Republicans can get away with shutting down the government because of gerrymandering. If more of them feared for their position, they'd be a lot more careful than this.
Actually, it's even worse than that. They do fear for their position, it's just the fear the opposite of what should happen in a democratic system. Those seats are safe for any Republican, so the thing they fear most is a challenge from a Tea Party backed conservative in the primary. The Tea Party is more motivated than the rank and file Republicans which makes it easier for these challengers to displace more moderate Republicans. In a fair election system, those challengers would be at a disadvantage in the general election, however, because of gerrymandering, those challengers can ride the popular support for the Repubican brand to victory even as they hate everything it stands for. The effect is to drag the whole party rightward because most of them need to worry more about Tea Party backed challengers than they do the general election. Effectively, the Republican party is now infested with political parasites*.
* Some people would say that's nothing new, but it seems the goal of the Tea Party is kill the Republican party and take it's place. Whether they have to do it from the inside or the outside.
Lots people are going to now jump in and bitch about how SS does pay for itself. Fine taken as individual accounts that's true, the value of the fund and interest does cover the outlay, but its also true the money has been spent on other things, lent to the treasury. So now the money must come from general funds.
While true, that has nothing to do SS itself. The government is paying back the loan it issued to itself. The problem is that those loans should be on the books, not off the books like they are now.
Many of the GOP that started this were voted in on the promise to try and stop Obamacare no matter what it takes (which, in turn, is what won them the House to begin with)...
Actually, the GOP should have lost the house. The Democrats won the popular vote by 1.2%, or more than a million votes, but because of gerrymandering by the states, the Republicans maintain an 34 seat edge over the Democrats despite getting fewer votes. So in effect, the people who were holding the Government hostage are mostly Tea Party candidates who defeated more moderate Republicans during the primaries and went on to win safe seats that probably didn't even need to campaign for. So it's highly likely that their promises to overturn Obamacare won them the primary, but the effect on the general election is hard to gauge because they were expected to win regardless of what they did.
So how much tax on the super wealthy is right? 70%? 100%?
I think it was close to 98% for the top income bracket around World War 2, but that's probably too high. The current 15% on investment income seems a bit low, though, so it should probably be somewhere between those extremes. There's a reaonable argument that it should probably go over 50% at some absurdly large number to discourage investors from bidding up wages past reasonable levels in the quest for superstar executives. For example, the top bracket could be set to 100 times the average American income with a tax rate of 75%. I know and understand the argument that this would be forcing an individual to give up most of the value of his work as taxes, but in practice what happened when taxes were similarly high in the past is that wages that went into the top bracket(s) weren't offered. Instead stock and perks were used instead because they became obviously more cost-effective compensation (and may actually benefit the companies hiring the executives because the stock and perks are less expensive than dealing with spiralling executive salaries).
What prevents them from using that super wealth to offer the country both middle fingers and move somewhere that doesn't want to reach into their wallet and take everything?
Reality? The simple truth is that most rich people don't want to live in any of the countries that have very low tax rates on the rich. A perceptive person might see cause and effect in that statement.
But the rural/urban effect would produce the same effect. Take a town of 10 people -- introduce one Democrat and you suddenly have 10% of the popular vote. Take a city of 100,000 -- introduce one Democrat and you haven't scratched the surface of the popular vote. Denser areas will always exhibit those kind of skews.
Except districts aren't actually divided up that way. Each district has to have approximately the same number of people in it. So if a town with 100,000 people were a district, (I think it's actually closer to 700,000 voters per district), the rural district would have 10,000 towns of 10 people. Adding one voter to either riding would have the same effect. Rural ridings aren't legally allowed to have significantly fewer voters than urban ridings.
maybe most people in Democrat cities don't even bother to come out to vote since they know which way the city is going to vote regardless
That's certainly possible, but it would show up in both the popular vote (for congress) and the number of congressional districts won, people who don't vote can't create a discrepancy between the two.
or maybe it's only the demographics of the swing states that end up mattering
There aren't any swings states in Congress, that's an artefact of the electoral college which only applies in Presidential elections.
I honestly have no clue, but I don't believe there's enough evidence to chalk the entire effect up to gerrymandering (or at least enough of an effect to be significant).
Well, if we look at the difference in Texas between Democratic gerrymandering and Republican gerrymandering we can get an idea. In 2002 the Republicans had 15 seats and the Democrats had 17, in 2004 without much change in the popular vote for congress, that switched to 21 seats for the Republicans and 11 for the Democrats. So, switching the direction of the gerrymandering flipped 6 seats (roughly 20%). It was considered so important in the Republican plan to maintain a permanent majority in the Congress that the federal House Majority Leader, Tom Delay went to Texas to personally supervise parts of the operation. I don't know that all of the 30 extra seats (~7%) that the Republicans have were won by gerrymandering, but if we credit both the Democratic and Republican gerrymandering with half the result (3 seats), 20% of the extra seats would be directly a result on gerrymandering in Texas. At that rate the Republicans would only need to gerrymander 4 more states than the Democrats to create their unrepresentative advantage (each flipped seat counts as 2 points - +1 to Republicans and -1 to Democrats). Of course, Texas is big, so most other states would probably yield fewer flipped seats.
Though I'm against gerrymandering to benefit either side -- I think the lines should be either random, based on geographic landmarks, or somehow generated by computer. No one should be making a judgment call, and they should ALWAYS be contiguous regions.
I think the urban versus rural distinction is actually muddying the underlying issue (which is likely why Republican pundits repeat it, it's more palatable than acknowledging that the majority of congressional elections are fixed). The issue is not that there are more rural districts than urban districts, because that is already represented in the lower amount of popular support for the Democrats across the state. The discrepancy between the popular vote and the election results actually occurs because the Democratic vote is more highly concentrated in the few ridings they do win than the Republican vote in the many ridings they win. Looking at the 2012 results, while this isn't an absolute pattern, most of the Republican ridings were won win with between 60-70% of the popular vote and most of Democratic ridings were won with 70-80% of the popular vote. This is exactly what gerry-mandering is supposed to do, concentrate the vote of the other party into as few ridings as possible and spreads your party more thinly across the other ridings to ensure victory by a smaller but still safe margin. The ultimate goal is to waste as many of the other party's votes as possible so you can maximize the number of seats your party wins.
The urban versus rural distinction just seems like a distraction to encourage you not to think about the gerrymandering that produced that result, it's pretty much code for saying "the Democrats deserve it because they're not real Americans like us". There's even a Wikipedia article on the difference the 2003 Texas Redistricting made.
Of course, before the 2003 redistricting, Texas was gerrymandered to benefit the Democrats which also subverted the will of the people. I'm not playing the blame the Republicans game here, the real problem is that the U.S. system has institutionalised systems that distort the results of congressional elections to the point where around 95% of the districts are more vulnerable to changes in the state election results than they are to changes in the federal results. Most ridings require over a 10% shift in support towards one party or the other to actually become competitive. Both major parties are responsible for this, however, at the current time the cumulative effect of gerrymandering gives the Republicans significantly more seats in Congress than they should actually have.
That is true, but it's not actually all that uncommon.
I don't think it's all that common, according to Wikipedia, it's only happened once since the 1940s
Many left voters tend to live in densely populated areas like cities whereas Republicans are more spread out across rural areas of the country. Those demographics will always favor Republicans where it comes to winning districts, with or without gerrymandering.
I've read a similar argument from some Republican pundits, but I don't see how that actually favours Republicans. Whether a district is densely populated or not, it should have about the same number of voters per district.
Several people noted that it is validly cached with the Etag and Last modified headers, so a better question might be why aren't they serving jquery-1.8.2.min.js? From the jQuery blog:
Well it certainly means you don't need to choose a health insurance provider*. So I guess it elminates at least one choice.
Government = good becasue they don't give you freedom and choices.
I'm not sure what choices you're expecting to lose. In the 60s there was an advertising campaign in Canada by a group of doctors warning that single-payer health care would end choices for both doctors and patients before the implementation of the Canadian single-payer systems (each province has it's own). Now, 50 years later, that has not only changed their position, they've found that the single payer systems have given doctors and patients more freedom than they used to have under private insurance and they absolutely do not want to go back to private insurance. In the end, single-payer was exactly the opposite of what they had feared it would be.
Nobel Prizes for doing absolutely fuck all and research grants so they can pay their mortgages.
If you were a scientist, you couldn't use any grant money to pay your mortgage. If you did, it would be theft. Grant money must be spent on doing the actual research.
What a load of utter tripe. Antarctic ice sheet gains exceed losses
That was a workshop based on preliminary results, here's the final research paper from the same scientist:
We combined an ensemble of satellite altimetry, interferometry, and gravimetry data sets using common geographical regions, time intervals, and models of surface mass balance and glacial isostatic adjustment to estimate the mass balance of Earth’s polar ice sheets. We find that there is good agreement between different satellite methods—especially in Greenland and West Antarctica—and that combining satellite data sets leads to greater certainty. Between 1992 and 2011, the ice sheets of Greenland, East Antarctica, West Antarctica, and the Antarctic Peninsula changed in mass by –142 ± 49, +14 ± 43, –65 ± 26, and –20 ± 14 gigatonnes year1, respectively. Since 1992, the polar ice sheets have contributed, on average, 0.59 ± 0.20 millimeter year1 to the rate of global sea-level rise.
Note the total is -213 ± 142.
Listen, here's the deal: You lost. Your narrative of catastrophic climate change due to man emitting Co2 into the atmosphere is a busted flush.
You act like there's some huge discrepancy, when in actuality the gerrymandering effect is far smaller (namely that it becomes the "will of the people" plus or minus a small number). At any rate, in 2010, the House took not only 63 House seats, but also 6 Senate seats (which are immune from the effects of gerrymandering).
Actually, the vast majority of House seats are assigned to the individual parties (via gerrymandering) and "elected" by party loyalists during the primaries. The People don't get much of a vote in Congress (Between 3% and 5% of congressional seats are considered "competitive"). Interestingly enough, in this house the Democratic candidates got about 1.7 million more votes that the Republican candidates but have 33 fewer seats than the Republicans. So in a very real sense, the People should not be held responsible for Congress, because they didn't get what they voted for.
The new design is pretty awful. This is a news site for people who are supposed to know more than bit about technology and you choose to go with a fixed-width design? That's amateurish by any standards. The pictures make it more colorfull but I actually found that they too large, they move the stuff that I can about (the article summaries) down the page a considerable amount for a picture that has questionable relevance to the topic, and they disrupt the structure of the page to the point of making it difficult to find where to resume reading.
It seems like you need to hire someone with user interface design experience to work on the redesign. It'd currently score the new design at 3/10 which is significantly worse than the current design.
Perhaps you could concede that the House - which is rather more democratically representative than the Senate (although in point of fact NEITHER is much of democratic institution any more) - ALSO has a mandate to pursue an agenda desired by their majority of constituents? Or is it only Democratic constituents that get a voice in Congress?
Considering that congressional districts are routinely gerrymandered (by both parties), it seems like Congrss should be considered significantly less representative than the Senate. For instance, despite the fact that a million more Americans voted for Democrat candidates than Republican candidates in the last congressional election, there are 32 more Republicans than Democrats in the house. That's not what I would consider representative.
For the record, I am not a Republican, nor do I agree with them. But the whole system is broken, and both parties are gaming it wherever they can, so I don't see anything "more illegitimate" about this Congress than any other one.
I was going to say that it was just as illegitimate as evey other gerrymandered congress, before I realize that actually this congress does actually seem more illegitimate. More than a few gerrymandered seats were highjacked by a fringe group of Republicans, I'm not sure if the Tea Party candidates actually represent the will of their constituents or managed to trojan-horse their way into government because of the redistricting. Specifically, it's quite possible that if these seats hadn't been gerrymandered, the Tea Party would have been much less successful in getting their representatives elected and hi-jacking the Republican party. As it is, the important battle in most congressional districts appears to be the nomination battle, not the election.
Mostly my comment was simply meant as a reminder that if you want to claim the moral high ground in representing the "will of the people" you should always make sure that you have more than 50% of the popular vote.
While the people did elect Obama a second time they also elected a majority republican congress at the same time. The people did vote for a divided government, although I do wonder how many people were voting against Romney instead of voting for Obama.Considering that Obama got a higher percentage of the vote than the democrats did in congress (looks to be about 3%) it would seem likely that people were voting against Romney.
You should be aware that the Democrats won the congressional popular vote by around 50.7% to 49.3%, but because of gerrymandering (the practice of dividing congressional districts to subvert the will of the public), they have fewer seats in congress than the Republicans.
They also re-elected a GOP majority in the House where funding bills start.
The House is gerrymandered. It does not accurately represent the will of the people, but rather represents the cumulative will of the parties in control of the states. If I remember correctly, between 95% and 98% of Congressional seats are predetermined by gerrymandering.
Furthermore, you already wrote "Polls show half the country thought the law was already fully in effect until last week or so and the majority don't understand their obligations or the most perfunctory effects the law will have on them" so clearly this can't be the will of the people, if half of them have no idea what the law is or will do. I'm not sure how this could conceivably be seen as anything other than the political obsession of a minority of congress.
You know what, I'm getting very tired at this 'citation needed' crap when someone is clearly providing an anecdote, and not regurgitating research.
What part of "men are much more likely to abuse children than women" and "[custody by the mother] is better for the children 99% of the time" is an anecdote? The "Citation Needed" seems appropriate when someone is making wildly expansive claims with no evidence to back them up.
(Maybe you're hiding -1 posts and not actually seeing the messages these "small, petty and very uninteresting" people are actually responding to?)
Actually, one scientist said if the trend from 2007 continued, there'd be no ice left sometime between 2013 and 2021. Of course, the trend from 2007 didn't continue, but even ignoring that, you'd have to wait 8 more years before you can do your victory dance because the warming isn't quite a bad as it could potentially be.
Actually, it's been falling for almost 10,000 years.
I take that as an admission that, "Let it change, but slowly enough that it does not bother me. My decedents can take care of themselves."
Sometimes simpletons don't understand the difference between stopping a speeding car with the brakes and stopping a speeding car with a brick wall.
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event, because that won't be good for any of us. At some place between 4 and 6 degrees above the baseline, most of the world is going to need new ecosystems. That replacement will be much easier on us, if nature has 1,000 years to adapt than if it has 30.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amused that you are willing to sell your honor, integrity and self-respect for $30/mo.
Republicans can get away with shutting down the government because of gerrymandering. If more of them feared for their position, they'd be a lot more careful than this.
Actually, it's even worse than that. They do fear for their position, it's just the fear the opposite of what should happen in a democratic system. Those seats are safe for any Republican, so the thing they fear most is a challenge from a Tea Party backed conservative in the primary. The Tea Party is more motivated than the rank and file Republicans which makes it easier for these challengers to displace more moderate Republicans. In a fair election system, those challengers would be at a disadvantage in the general election, however, because of gerrymandering, those challengers can ride the popular support for the Repubican brand to victory even as they hate everything it stands for. The effect is to drag the whole party rightward because most of them need to worry more about Tea Party backed challengers than they do the general election. Effectively, the Republican party is now infested with political parasites*.
* Some people would say that's nothing new, but it seems the goal of the Tea Party is kill the Republican party and take it's place. Whether they have to do it from the inside or the outside.
Lots people are going to now jump in and bitch about how SS does pay for itself. Fine taken as individual accounts that's true, the value of the fund and interest does cover the outlay, but its also true the money has been spent on other things, lent to the treasury. So now the money must come from general funds.
While true, that has nothing to do SS itself. The government is paying back the loan it issued to itself. The problem is that those loans should be on the books, not off the books like they are now.
Many of the GOP that started this were voted in on the promise to try and stop Obamacare no matter what it takes (which, in turn, is what won them the House to begin with)...
Actually, the GOP should have lost the house. The Democrats won the popular vote by 1.2%, or more than a million votes, but because of gerrymandering by the states, the Republicans maintain an 34 seat edge over the Democrats despite getting fewer votes. So in effect, the people who were holding the Government hostage are mostly Tea Party candidates who defeated more moderate Republicans during the primaries and went on to win safe seats that probably didn't even need to campaign for. So it's highly likely that their promises to overturn Obamacare won them the primary, but the effect on the general election is hard to gauge because they were expected to win regardless of what they did.
So how much tax on the super wealthy is right? 70%? 100%?
I think it was close to 98% for the top income bracket around World War 2, but that's probably too high. The current 15% on investment income seems a bit low, though, so it should probably be somewhere between those extremes. There's a reaonable argument that it should probably go over 50% at some absurdly large number to discourage investors from bidding up wages past reasonable levels in the quest for superstar executives. For example, the top bracket could be set to 100 times the average American income with a tax rate of 75%. I know and understand the argument that this would be forcing an individual to give up most of the value of his work as taxes, but in practice what happened when taxes were similarly high in the past is that wages that went into the top bracket(s) weren't offered. Instead stock and perks were used instead because they became obviously more cost-effective compensation (and may actually benefit the companies hiring the executives because the stock and perks are less expensive than dealing with spiralling executive salaries).
What prevents them from using that super wealth to offer the country both middle fingers and move somewhere that doesn't want to reach into their wallet and take everything?
Reality? The simple truth is that most rich people don't want to live in any of the countries that have very low tax rates on the rich. A perceptive person might see cause and effect in that statement.
But the rural/urban effect would produce the same effect. Take a town of 10 people -- introduce one Democrat and you suddenly have 10% of the popular vote. Take a city of 100,000 -- introduce one Democrat and you haven't scratched the surface of the popular vote. Denser areas will always exhibit those kind of skews.
Except districts aren't actually divided up that way. Each district has to have approximately the same number of people in it. So if a town with 100,000 people were a district, (I think it's actually closer to 700,000 voters per district), the rural district would have 10,000 towns of 10 people. Adding one voter to either riding would have the same effect. Rural ridings aren't legally allowed to have significantly fewer voters than urban ridings.
maybe most people in Democrat cities don't even bother to come out to vote since they know which way the city is going to vote regardless
That's certainly possible, but it would show up in both the popular vote (for congress) and the number of congressional districts won, people who don't vote can't create a discrepancy between the two.
or maybe it's only the demographics of the swing states that end up mattering
There aren't any swings states in Congress, that's an artefact of the electoral college which only applies in Presidential elections.
I honestly have no clue, but I don't believe there's enough evidence to chalk the entire effect up to gerrymandering (or at least enough of an effect to be significant).
Well, if we look at the difference in Texas between Democratic gerrymandering and Republican gerrymandering we can get an idea. In 2002 the Republicans had 15 seats and the Democrats had 17, in 2004 without much change in the popular vote for congress, that switched to 21 seats for the Republicans and 11 for the Democrats. So, switching the direction of the gerrymandering flipped 6 seats (roughly 20%). It was considered so important in the Republican plan to maintain a permanent majority in the Congress that the federal House Majority Leader, Tom Delay went to Texas to personally supervise parts of the operation. I don't know that all of the 30 extra seats (~7%) that the Republicans have were won by gerrymandering, but if we credit both the Democratic and Republican gerrymandering with half the result (3 seats), 20% of the extra seats would be directly a result on gerrymandering in Texas. At that rate the Republicans would only need to gerrymander 4 more states than the Democrats to create their unrepresentative advantage (each flipped seat counts as 2 points - +1 to Republicans and -1 to Democrats). Of course, Texas is big, so most other states would probably yield fewer flipped seats.
Though I'm against gerrymandering to benefit either side -- I think the lines should be either random, based on geographic landmarks, or somehow generated by computer. No one should be making a judgment call, and they should ALWAYS be contiguous regions.
I completely agree.
I think the urban versus rural distinction is actually muddying the underlying issue (which is likely why Republican pundits repeat it, it's more palatable than acknowledging that the majority of congressional elections are fixed). The issue is not that there are more rural districts than urban districts, because that is already represented in the lower amount of popular support for the Democrats across the state. The discrepancy between the popular vote and the election results actually occurs because the Democratic vote is more highly concentrated in the few ridings they do win than the Republican vote in the many ridings they win. Looking at the 2012 results, while this isn't an absolute pattern, most of the Republican ridings were won win with between 60-70% of the popular vote and most of Democratic ridings were won with 70-80% of the popular vote. This is exactly what gerry-mandering is supposed to do, concentrate the vote of the other party into as few ridings as possible and spreads your party more thinly across the other ridings to ensure victory by a smaller but still safe margin. The ultimate goal is to waste as many of the other party's votes as possible so you can maximize the number of seats your party wins.
The urban versus rural distinction just seems like a distraction to encourage you not to think about the gerrymandering that produced that result, it's pretty much code for saying "the Democrats deserve it because they're not real Americans like us". There's even a Wikipedia article on the difference the 2003 Texas Redistricting made.
Of course, before the 2003 redistricting, Texas was gerrymandered to benefit the Democrats which also subverted the will of the people. I'm not playing the blame the Republicans game here, the real problem is that the U.S. system has institutionalised systems that distort the results of congressional elections to the point where around 95% of the districts are more vulnerable to changes in the state election results than they are to changes in the federal results. Most ridings require over a 10% shift in support towards one party or the other to actually become competitive. Both major parties are responsible for this, however, at the current time the cumulative effect of gerrymandering gives the Republicans significantly more seats in Congress than they should actually have.
That is true, but it's not actually all that uncommon.
I don't think it's all that common, according to Wikipedia, it's only happened once since the 1940s
Many left voters tend to live in densely populated areas like cities whereas Republicans are more spread out across rural areas of the country. Those demographics will always favor Republicans where it comes to winning districts, with or without gerrymandering.
I've read a similar argument from some Republican pundits, but I don't see how that actually favours Republicans. Whether a district is densely populated or not, it should have about the same number of voters per district.
Single payer mean no choices.
Well it certainly means you don't need to choose a health insurance provider*. So I guess it elminates at least one choice.
Government = good becasue they don't give you freedom and choices.
I'm not sure what choices you're expecting to lose. In the 60s there was an advertising campaign in Canada by a group of doctors warning that single-payer health care would end choices for both doctors and patients before the implementation of the Canadian single-payer systems (each province has it's own). Now, 50 years later, that has not only changed their position, they've found that the single payer systems have given doctors and patients more freedom than they used to have under private insurance and they absolutely do not want to go back to private insurance. In the end, single-payer was exactly the opposite of what they had feared it would be.
Nobel Prizes for doing absolutely fuck all and research grants so they can pay their mortgages.
If you were a scientist, you couldn't use any grant money to pay your mortgage. If you did, it would be theft. Grant money must be spent on doing the actual research.
What a load of utter tripe. Antarctic ice sheet gains exceed losses
That was a workshop based on preliminary results, here's the final research paper from the same scientist:
Note the total is -213 ± 142.
Listen, here's the deal: You lost. Your narrative of catastrophic climate change due to man emitting Co2 into the atmosphere is a busted flush.
I wish it were that easy.
You act like there's some huge discrepancy, when in actuality the gerrymandering effect is far smaller (namely that it becomes the "will of the people" plus or minus a small number). At any rate, in 2010, the House took not only 63 House seats, but also 6 Senate seats (which are immune from the effects of gerrymandering).
You know if we look at the relevant election, 2012 instead of 2010, the numbers are quite a bit different. The Democrats got 1.7 million more votes and 33 fewer seats than the Republicans. That is a huge discrepancy.
SO whereas you might be able to write off a 9% swing in the House, you can't write off a 5% swing in the Senate.
Fair being fair, how do you write off an 8% swing in the House and a 9.7% swing in the Senate for the Democrats in 2012?
What kind of sicko hears about $crime and their first thought is 'call the graphics department and get them to work up a logo for that, ASAP".
That's simple, a marketing executive. Got any other easy ones?
If the makeup of Congress matched the actual votes cast during the last election, this wouldn't be happening. The Democrats got 1.7 million more votes than the Republicans across the country, but because of gerrymandering*, they got 33 fewer seats. Actually, if the Republicans weren't also enforcing an anti-democratic rule that only laws that most of the Repbulican party supports can even be voted on at all, this wouldn't be happening either.
Most americans aren't actually getting the government they voted for, they've been robbed by partisan maneuvers.
* Yes, both parties gerrymander and it should be counted as vote fraud regardless of who's doing it.
Actually, the vast majority of House seats are assigned to the individual parties (via gerrymandering) and "elected" by party loyalists during the primaries. The People don't get much of a vote in Congress (Between 3% and 5% of congressional seats are considered "competitive"). Interestingly enough, in this house the Democratic candidates got about 1.7 million more votes that the Republican candidates but have 33 fewer seats than the Republicans. So in a very real sense, the People should not be held responsible for Congress, because they didn't get what they voted for.
The new design is pretty awful. This is a news site for people who are supposed to know more than bit about technology and you choose to go with a fixed-width design? That's amateurish by any standards. The pictures make it more colorfull but I actually found that they too large, they move the stuff that I can about (the article summaries) down the page a considerable amount for a picture that has questionable relevance to the topic, and they disrupt the structure of the page to the point of making it difficult to find where to resume reading.
It seems like you need to hire someone with user interface design experience to work on the redesign. It'd currently score the new design at 3/10 which is significantly worse than the current design.
It's pretty much what Reagan, Dole, and Romney originally proposed as a health care solution (and in Romney's case, implemented in his state).
The fact that not a single Republican voted actually says a lot about the Republican party.
Perhaps you could concede that the House - which is rather more democratically representative than the Senate (although in point of fact NEITHER is much of democratic institution any more) - ALSO has a mandate to pursue an agenda desired by their majority of constituents? Or is it only Democratic constituents that get a voice in Congress?
Considering that congressional districts are routinely gerrymandered (by both parties), it seems like Congrss should be considered significantly less representative than the Senate. For instance, despite the fact that a million more Americans voted for Democrat candidates than Republican candidates in the last congressional election, there are 32 more Republicans than Democrats in the house. That's not what I would consider representative.
For the record, I am not a Republican, nor do I agree with them. But the whole system is broken, and both parties are gaming it wherever they can, so I don't see anything "more illegitimate" about this Congress than any other one.
I was going to say that it was just as illegitimate as evey other gerrymandered congress, before I realize that actually this congress does actually seem more illegitimate. More than a few gerrymandered seats were highjacked by a fringe group of Republicans, I'm not sure if the Tea Party candidates actually represent the will of their constituents or managed to trojan-horse their way into government because of the redistricting. Specifically, it's quite possible that if these seats hadn't been gerrymandered, the Tea Party would have been much less successful in getting their representatives elected and hi-jacking the Republican party. As it is, the important battle in most congressional districts appears to be the nomination battle, not the election.
Mostly my comment was simply meant as a reminder that if you want to claim the moral high ground in representing the "will of the people" you should always make sure that you have more than 50% of the popular vote.
While the people did elect Obama a second time they also elected a majority republican congress at the same time. The people did vote for a divided government, although I do wonder how many people were voting against Romney instead of voting for Obama.Considering that Obama got a higher percentage of the vote than the democrats did in congress (looks to be about 3%) it would seem likely that people were voting against Romney.
You should be aware that the Democrats won the congressional popular vote by around 50.7% to 49.3%, but because of gerrymandering (the practice of dividing congressional districts to subvert the will of the public), they have fewer seats in congress than the Republicans.
They also re-elected a GOP majority in the House where funding bills start.
The House is gerrymandered. It does not accurately represent the will of the people, but rather represents the cumulative will of the parties in control of the states. If I remember correctly, between 95% and 98% of Congressional seats are predetermined by gerrymandering.
Furthermore, you already wrote "Polls show half the country thought the law was already fully in effect until last week or so and the majority don't understand their obligations or the most perfunctory effects the law will have on them" so clearly this can't be the will of the people, if half of them have no idea what the law is or will do. I'm not sure how this could conceivably be seen as anything other than the political obsession of a minority of congress.
You know what, I'm getting very tired at this 'citation needed' crap when someone is clearly providing an anecdote, and not regurgitating research.
What part of "men are much more likely to abuse children than women" and "[custody by the mother] is better for the children 99% of the time" is an anecdote? The "Citation Needed" seems appropriate when someone is making wildly expansive claims with no evidence to back them up.
(Maybe you're hiding -1 posts and not actually seeing the messages these "small, petty and very uninteresting" people are actually responding to?)
Actually, one scientist said if the trend from 2007 continued, there'd be no ice left sometime between 2013 and 2021. Of course, the trend from 2007 didn't continue, but even ignoring that, you'd have to wait 8 more years before you can do your victory dance because the warming isn't quite a bad as it could potentially be.
Hang the fact that it has been rising all long.
Actually, it's been falling for almost 10,000 years.
I take that as an admission that, "Let it change, but slowly enough that it does not bother me. My decedents can take care of themselves."
Sometimes simpletons don't understand the difference between stopping a speeding car with the brakes and stopping a speeding car with a brick wall.
In this case it isn't make it slow enough so that it doesn't bother me, it's make it slow enough so that natural systems aren't pushed into another mass extinction event, because that won't be good for any of us. At some place between 4 and 6 degrees above the baseline, most of the world is going to need new ecosystems. That replacement will be much easier on us, if nature has 1,000 years to adapt than if it has 30.