Trump did indeed obstruct justice, or potentially collude with the Russian government, or is otherwise just an aspiring dictator. That's what I really want to understand - have you considered that you could be wrong? That maybe there isn't a conspiracy theory against him? Is there any realistic scenario where you abandon your support for him? Because it seems to me that even if there is unambiguous evidence that he's broken the law, his supporters will continue to support him and demonize his opponents.
And, for what it's worth, I think the FISA courts are easily abusable and I've been concerned about the erosion of civil protections and intelligence accountability ever since the Patriot Act - overall I think it's a positive thing that there's some light being shed on these secret courts. That said, in this case, it's plainly obvious from the timing and circumstances of the release that this isn't an attempt to improve government accountability, but instead is a baldly partisan move to discredit the FBI and take some heat off of DJT. And, before you cry "MSM", these are opinions I've formed just from reading the goddamned memo itself.
Again, you are committing the logical error of considering that because the average is acceptable, that general funding is acceptable. Kansas has some very well funded schools in affluent areas, but recently the Kansas supreme court ruled that the funding was "unconstitutionally low" for many districts.
Perhaps it's not how much is spent - but HOW it is spent
I'll raise you one more - WHERE it is spent matters a great deal. On aggregate, it can look like we spend plenty on education. But due to the fact that schools are generally funded by local property taxes, we've got a combo of schools that have enough money that they've reached the point of diminishing returns in spending, alongside schools that are struggling to provide basic services and just stay fully staffed. Which is a great way to get an education system where there's a lot of spending, and also a lot of students that aren't doing well.
You've failed to answer the most important question:
Is there any level of evidence that would ever cause you to question your allegiance to Republicans and hatred of the left?
If you can't answer that, then it means that your partisan identity determines your worldview, not facts. The third-party fact-checking organizations you ask for exist, and they show that many Republicans lie more than their counterparts, particularly your boy DJT, who is the least honest politician on record.
We believe in the rule of law and the integrity of the rank and file at the FBI and DOJ to do their job to faithfully uphold the law.
What? Your leader is saying that the FBI is "in tatters" and playing shamelessly partisan politics with the agency. He's fired people and tried to use his political power to influence investigations into his buddies. Many of these "deep state leftists" are people that TRUMP himself appointed. The "Rule of Law" is a fucking joke with this administration, and there has been no greater threat to the constitution in generations.
I along with most conservatives have no illusions about Trump.
To me, it sounds like you have plenty of illusions about your guy, and total gullibility regarding the other guy. Which seem to fit exactly with your preconceptions regarding political parties.
There are lots of reasons for not reporting a crime immediately - fear of retaliation, confusion, shame at being a victim, a reluctance to begin the drama of a criminal trial. It seems to me that a much more objective view is that men with power tend to use it to get sex, and that where there are accusers, Occam's razor says that the most likely result is that the accuser is being truthful. And for any financial incentive for reporting, there is at least as much financial incentive for keeping quiet (there's clear use of hush money with Stormy Daniels, and that wasn't even criminal).
There are MANY, MANY men in power who are loathed by both the left and the right, and yet we only see accusations of sexual assault for a small (but troublingly significant) subset. GWB was loathed by the left, but we never saw any accusations of sexual crimes. Obama was loathed by the right, yet nobody claimed improper sexual behavior. Trump has a history of words, behaviors, and reports suggesting he's a sexual criminal, full stop. Anybody who says otherwise is a shameless partisan.
The solution to the fake news media is an independent journalism association that evaluates and rates news and outlets based on the facts as known as well as track records of outlets. The evaluation has to be transparent and accountable and based on the simple question of getting the facts right, complete and with background and context. Not reporting major stories would also get a news outlet down rated, as story suppression is tantamount to lying by omission. Politifact and fact check.org started out with that goal, but they have both been completely infiltrated by the alt left, to the point where they are now actually just as bad if not worse with rabid bias than the MSM...
Hmm... Except politifact is exactly what you ask for, and when THEY have been rated by outside, third-party organizations, they have done very well. Heck, it's simple to see with a momentary wiki search that they are critical of the left: The 2013 Lie of the Year was Barack Obama's promise that "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it". As evidence, PolitiFact cited 4 million cancellation letters sent to American health insurance consumers.
What if politifact IS generally accurate? What if your side IS based more on mistruths? What would convince you of that? Is there any level of evidence that would ever cause you to question your allegiance to Republicans and hatred of the left?
Has had numerous people murdered, including Vince Foster, Jim McDougal and Ron Brown. The Clintons are clearly mob connected and have had numerous people killed: http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2...
Do you realize just how susceptible you are to fake news? This study is about you, and the kind of conspiracy theories you subscribe to. Honestly, your posts start out semi-rational, but then you just devolve into full-out lunacy.
Here's a measure for you: do you believe the sexual assault allegations against Trump less than, as much as, or more than the allegations against Bill Clinton? Your answer to that will reveal whether you are a mindless partisan or someone who attempts to evaluate evidence rationally.
What evidence would be sufficient to convince you that your conspiracy theory is wrong? If you don't have a specific standard in mind, that suggests that your theory is not falsifiable, and therefore not really evidence-based. You hate "hard core alt left fascists" because it feels good.
We spend more than any other OECD country on K-12 education - and our students typically end up near the middle, or in the bottom half. Spending != performance, at least in the US.
"We" meaning the average of the country. Kansas is at the bottom of the barrel in education spending. There are some states (generally blue ones), that spend far, far more, which pulls the average way up. Exorbitant spending isn't required to have effective education, but there is such a thing as funding so low that it becomes impossible to run a school properly. Kansas has been in that situation for quite a while.
You haven't visited a college campus in this century, have you?
Have you? Sure, there are professors that want you to parrot their opinions back to them. However, there are also political groups of every stripe, political demonstrations (sometimes of very graphic stuff like aborted fetuses), speakers on all sorts of topics... I can think of no place that promotes the free exchange of ideas more than a college campus.
School funding isn't the answer, or even the question.
That's just obviously wrong. There is a massive teacher shortage right now, in large part because of teacher pay and work conditions. In every other industry, it's accepted that you get what you pay for when it comes to employees. The countries with the best education systems pay teachers better than ours, generally.
Also, teachers with STEM degrees? Where is that?
Ever had a math or science teacher? At least in my state, those teachers are required to have a B.S. in the subject area they teach, and often have a minor in education. Speaking from experience, I taught for about a year, saw that it was a bullshit career, and then decided to leave for industry and use that STEM degree to approximately quadruple my earnings. New teachers are leaving in droves because the pay is shit, the students and parents offer no respect, the performance scrutiny is worse than just about any other career, and the weekly hours are brutal. I've worked in software development, aerospace engineering, and IT, and none of them have been close to as demanding as teaching.
Completely unrelated. SLS is not designed to service the ISS
It is related because it part of NASA's budget that could be used for other things. It is related because the shuttle was the last vehicle NASA used that was too expensive.
No, supporting the ISS or not has nothing to do with supporting SLS or not. SLS doesn't go to the ISS, the ISS budget doesn't depend on SLS, the SLS budget doesn't depend on the ISS. ISS is serviced by Soyuz, SpaceX, and a variety of commercial launch providers.
That if you want the ISS to keep running those partners pay their fair share.
Define "fair share". Do you want it determined by who derives the most benefit? By who gets the most astronaut hours? By who gets the science? The U.S. is the greatest contributor, but it is also the greatest beneficiary.
"It's not fair" is about the weakest argument you can offer, the type of rhetoric that 5-year-olds often resort to, but unfortunately you and a lot of Trumpists seem to think it is compelling.
A better question would be: what have we gotten in return for our involvement? The ISS has given us more knowledge about long-duration manned spaceflight than we ever had, and has actually given the U.S. some significant expertise in building space stations - Skylab was a pretty minimal effort compared to MIR, so this has developed a level of knowledge and capability that we didn't previously have. We wouldn't have the practical knowledge about on-orbit assembly that we now have. You can argue that the ISS was key to starting a new era of low-cost space access, considering that SpaceX wouldn't exist today without the COTS ISS resupply award.
If NASA doesn't have to develop a new rocket (heavy lift and human cargo) to achieve orbit then they have more budget for science and research.
Completely unrelated. SLS is not designed to service the ISS.
The ISS is supposed to be international yet the US has contributed far more than the other partners.
In 2010 the cost was expected to be $150 billion. This includes NASA's budget of $58.7 billion (inflation-unadjusted) for the station from 1985 to 2015
So the U.S. has paid a bit over a third of the cost - what do you expect? We're one of only two participating countries that had manned space capability - the other being Russia, who is far, far poorer. We've got an aerospace industry that dwarves all the others. The ISS is cheaper per man/hour of research than single country stations have been. The whole thing has really been a massive project to sustain the leadership of the U.S. aerospace industry, while getting other countries to pick up a good chunk of the tab.
I'll believe that a politician is serious about getting NASA on the right track when they move to cancel the SLS mandate which is an economic and technological boondoggle, and then gets their fingers out of the cookie jar and gives NASA the modest funding increases that are requested rather than treating the agency as a political football.
Depending where you are, the cost of living here (CO) isn't particularly low, but we are consistently in the worst 10 states for school funding and teacher pay. Last I checked, starting salaries for teachers ranged from about $26k - $40k in the state. Some charter schools I know of TOP OUT at $38k/yr - that's with 30 years of experience and a doctorate.
Money in schools is just like money in life - if you've got enough to get by, an excess isn't going to improve things that much, but if you don't have enough for the basics, things are going to be miserable. The federal government is NOT dumping cash into education, and the schools that are well funded are the ones where local taxes are high.
We're still missing one of the most interesting pieces - whether artificial gravity works as expected, and what side effects it has on astronauts. Many long-term visions of space travel rely on this technology, but it has never actually been tested. There was a module built for these experiments by Japan, but for funding reasons it never flew.
If commercial space companies will only do what's profitable for them, then NASA should do the R&D that's unprofitable: cleaning up space junk, blue skies science, and basic research.
You know what would ACTUALLY convince me that someone at the top cared about NASA? A rearticulation of their mission to be exactly this: focus on basic research, technological development, and doing the foundational proof-of-concept work that paves the way for space tech to be commercialized. And then politicians should GTFO and let NASA determine for itself the best way to achieve those goals. As it is, this looks more like a first move in a strategy to gut NASA as a whole.
So much money has been added to gov education over the decades from the gov and private sector in the USA.
The amount per student in some city and states should have produced amazing results if a lack of spending in the past was the only problem.
What the hell are you talking about? In my state, total per-pupil funding is about $7000-$8000/yr, and has barely been keeping pace with inflation. For reference, daycare for one kid costs about $2000 PER MONTH here - what the schools get is a pittance by comparison. And keep in mind that daycare can be done by college students and stay-at-home moms, while teachers must have a bachelor's degree, minimum, and often have an advanced degree. Many of those are STEM degrees, worth quite a bit in industry.
The schools haven't been adequately funded for decades, and things are only getting worse.
Not that that's the NSA's fault, as an agency - that's entirely on their then-management in the White House, and those in the White House granted the power to troll through signal intelligence and the ability to unmask citizens from their collected communications. Here's looking at you, Susan Rice.
If you don't want people in the government to be able to spy on its citizens, maybe you should just oppose the collection of the information outright. I don't understand why you draw a line between one government entity and another invading the privacy of U.S. citizens. The NSA has no business collecting this information on U.S. citizens, period.
Slashdot Mirror
The debt is just the sum of all the deficits. And Clinton never run a surplus
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
09/30/1998 5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997 5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996 5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995 4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994 4,692,749,910,013.32
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139.38
09/30/1992 4,064,620,655,521.66
09/30/1991 3,665,303,351,697.03
Each year the debt increased because each year a deficit was run. Including 2000, Clinton's claimed 'surplus year'.
You're attacking a point that is at best tangential to my contention: that the GOP is the party of debt. Your own figures illustrate my point perfectly - look at the derivative of the debt figures you provide (just subtract one from the next, to find the deficit), and you'll see that the growth of the debt is shrinking, on average, throughout Clinton's administration. By your numbers, at the beginning, the deficit inherited from GHWB was adding ~$400B/yr to the national debt. At the end of Clinton's administration, the deficit was reduced to 1/4th of that. Look at the figures for Reagan, GWB, or now Trump, and you'll see the opposite trend - higher and higher deficits every year. Obama inherited a truly massive deficit, and once again lowered it dramatically over the course of his two terms.
If you care about the national debt, you should never, ever vote a Republican into the Oval Office. Their stated goal ("starve the beast" philosophy) is to increase the debt to try to force the government to shrink. Like increasing your credit card debt to force yourself to be more frugal.
It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it.
Each one of those increased the debt
https://www.thebalance.com/us-...
If you actually read what I wrote, you'll notice that I made a claim regarding deficits, not debt. Debt tells you very little about a given president's influence - because frequently a president inherits a massive deficit, so it's more or less a given that the debt will increase under their tenure. What you should really look at is whether the deficit is increasing, which tells us whether the president is moving the trend towards a balanced budget, or turning towards higher levels of debt. Republican presidents for the last few decades have increased the deficit, increasing the rate at which the debt grows, while Democratic presidents have decreased the deficit, or even moved us into a surplus, in Clinton's case.
If you care about the national debt, voting for a Republican president is, historically speaking, a terrible move. We can see that playing out in Washington right now. Anybody who thinks the GOP is fiscally conservative hasn't been paying attention for a very long time.
Democrats don't hold a candle to Republicans when it comes to increasing national debt. It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it. Reagan started what's now a time-honored tradition of Republican presidents dicking over the next generation by driving up the deficit through some combination of unfunded tax cuts and increased spending.
Dispute this with "alternative facts" all you want, but there's nothing tricky about the math - just look at the chart. And the thing is, it is DELIBERATE on the part of the "conservatives"... they decided to institute a "starve the beast" philosophy in the Reagan era, where they intentionally drive up debt to try to force government spending down. Similar to charging up your credit cards to try to force yourself to be more frugal.
Just spend 2 minutes actually reading and you'll see. The GOP has become the debt party and the instant gratification party, and this latest move of massive spending ceilings and unfunded tax cuts is just more of the same. The biggest shame is that Schumer's no better in this case, he's crowing right along with them about selling out our grandkids.
What they're *not* free to do however is to enforce policies, terms, and rules arbitrarily, unequally, and unfairly.
Outside of a few protected classes, they absolutely are. Businesses commonly refuse service because of clothing, which is pretty damn arbitrary (no shoes, no shirt, no service?).
But hey, not everyone can pass the marshmallow test like Northern Europeans I suppose. So they blame Northern Europeans for climate change and demand cash.
The U.S. is failing the marshmallow test as we speak - huge tax cuts and massive spending increases at a time when the economy is already strong, and the GOP controls ALL branches of government. Apparently there are no longer any adults in charge who realize that if you don't pay down your debt during the good times, things will get really ugly in the bad times.
A simple, idealized model isn't hard. Suppose a 99% chance of success (no explode) per engine.
The raw probability of a vehicle NOT having an engine failure is just P^n in this case, which means that you have a 99% chance of a problem-free flight with one engine, but a 95.1% chance with 5 engines, and only a 91% chance with 9 engines... all the way down to 76% chance of no failure at 27 engines. Thankfully, real rocket engines are much better than 99% reliable.
So, the chance of at least one failure increases dramatically as your engine count goes up - however, if you can still succeed with one engine out, that means that you only fail when 2 or more engines go out. This is a very unlikely event (1% * 1% chance, roughly, although there are 10 different "pairs" of engines that could go out in a 5 engine rocket) so that means that while you have a 95.1% chance of flying without an engine failure, you have a 99.9% chance of making it to orbit.
With 9 engines and 1-engine out capability, you have a 99.6% chance of mission success, and with 27 engines, assuming that 3 can go out, you have a 99.98% chance of completing the mission.
This is the most simplistic, idealized model, but it shows the basic principal - engine-out capability does a LOT for you, in terms of reliability. However, there is a no-mans land between 1 engine and 5 engine designs where chance of failure is going up linearly but you haven't yet achieved engine-out capability, so a 2, 3, or 4 engine designs aren't well optimized in that one, limited sense.
And you are at least partly wrong: http://time.com/5019182/george...
In that particular case, there's no real doubt about the groping - he's a well-known lecherous geezer who makes a joke about "David Cop-A-Feel" before grabbing someone's ass, and that was consistent with the claim - he admitted as much and apoligized. It really just proves my point though - that in the vast majority of cases, claims are not manufactured, and when they are, they are usually easy to disprove. (There was one politician where claims were made recently, but he had solid proof that he wasn't even in the same state during the dates in question).
Whether or not something is actionable in a legal sense has nothing to do with whether it is moral or not - a murder is a murder, even 20 years after the fact, and a rape or any other kind of sexual crime continues to be morally wrong, whether it has been 1 year or 30. It's also directly relevant to concerns about the character of political aspirants, or at least it ought to be. It's tragic that the party that used to stand on "family values" and morals has been furiously defending adultery, sexual assault and pedophilia in its candidates.
You all will be screaming about abuse of power by Trump as the 15 actually corrupt FBI and DOJ officials are frog marched out, tried and convicted of actual crimes.
I was screaming about abuse of power by Trump before he was even elected, when it was painfully clear from his own statements that he's an authoritarian wannabe dictator, who can't tell you the first thing about the constitution. He's happy to discriminate based on religion, he wants limits on free speech, and he's transparently using Soviet-era techniques to demonize his opponents... he happily called democrats treasonous for NOT CLAPPING. That's downright Orwellian. It's not like his tweets are filtered by the "MSM" - I can just read his opinions for myself, and see that he's the kind of guy I wouldn't hang out with, hire, work for, or associate with on any level if I could help it - he's an untrustworthy narcissist.
It's honestly just sad for me to see how willing people are to follow him. Your very use of the "alt-left" terminology shows that you're playing into the fake news... because the "alt-left" only exists as a term since Trump made it up. It's not in any way comparable to the alt-right, which is a movement that actually named itself, and which has many different players and ideological branches, and a substantial online community. Leftist extremists do exist, but the ones that exist in government are the people like Bernie.
The level of cognitive dissonance I see makes me suspect that there is no evidence whatsoever that would ever convince you that Trump did indeed obstruct justice, or potentially collude with the Russian government, or is otherwise just an aspiring dictator. That's what I really want to understand - have you considered that you could be wrong? That maybe there isn't a conspiracy theory against him? Is there any realistic scenario where you abandon your support for him? Because it seems to me that even if there is unambiguous evidence that he's broken the law, his supporters will continue to support him and demonize his opponents.
And, for what it's worth, I think the FISA courts are easily abusable and I've been concerned about the erosion of civil protections and intelligence accountability ever since the Patriot Act - overall I think it's a positive thing that there's some light being shed on these secret courts. That said, in this case, it's plainly obvious from the timing and circumstances of the release that this isn't an attempt to improve government accountability, but instead is a baldly partisan move to discredit the FBI and take some heat off of DJT. And, before you cry "MSM", these are opinions I've formed just from reading the goddamned memo itself.
Kansas spends about $10K per student which is above average for the OECD (which is around $9300 per student, per my link from CBS News).
Again, you are committing the logical error of considering that because the average is acceptable, that general funding is acceptable. Kansas has some very well funded schools in affluent areas, but recently the Kansas supreme court ruled that the funding was "unconstitutionally low" for many districts.
Perhaps it's not how much is spent - but HOW it is spent
I'll raise you one more - WHERE it is spent matters a great deal. On aggregate, it can look like we spend plenty on education. But due to the fact that schools are generally funded by local property taxes, we've got a combo of schools that have enough money that they've reached the point of diminishing returns in spending, alongside schools that are struggling to provide basic services and just stay fully staffed. Which is a great way to get an education system where there's a lot of spending, and also a lot of students that aren't doing well.
You've failed to answer the most important question:
Is there any level of evidence that would ever cause you to question your allegiance to Republicans and hatred of the left?
If you can't answer that, then it means that your partisan identity determines your worldview, not facts. The third-party fact-checking organizations you ask for exist, and they show that many Republicans lie more than their counterparts, particularly your boy DJT, who is the least honest politician on record.
We believe in the rule of law and the integrity of the rank and file at the FBI and DOJ to do their job to faithfully uphold the law.
What? Your leader is saying that the FBI is "in tatters" and playing shamelessly partisan politics with the agency. He's fired people and tried to use his political power to influence investigations into his buddies. Many of these "deep state leftists" are people that TRUMP himself appointed. The "Rule of Law" is a fucking joke with this administration, and there has been no greater threat to the constitution in generations.
I along with most conservatives have no illusions about Trump.
To me, it sounds like you have plenty of illusions about your guy, and total gullibility regarding the other guy. Which seem to fit exactly with your preconceptions regarding political parties.
There are lots of reasons for not reporting a crime immediately - fear of retaliation, confusion, shame at being a victim, a reluctance to begin the drama of a criminal trial. It seems to me that a much more objective view is that men with power tend to use it to get sex, and that where there are accusers, Occam's razor says that the most likely result is that the accuser is being truthful. And for any financial incentive for reporting, there is at least as much financial incentive for keeping quiet (there's clear use of hush money with Stormy Daniels, and that wasn't even criminal).
There are MANY, MANY men in power who are loathed by both the left and the right, and yet we only see accusations of sexual assault for a small (but troublingly significant) subset. GWB was loathed by the left, but we never saw any accusations of sexual crimes. Obama was loathed by the right, yet nobody claimed improper sexual behavior. Trump has a history of words, behaviors, and reports suggesting he's a sexual criminal, full stop. Anybody who says otherwise is a shameless partisan.
The solution to the fake news media is an independent journalism association that evaluates and rates news and outlets based on the facts as known as well as track records of outlets. The evaluation has to be transparent and accountable and based on the simple question of getting the facts right, complete and with background and context. Not reporting major stories would also get a news outlet down rated, as story suppression is tantamount to lying by omission. Politifact and fact check.org started out with that goal, but they have both been completely infiltrated by the alt left, to the point where they are now actually just as bad if not worse with rabid bias than the MSM...
Hmm... Except politifact is exactly what you ask for, and when THEY have been rated by outside, third-party organizations, they have done very well. Heck, it's simple to see with a momentary wiki search that they are critical of the left: The 2013 Lie of the Year was Barack Obama's promise that "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it". As evidence, PolitiFact cited 4 million cancellation letters sent to American health insurance consumers.
What if politifact IS generally accurate? What if your side IS based more on mistruths? What would convince you of that? Is there any level of evidence that would ever cause you to question your allegiance to Republicans and hatred of the left?
Has had numerous people murdered, including Vince Foster, Jim McDougal and Ron Brown. The Clintons are clearly mob connected and have had numerous people killed: http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2...
Do you realize just how susceptible you are to fake news? This study is about you, and the kind of conspiracy theories you subscribe to. Honestly, your posts start out semi-rational, but then you just devolve into full-out lunacy.
Here's a measure for you: do you believe the sexual assault allegations against Trump less than, as much as, or more than the allegations against Bill Clinton? Your answer to that will reveal whether you are a mindless partisan or someone who attempts to evaluate evidence rationally.
What evidence would be sufficient to convince you that your conspiracy theory is wrong? If you don't have a specific standard in mind, that suggests that your theory is not falsifiable, and therefore not really evidence-based. You hate "hard core alt left fascists" because it feels good.
We spend more than any other OECD country on K-12 education - and our students typically end up near the middle, or in the bottom half. Spending != performance, at least in the US.
"We" meaning the average of the country. Kansas is at the bottom of the barrel in education spending. There are some states (generally blue ones), that spend far, far more, which pulls the average way up. Exorbitant spending isn't required to have effective education, but there is such a thing as funding so low that it becomes impossible to run a school properly. Kansas has been in that situation for quite a while.
You haven't visited a college campus in this century, have you?
Have you? Sure, there are professors that want you to parrot their opinions back to them. However, there are also political groups of every stripe, political demonstrations (sometimes of very graphic stuff like aborted fetuses), speakers on all sorts of topics... I can think of no place that promotes the free exchange of ideas more than a college campus.
School funding isn't the answer, or even the question.
That's just obviously wrong. There is a massive teacher shortage right now, in large part because of teacher pay and work conditions. In every other industry, it's accepted that you get what you pay for when it comes to employees. The countries with the best education systems pay teachers better than ours, generally.
Also, teachers with STEM degrees? Where is that?
Ever had a math or science teacher? At least in my state, those teachers are required to have a B.S. in the subject area they teach, and often have a minor in education. Speaking from experience, I taught for about a year, saw that it was a bullshit career, and then decided to leave for industry and use that STEM degree to approximately quadruple my earnings. New teachers are leaving in droves because the pay is shit, the students and parents offer no respect, the performance scrutiny is worse than just about any other career, and the weekly hours are brutal. I've worked in software development, aerospace engineering, and IT, and none of them have been close to as demanding as teaching.
Completely unrelated. SLS is not designed to service the ISS
It is related because it part of NASA's budget that could be used for other things. It is related because the shuttle was the last vehicle NASA used that was too expensive.
No, supporting the ISS or not has nothing to do with supporting SLS or not. SLS doesn't go to the ISS, the ISS budget doesn't depend on SLS, the SLS budget doesn't depend on the ISS. ISS is serviced by Soyuz, SpaceX, and a variety of commercial launch providers.
That if you want the ISS to keep running those partners pay their fair share.
Define "fair share". Do you want it determined by who derives the most benefit? By who gets the most astronaut hours? By who gets the science? The U.S. is the greatest contributor, but it is also the greatest beneficiary.
"It's not fair" is about the weakest argument you can offer, the type of rhetoric that 5-year-olds often resort to, but unfortunately you and a lot of Trumpists seem to think it is compelling.
A better question would be: what have we gotten in return for our involvement? The ISS has given us more knowledge about long-duration manned spaceflight than we ever had, and has actually given the U.S. some significant expertise in building space stations - Skylab was a pretty minimal effort compared to MIR, so this has developed a level of knowledge and capability that we didn't previously have. We wouldn't have the practical knowledge about on-orbit assembly that we now have. You can argue that the ISS was key to starting a new era of low-cost space access, considering that SpaceX wouldn't exist today without the COTS ISS resupply award.
If NASA doesn't have to develop a new rocket (heavy lift and human cargo) to achieve orbit then they have more budget for science and research.
Completely unrelated. SLS is not designed to service the ISS.
The ISS is supposed to be international yet the US has contributed far more than the other partners.
In 2010 the cost was expected to be $150 billion. This includes NASA's budget of $58.7 billion (inflation-unadjusted) for the station from 1985 to 2015
So the U.S. has paid a bit over a third of the cost - what do you expect? We're one of only two participating countries that had manned space capability - the other being Russia, who is far, far poorer. We've got an aerospace industry that dwarves all the others. The ISS is cheaper per man/hour of research than single country stations have been. The whole thing has really been a massive project to sustain the leadership of the U.S. aerospace industry, while getting other countries to pick up a good chunk of the tab.
I'll believe that a politician is serious about getting NASA on the right track when they move to cancel the SLS mandate which is an economic and technological boondoggle, and then gets their fingers out of the cookie jar and gives NASA the modest funding increases that are requested rather than treating the agency as a political football.
Depending where you are, the cost of living here (CO) isn't particularly low, but we are consistently in the worst 10 states for school funding and teacher pay. Last I checked, starting salaries for teachers ranged from about $26k - $40k in the state. Some charter schools I know of TOP OUT at $38k/yr - that's with 30 years of experience and a doctorate.
Money in schools is just like money in life - if you've got enough to get by, an excess isn't going to improve things that much, but if you don't have enough for the basics, things are going to be miserable. The federal government is NOT dumping cash into education, and the schools that are well funded are the ones where local taxes are high.
We're still missing one of the most interesting pieces - whether artificial gravity works as expected, and what side effects it has on astronauts. Many long-term visions of space travel rely on this technology, but it has never actually been tested. There was a module built for these experiments by Japan, but for funding reasons it never flew.
If commercial space companies will only do what's profitable for them, then NASA should do the R&D that's unprofitable: cleaning up space junk, blue skies science, and basic research.
You know what would ACTUALLY convince me that someone at the top cared about NASA? A rearticulation of their mission to be exactly this: focus on basic research, technological development, and doing the foundational proof-of-concept work that paves the way for space tech to be commercialized. And then politicians should GTFO and let NASA determine for itself the best way to achieve those goals. As it is, this looks more like a first move in a strategy to gut NASA as a whole.
So much money has been added to gov education over the decades from the gov and private sector in the USA.
The amount per student in some city and states should have produced amazing results if a lack of spending in the past was the only problem.
What the hell are you talking about? In my state, total per-pupil funding is about $7000-$8000/yr, and has barely been keeping pace with inflation. For reference, daycare for one kid costs about $2000 PER MONTH here - what the schools get is a pittance by comparison. And keep in mind that daycare can be done by college students and stay-at-home moms, while teachers must have a bachelor's degree, minimum, and often have an advanced degree. Many of those are STEM degrees, worth quite a bit in industry.
The schools haven't been adequately funded for decades, and things are only getting worse.
Not that that's the NSA's fault, as an agency - that's entirely on their then-management in the White House, and those in the White House granted the power to troll through signal intelligence and the ability to unmask citizens from their collected communications. Here's looking at you, Susan Rice.
If you don't want people in the government to be able to spy on its citizens, maybe you should just oppose the collection of the information outright. I don't understand why you draw a line between one government entity and another invading the privacy of U.S. citizens. The NSA has no business collecting this information on U.S. citizens, period.