Pelosi's a bit of a different case, though I really don't expect her to run for president. Pelosi was an effective speaker of the house at actually doing the job of herding the cats of the democratic house caucus, but is also an amazingly effective lightning rod for Republicans and has a habit of saying politically stupid things that sell poorly to the general public. If she becomes president it'll be due to some ultra-long shot double whammy impeachment that gets both Trump and Pence if Pelosi is reelected as speaker of the house next year (that position is third in line constitutionally).
You might be thinking of Senator Gillibrand of New York actually, she's the highest profile democrat that I can think of that is big on the sort of identity politics that you are against.
You don't have to like Elizabeth Warren, but at least get your basic facts straight about her political background. She rose to political prominence as a specialist on the issue of consumer finance, and was previously a professor focused on bankruptcy and commercial law. Her main claim to fame before running for senate in Massachusetts was being the mastermind behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she's been clashing heavily with Republicans on that for years. Warren's political constituency significantly overlaps with Sanders on the left, as she was a higher profile anti-Wall St. crusader prior to his primary run, and if you actually believe in Sanders ideology for what it actually stands for then Warren is an obvious alternative.
It was actually her opponents that were really laying hard into identity politics, Scott Brown and more recently Donald Trump himself. Trump and associates were the ones called her Pocahontas and they were the ones that brought up the racial identity issue in the political arena, not her.
Don't take this as me advocating her running for president, however, she is a bit of a specialist. But her popularity on the left comes from many of the same places for the same reasons that Sanders does, and making it all about gender is more on you than on her.
Trump is not an ideologue in the traditional sense, yes, but the problem with your statement is who his hunches are telling him are benefiting from the impulsive action. It is not what is beneficial to the country as a whole, it is what is beneficial to Trump personally and to his political allies. Perhaps he is such an extreme narcissist that he conflates those two together, but that doesn't make it any better.
Propping up the coal industry should make this point plain as day to rational observers. Coal has a load of negative externalities, it imposes a cost on society far higher than is paid in the price paid by the end electricity consumer. The old economic excuse for coal, that it's cheap, rooted in a laissez faire or free-market capitalist ideological justification, is moot since coal is decreasingly competitive on price, particularly in comparison to natural gas. It wouldn't need these subsidizes otherwise.
All that remains is naked use political power for self interest and the interest of political allies. Much like coal itself, that is very old and very dirty.
This is the nightmare of government interference into markets that conservatives have long used to attack the left for their regulatory and subsidy policies, summed up in the pithy phrase of "picking winners and losers". But this is unvarnished use of political power to the economic benefit of political allies, a crony capitalism that is an even more explicit form of the "swamp" behavior that Trump ran against.
If you think the above rebuke is wrong, please tell me what the genuine public interest is in the underlying rule "to consider guaranteeing financial returns for any power plant that could stockpile 90 days’ worth of fuel on-site". Several forms of power generation don't stockpile fuel (natural gas is typically piped in), or don't use "fuel" at all, such as wind, solar, and hydro. If fuel disruption was the legitimate security concern, then not requiring fuel distribution at all would be the most ideal for that end.
Propping up coal is particularly egregious, since the coal industry has a plethora of negative externalities, which means that if anything coal power has been selling at rates well below it's true overall cost to society. Coal power also is at the top of the list of mortality and impaired health of all forms of power generation, far higher than natural gas generation which has been the main competitor crowding it out on price.
Subsidizing coal power is plainly not in the general public interest, only the narrow interest of those who depend economically on the coal industry.
We don't have the most corrupt government in the modern world, but the US is such a big economy that our slide into corruption is really hard for the world to ignore. Authoritarian regimes are typically very corrupt, and when you look at the list of places you'll find a lot of corrupt countries. Russia is a kleptocracy, as are a lot of other ex-Soviet central asian states, and the Yanukovych regime that was overthrown in Ukraine was almost breathtakingly corrupt. States highly dependent on natural resource income for their economy are known for falling victim to corrupt regimes. The Arab spring was also due in large part to corruption, not just the religious and ethnic strife that has taken hold in places like Syria, the initial stages of it that ousted the Tunisian regime were clearly focused on corruption.
I can't disagree with the overall prescription of clamping down on bribery. Corruption almost seems to be an ideology for a lot of people, and the SCOTUS rulings of Citizen's United and especially McDonnell v United States made it easier to funnel money to politicians and much harder to prosecute bribery.
It's not all doom and gloom though, Malaysia's extremely corrupt government was just voted out in a huge surprise result, so they have at least a chance of pulling back from the abyss of corrupt rule.
Yeah, overall inflation really has stayed low for a really long time, particularly wage inflation. There was talk for most of this decade since the crash of the bond vigilantes showing up any day now, and interest rates are only starting to slowly creep back up from lower bounds recently.
Labor does seem to be in a surprisingly weak position for how low the topline unemployment rates are. The left has pointed at the anti-union movement from the right, particularly at the state level, and I'm increasingly inclined to believe it. The more generalized weakening of the negotiating position of workers seems pretty important for these effects, such as with the SCOTUS ruling putting binding arbitration above worker class action rights. The recent tax cuts were by far most targeted at capital and capital holders (lowering the corporate tax rate and such), so I'm also not the least bit surprised that very little of that has materialized as benefit for workers. The labor benefits from that were always going to potentially be in the long term from indirect benefits from increased investment, but the Republicans are stuck in an alternative reality especially on tax policy.
As for the talk of a recession and bubbles popping, a bunch of wage inflation and thus general inflation would be one way to make sure that actually happens. If for no other reason the Federal Reserve would freak out and seriously raise interest rates to kill the boom to stop inflation.
We're somewhere close to full employment, what we are in now is what counts as the "boom". I'd guess that the depth of the downturn after the real estate bubble and the slowness of the recovery are contributors to as to why we haven't had a recession in so long. The basic definition for a recession is 2 quarters in a row of negative GDP growth. The original Great Depression actually had 2 technical recessions in its timeframe, the first one was by the worst and deepest.
You don't seem to be getting the point that the law that the judicial makes, "case law", is intertwined with the various steps you've listed, it does not simply reside at the bottom. The decision in this subject isn't a neutral opinion on the law, it is making law itself. By choosing between what takes priority between different conflicting laws and regulatory mechanisms, by saying that the arbitration clauses bind workers against banding together and running class actions SCOTUS has made law, and if you are involved in litigation covered by this you will feel the full force of that law.
Sure, the process of making law in the judicial branch is different than the statutory process of congress, but you must have missed the point of American history on the Marbury v. Madison. Because it wasn't just that the underlying action regarding payment commissions was "unconstitutional" from the standpoint of some independent observer from an inertial reference frame, the court got to decide on their say so that the law was unconstitutional and negate it as a consequence.
In other legal systems, like civil law practiced in many other countries such as in mainland Europe, the role of the judiciary in lawmaking is far more subservient to statutory lawmaking than in the common law system the US has. It's a bit of doublethink to believe that the US judiciary doesn't make law at the same time as believing that this SCOTUS decision will have a binding effect on the law going forward through precedent.
The United States is a common law country. So yes, unelected, unaccountable judges do make law too. The supreme court, and subsequently this decision itself, would be far less important if we weren't in a common law system.
Spreading basic ignorance of the nature of case law and statutory law is not informative.
How will they defeat measures like this? The only mechanisms I can obviously see when comparing with other realms is out of spite (like with the punitive measures attempted against Amazon), or more generalized obstruction that has this as collateral damage.
I don't know where you are getting off in the overall political theory, but the age old problems of regulatory capture and corruption have been an increasing problem in the US, and democratic power is on a decline. As OBE director Mulvaney said, he only met with lobbyists that gave him money, and overall he clearly and crudely laid out the status quo with political figures of his mindset. Money is becoming speech as the supreme court has carved away campaign finance and public corruption laws in the last decade or so, and money begets more money when used to benefit politicians who will steer public policy in favor of their moneyed constituents. The return on investment with such contributions tends to be great. Which, like with 144 year long copyright, has the obvious endgame of rent-seeking.
Mindless raging opposition this is not, it is an informed anger that sees banana republicanism becoming a primary import. This is how the game is played in a lot of countries, and it doesn't take all that much looking to realize that it ends poorly. Maybe you are a billionaire oligarch who can make these guys dance with your puppet strings, but I'm not.
The rent-seekers are in charge, there's really no better explanation for the behavior when you are extending copyright decades past the maximum life span of humans. Sorry if you thought the current regime would remedy this problem rent-seeker control of political power in the US, it is only getting worse, and this is but one example of it.
Abusing executive power to go after enemies is an impeachable offense, and we know that it is an impeachable offense because Nixon was about to be impeached for it, among other things. See article 2 of the Nixon impeachment:
Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.
This conduct has included one or more of the following:
He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
...
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Adopted 28-10 by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives.
The relevant bit of history is Nixon's enemies list, in which he ordered IRS audits to "screw" his political enemies. In that case, the IRS commissioner Donald Alexander also refused to follow the order to perform the audits, and stored the order in the sealed envelope in his safe until the enemies list was outed by WH Counsel John Dean.
As an aside: there are other bits of that article of impeachment that Trump's folks have been accusing his political enemies of violating, particularly with the FBI and surveillance. That's a neat trick of acting Nixonian whist accusing your enemies of acting Nixonian, I don't know if that counts as projection or muddying the waters, or if it even reaches the heights of Orwellianism. Or perhaps it is simply a childish "no, you are!"
At the top of the page it says it is a meta analysis of 193696 people, and in the follow ups on deaths there were 29639 deaths, so that seems like that should be large enough samples to not run into the sample size issues that you mention as long as you don't get too far into the weeds with subdividing the populations. Here are the leading causes of death for the general US population, presumably the early mortality in this study would have a different profile than that of the general population, but even for the general population accidents constitute over 5% of overall mortality. Cardiovascular issues are much higher proportion of overall mortality than that, and the study seems to want to focus on those issues so comparing rates on that for the different levels of physical activity tested by the study seems like a much more informative path for teasing out paths of causation than just the general mortality numbers.
The bigger issue seems to be that they are mashing a bunch of different studies together, which is beyond my basic level of statistical modeling but sounds like could cause problems. To be fair, I'm not saying that this study is "bad" just from the speed read of some random asshole on the internet, but scientific journalism tends to draw way more conclusions than is merited by the scientific studies that they cover, and there are quite a few issues that make the idea being sold that physical activity in the job is bad compared to recreational physical activity being good less conclusive than as presented.
It seems like an important detail missing from the article is what the causes of death are that increase for the more physically active jobs. Are they dying more from natural causes, or accidents or something else?
An obvious hypothesis for a potential cause of early death would be if the higher physical activity jobs had much higher accident rates, since a lot of the jobs that come to mind involving a lot of physical activity have more obvious workplace dangers than someone working at a desk job. For example, it seems a lot more likely for a construction worker or a roof cleaner to fall to their death than it would for a programmer, and the path of causation would be due to the particular type of physical activity rather than the job being more physically active.
This study seems to be really focused on the cardiovascular effects, but it seems like there could be lots of potentials for causation beyond the one they are focused on, and it's not obvious what their controls were. The generalized increased risk of mortality numbers seem like they may be less informative than focusing on more specific numbers for particular health risks and causes of death, though the overall numbers are useful for life insurance underwriters.
You're overcomplicating it a bunch, it's simply a joke that Trump is too nice to the Russians. Not that ZTE is actually a Russian company, he's just acting inexplicably favorably towards them like with the Russians.
Even if you didn't like what Obama was doing, at least it made sense. This stuff just does not make sense.
I mean, Trump was trying to start a trade war with China, just busted out of the Iran nuclear deal, and now he is talking about how bad it is that ZTE's troubles as a consequence of such sanctions is causing too many Chinese jobs to be lost? Might as well start talking about Chewbacca.
I also find it remarkable how stable the level of support is in face of this madness. The administration has told us that 2+2=5 so many times that the opposition can't believe anything it says anymore, and so when you get reversals like this on ZTE's violation of the Iran sanctions the conclusion jumps straight to corruption, because even if there is a reasonable justification for playing nice with the Chinese there is absolutely no apparent coherence to what Trump is doing.
And on the other side, his supporters seem to love him shouting at us that 2+2=5 because that triggers snowflakes, and nothing seems to matter anymore. Rather depressing since sometimes reality likes to assert itself in extremely unpleasant ways, whether it be after a trade war with China starts blowing up businesses both here and there, or worse if it leads to shooting war with someone like Iran.
I know that was probably fun to do, but either you've been mislead by what you've read, or you a painting a misleading picture here, perhaps intentionally.
I'll just focus on one issue, the Manafort case. The judge did dress down the prosecution, that much is true, but you have conspicuously left out what were the stakes of the argument. It was an issue of jurisdiction, and the judge was pressing the special prosecutors as to why they hadn't passed off Manafort's prosecution on bank fraud and such to the local US attorney, as opposed to running the prosecution themselves. The special prosecutor had previously done that with the case against Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen, where at least some of that prosecution was handed off to the Southern District of New York. This doesn't imply that the judge will necessarily rule against the special prosecutor, but in the event that he does that doesn't mean that Manafort is left off the hook on prosecution, it means that the US attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia handle it instead.
Personally, I thought the judge went out over his skis on that, but judges sometimes like to rant against prosecutors, especially ones who have been around for a very long time like Judge Ellis, and sometimes prosecutors deserve it. This special prosecution was explicitly granted authority to probe activities related to Manafort's earlier work for Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, and the financial crimes in a lot of these indictments seem to be direct consequences from that. That memo from Deputy AG Rosenstein seems to be what you are alluding to, since several of the leadership from the House Republicans have been desperately trying to get their hands on the unredacted version of it, as it laid out much more specifically the special prosecution's mandate last year. Of course, that is law enforcement sensitive material and outing it would tip off the targets of the probe, which seems precisely the intent of their "oversight" given how quickly they leaked other things like the Comey memos after receiving them.
There's another reason why this is such a big deal that very often gets glossed over in these discussions: the fraudulent nature of the source of propaganda. Psychological warfare and propaganda is nothing new, even if these are newer methods, but the Russians went so far as to obscure that they were the ones pushing the propaganda, representing themselves to be Americans or at best leaving the source intentionally ambiguous. In American parlance, these are black psyops, and are definitely hostile acts.
If you want so see why this distinction matters, contrast with RT. That plays the line from Russian government, but it is open about its connection to the Russian government, so you can get that channel in standard TV packages in America to this day.
A lot of you guys have some sort of strange fun house mirror view of how your political opposition thinks, or perhaps it is a distorted projection of some sort of your thought process on to others, I don't get it. It seems to have short circuited much in the way of critical thought on the issue.
The election was won and lost on the margins, and turnout is a critical factor. It's not enough to have someone prefer Clinton or Trump, they actually have to show up and vote. Propaganda doesn't have to convert a Clinton supporter into a Trump voter or vice versa, it is sufficient if it can motive the marginal voters on one side to turn out and demotivate them on the other to stay home. Clinton had very high negatives, and democrats tend to be strongest in the demographics that have lower turn out rates, so trying to demotivate the marginal edge of the earlier Obama voters was an obvious way to try to help Trump win. Conversely, Trump also had very high negatives, so pushing some traditional Republican voters out the door to hold their nose and pull the lever for Trump even if they didn't like him was also major a pathway to help him win.
As to how well this worked, see the previous post. Quantifying these effects is extremely difficult.
Carrying 10 more states and 77 more votes isn't really close. It was only a "close" race if you ignore the actual rules and result.
Of course the US doesn't elect it's president by the popular vote, but your numeric framing of the issue is even more misleading. Clinton got 2.86 million more votes from voters overall, but the electoral college means that what mattered was where those votes where more that just the number. It didn't matter if Clinton won California with 100% of the vote, and likewise it didn't matter if Trump won Utah with 100% of the vote. So to really figure out how close it was, you need to focus on the "tipping point" states, a combination of the closest states with enough EVs to swing the election depending upon their outcome. The "tipping point" state in the conventional definition of the term was Wisconsin, as losing that would have made her still lose the EC even if she had won the closer states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Clinton lost Pennsylvania by about 44.3k votes, Michigan by about 10.7k votes, and Wisconsin by about 22.7k votes. So those are the margins Clinton would have needed to make up to win, or a higher number of votes in a less optimal mixture of states.
I know Trump lives in the alternative reality where he won the popular vote somehow, but practically speaking his win in the EC was due to those margins, which is less than 100k votes total. That's pretty close for a presidential election. Not as close as 2000 and Bush vs Gore, but still pretty close.
The uncomfortable nature of this issue is that it is very difficult to quantify the impact that Russian propaganda had on the US electorate, and the big question over whether it altered the outcome of the election is probably impossible to answer. Counterfactuals are hard, we can't easily go back and spin off a different parallel universe without the Russian operations to form a control and compare the differences. The election was close enough (but not as close as 2000) that we might not be able to reach a conclusion even if we were willing to expend significant effort and resources in trying to answer that question.
Contrast this with the French elections, the Russians tried to some similar efforts to help out Le Pen versus Macron, but Macron won 66% to Le Pen's 34%, so it's pretty clear that the Russians had no substantial effect on the final outcome in that match up. The only plausible thing that they could have made a major effect on that I can think of would be in the first round of the Presidential election, where most of the top candidates had in ballpark of 20% of the vote but Le Pen at 21% and Macron at 24% were the top two and made it to the runoff. It's a lot more plausible that Russian psyops could shave a percent or two off the next in line, Fillon or Mélenchon, who had around 20% of the first round, to put Le Pen in the second spot. FT has an interesting graph showing how the different electorates split between first and then second round candidates.
Of course, the Russians wouldn't resort to psychological warfare if they thought the effort would be inherently pointless. As highly a people like to think of their own intellects and inability to be manipulated by information and disinformation, there wouldn't be so much propaganda if it didn't work.
What you are doing is not "being rational", it's borderline willfully ignorant. This is widely reported publicly available information.
NK was not supposed to be testing rockets either, not just nuclear weapons themselves. And their rocket did cross into Japanese airspace. Russia and China are on the UNSC too, and they got that denouncement watered down enough that it was mainly a slap on the wrist. Again, just being denounced was enough to cause NK to test another nuclear weapon right after, when the plutonium processing at Yongbyon was supposed to be shutting down, so regardless of mean words NK definitely was "up to no good".
Is the world so upside down that we even have reflexive apologia for North Korea here now? I certainly don't want a war with them, but you have to be living in an alternative universe to think that they operate in anything remotely close to good faith. These guys have even given unambigious casus bellis, such as by launching an artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong. I hate to think what would happen if they tried that sort of thing again with Trump and his NSA John Bolton in charge now.
It's probably not worth responding to an empty headed partisan AC, but this shows some of the point I was trying to get across. The North Korean nuclear program has its roots in the 1950s and 1960s. Some folks like the parent are such shortsighted partisans that they can't appreciate that this issue has much longer scope and goes beyond the simple internal political divide of the US of the moment.
Bill Clinton failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. George W Bush failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. Barack Obama failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. I pessimistically expect Donald Trump to fail to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue, I just hope he doesn't do so in a catastrophic way that leads to Korean War II or WWII.
It's not the US that holds most of the cards on dealing with this. It's the Chinese and the North Koreans themselves who have the best ability to resolve this problem in a way that doesn't end up with millions dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Pelosi's a bit of a different case, though I really don't expect her to run for president. Pelosi was an effective speaker of the house at actually doing the job of herding the cats of the democratic house caucus, but is also an amazingly effective lightning rod for Republicans and has a habit of saying politically stupid things that sell poorly to the general public. If she becomes president it'll be due to some ultra-long shot double whammy impeachment that gets both Trump and Pence if Pelosi is reelected as speaker of the house next year (that position is third in line constitutionally).
You might be thinking of Senator Gillibrand of New York actually, she's the highest profile democrat that I can think of that is big on the sort of identity politics that you are against.
You don't have to like Elizabeth Warren, but at least get your basic facts straight about her political background. She rose to political prominence as a specialist on the issue of consumer finance, and was previously a professor focused on bankruptcy and commercial law. Her main claim to fame before running for senate in Massachusetts was being the mastermind behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she's been clashing heavily with Republicans on that for years. Warren's political constituency significantly overlaps with Sanders on the left, as she was a higher profile anti-Wall St. crusader prior to his primary run, and if you actually believe in Sanders ideology for what it actually stands for then Warren is an obvious alternative.
It was actually her opponents that were really laying hard into identity politics, Scott Brown and more recently Donald Trump himself. Trump and associates were the ones called her Pocahontas and they were the ones that brought up the racial identity issue in the political arena, not her.
Don't take this as me advocating her running for president, however, she is a bit of a specialist. But her popularity on the left comes from many of the same places for the same reasons that Sanders does, and making it all about gender is more on you than on her.
Trump is not an ideologue in the traditional sense, yes, but the problem with your statement is who his hunches are telling him are benefiting from the impulsive action. It is not what is beneficial to the country as a whole, it is what is beneficial to Trump personally and to his political allies. Perhaps he is such an extreme narcissist that he conflates those two together, but that doesn't make it any better.
Propping up the coal industry should make this point plain as day to rational observers. Coal has a load of negative externalities, it imposes a cost on society far higher than is paid in the price paid by the end electricity consumer. The old economic excuse for coal, that it's cheap, rooted in a laissez faire or free-market capitalist ideological justification, is moot since coal is decreasingly competitive on price, particularly in comparison to natural gas. It wouldn't need these subsidizes otherwise.
All that remains is naked use political power for self interest and the interest of political allies. Much like coal itself, that is very old and very dirty.
This is the nightmare of government interference into markets that conservatives have long used to attack the left for their regulatory and subsidy policies, summed up in the pithy phrase of "picking winners and losers". But this is unvarnished use of political power to the economic benefit of political allies, a crony capitalism that is an even more explicit form of the "swamp" behavior that Trump ran against.
If you think the above rebuke is wrong, please tell me what the genuine public interest is in the underlying rule "to consider guaranteeing financial returns for any power plant that could stockpile 90 days’ worth of fuel on-site". Several forms of power generation don't stockpile fuel (natural gas is typically piped in), or don't use "fuel" at all, such as wind, solar, and hydro. If fuel disruption was the legitimate security concern, then not requiring fuel distribution at all would be the most ideal for that end.
Propping up coal is particularly egregious, since the coal industry has a plethora of negative externalities, which means that if anything coal power has been selling at rates well below it's true overall cost to society. Coal power also is at the top of the list of mortality and impaired health of all forms of power generation, far higher than natural gas generation which has been the main competitor crowding it out on price.
Subsidizing coal power is plainly not in the general public interest, only the narrow interest of those who depend economically on the coal industry.
We don't have the most corrupt government in the modern world, but the US is such a big economy that our slide into corruption is really hard for the world to ignore. Authoritarian regimes are typically very corrupt, and when you look at the list of places you'll find a lot of corrupt countries. Russia is a kleptocracy, as are a lot of other ex-Soviet central asian states, and the Yanukovych regime that was overthrown in Ukraine was almost breathtakingly corrupt. States highly dependent on natural resource income for their economy are known for falling victim to corrupt regimes. The Arab spring was also due in large part to corruption, not just the religious and ethnic strife that has taken hold in places like Syria, the initial stages of it that ousted the Tunisian regime were clearly focused on corruption.
I can't disagree with the overall prescription of clamping down on bribery. Corruption almost seems to be an ideology for a lot of people, and the SCOTUS rulings of Citizen's United and especially McDonnell v United States made it easier to funnel money to politicians and much harder to prosecute bribery.
It's not all doom and gloom though, Malaysia's extremely corrupt government was just voted out in a huge surprise result, so they have at least a chance of pulling back from the abyss of corrupt rule.
Yeah, overall inflation really has stayed low for a really long time, particularly wage inflation. There was talk for most of this decade since the crash of the bond vigilantes showing up any day now, and interest rates are only starting to slowly creep back up from lower bounds recently.
Labor does seem to be in a surprisingly weak position for how low the topline unemployment rates are. The left has pointed at the anti-union movement from the right, particularly at the state level, and I'm increasingly inclined to believe it. The more generalized weakening of the negotiating position of workers seems pretty important for these effects, such as with the SCOTUS ruling putting binding arbitration above worker class action rights. The recent tax cuts were by far most targeted at capital and capital holders (lowering the corporate tax rate and such), so I'm also not the least bit surprised that very little of that has materialized as benefit for workers. The labor benefits from that were always going to potentially be in the long term from indirect benefits from increased investment, but the Republicans are stuck in an alternative reality especially on tax policy.
As for the talk of a recession and bubbles popping, a bunch of wage inflation and thus general inflation would be one way to make sure that actually happens. If for no other reason the Federal Reserve would freak out and seriously raise interest rates to kill the boom to stop inflation.
We're somewhere close to full employment, what we are in now is what counts as the "boom". I'd guess that the depth of the downturn after the real estate bubble and the slowness of the recovery are contributors to as to why we haven't had a recession in so long. The basic definition for a recession is 2 quarters in a row of negative GDP growth. The original Great Depression actually had 2 technical recessions in its timeframe, the first one was by the worst and deepest.
You don't seem to be getting the point that the law that the judicial makes, "case law", is intertwined with the various steps you've listed, it does not simply reside at the bottom. The decision in this subject isn't a neutral opinion on the law, it is making law itself. By choosing between what takes priority between different conflicting laws and regulatory mechanisms, by saying that the arbitration clauses bind workers against banding together and running class actions SCOTUS has made law, and if you are involved in litigation covered by this you will feel the full force of that law.
Sure, the process of making law in the judicial branch is different than the statutory process of congress, but you must have missed the point of American history on the Marbury v. Madison. Because it wasn't just that the underlying action regarding payment commissions was "unconstitutional" from the standpoint of some independent observer from an inertial reference frame, the court got to decide on their say so that the law was unconstitutional and negate it as a consequence.
In other legal systems, like civil law practiced in many other countries such as in mainland Europe, the role of the judiciary in lawmaking is far more subservient to statutory lawmaking than in the common law system the US has. It's a bit of doublethink to believe that the US judiciary doesn't make law at the same time as believing that this SCOTUS decision will have a binding effect on the law going forward through precedent.
The United States is a common law country. So yes, unelected, unaccountable judges do make law too. The supreme court, and subsequently this decision itself, would be far less important if we weren't in a common law system.
Spreading basic ignorance of the nature of case law and statutory law is not informative.
How will they defeat measures like this? The only mechanisms I can obviously see when comparing with other realms is out of spite (like with the punitive measures attempted against Amazon), or more generalized obstruction that has this as collateral damage.
I don't know where you are getting off in the overall political theory, but the age old problems of regulatory capture and corruption have been an increasing problem in the US, and democratic power is on a decline. As OBE director Mulvaney said, he only met with lobbyists that gave him money, and overall he clearly and crudely laid out the status quo with political figures of his mindset. Money is becoming speech as the supreme court has carved away campaign finance and public corruption laws in the last decade or so, and money begets more money when used to benefit politicians who will steer public policy in favor of their moneyed constituents. The return on investment with such contributions tends to be great. Which, like with 144 year long copyright, has the obvious endgame of rent-seeking.
Mindless raging opposition this is not, it is an informed anger that sees banana republicanism becoming a primary import. This is how the game is played in a lot of countries, and it doesn't take all that much looking to realize that it ends poorly. Maybe you are a billionaire oligarch who can make these guys dance with your puppet strings, but I'm not.
The rent-seekers are in charge, there's really no better explanation for the behavior when you are extending copyright decades past the maximum life span of humans. Sorry if you thought the current regime would remedy this problem rent-seeker control of political power in the US, it is only getting worse, and this is but one example of it.
The relevant bit of history is Nixon's enemies list, in which he ordered IRS audits to "screw" his political enemies. In that case, the IRS commissioner Donald Alexander also refused to follow the order to perform the audits, and stored the order in the sealed envelope in his safe until the enemies list was outed by WH Counsel John Dean.
As an aside: there are other bits of that article of impeachment that Trump's folks have been accusing his political enemies of violating, particularly with the FBI and surveillance. That's a neat trick of acting Nixonian whist accusing your enemies of acting Nixonian, I don't know if that counts as projection or muddying the waters, or if it even reaches the heights of Orwellianism. Or perhaps it is simply a childish "no, you are!"
At the top of the page it says it is a meta analysis of 193696 people, and in the follow ups on deaths there were 29639 deaths, so that seems like that should be large enough samples to not run into the sample size issues that you mention as long as you don't get too far into the weeds with subdividing the populations. Here are the leading causes of death for the general US population, presumably the early mortality in this study would have a different profile than that of the general population, but even for the general population accidents constitute over 5% of overall mortality. Cardiovascular issues are much higher proportion of overall mortality than that, and the study seems to want to focus on those issues so comparing rates on that for the different levels of physical activity tested by the study seems like a much more informative path for teasing out paths of causation than just the general mortality numbers.
The bigger issue seems to be that they are mashing a bunch of different studies together, which is beyond my basic level of statistical modeling but sounds like could cause problems. To be fair, I'm not saying that this study is "bad" just from the speed read of some random asshole on the internet, but scientific journalism tends to draw way more conclusions than is merited by the scientific studies that they cover, and there are quite a few issues that make the idea being sold that physical activity in the job is bad compared to recreational physical activity being good less conclusive than as presented.
It seems like an important detail missing from the article is what the causes of death are that increase for the more physically active jobs. Are they dying more from natural causes, or accidents or something else?
An obvious hypothesis for a potential cause of early death would be if the higher physical activity jobs had much higher accident rates, since a lot of the jobs that come to mind involving a lot of physical activity have more obvious workplace dangers than someone working at a desk job. For example, it seems a lot more likely for a construction worker or a roof cleaner to fall to their death than it would for a programmer, and the path of causation would be due to the particular type of physical activity rather than the job being more physically active.
This study seems to be really focused on the cardiovascular effects, but it seems like there could be lots of potentials for causation beyond the one they are focused on, and it's not obvious what their controls were. The generalized increased risk of mortality numbers seem like they may be less informative than focusing on more specific numbers for particular health risks and causes of death, though the overall numbers are useful for life insurance underwriters.
You're overcomplicating it a bunch, it's simply a joke that Trump is too nice to the Russians. Not that ZTE is actually a Russian company, he's just acting inexplicably favorably towards them like with the Russians.
Even if you didn't like what Obama was doing, at least it made sense. This stuff just does not make sense.
I mean, Trump was trying to start a trade war with China, just busted out of the Iran nuclear deal, and now he is talking about how bad it is that ZTE's troubles as a consequence of such sanctions is causing too many Chinese jobs to be lost? Might as well start talking about Chewbacca.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
I also find it remarkable how stable the level of support is in face of this madness. The administration has told us that 2+2=5 so many times that the opposition can't believe anything it says anymore, and so when you get reversals like this on ZTE's violation of the Iran sanctions the conclusion jumps straight to corruption, because even if there is a reasonable justification for playing nice with the Chinese there is absolutely no apparent coherence to what Trump is doing.
And on the other side, his supporters seem to love him shouting at us that 2+2=5 because that triggers snowflakes, and nothing seems to matter anymore. Rather depressing since sometimes reality likes to assert itself in extremely unpleasant ways, whether it be after a trade war with China starts blowing up businesses both here and there, or worse if it leads to shooting war with someone like Iran.
I know that was probably fun to do, but either you've been mislead by what you've read, or you a painting a misleading picture here, perhaps intentionally.
I'll just focus on one issue, the Manafort case. The judge did dress down the prosecution, that much is true, but you have conspicuously left out what were the stakes of the argument. It was an issue of jurisdiction, and the judge was pressing the special prosecutors as to why they hadn't passed off Manafort's prosecution on bank fraud and such to the local US attorney, as opposed to running the prosecution themselves. The special prosecutor had previously done that with the case against Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen, where at least some of that prosecution was handed off to the Southern District of New York. This doesn't imply that the judge will necessarily rule against the special prosecutor, but in the event that he does that doesn't mean that Manafort is left off the hook on prosecution, it means that the US attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia handle it instead.
Personally, I thought the judge went out over his skis on that, but judges sometimes like to rant against prosecutors, especially ones who have been around for a very long time like Judge Ellis, and sometimes prosecutors deserve it. This special prosecution was explicitly granted authority to probe activities related to Manafort's earlier work for Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, and the financial crimes in a lot of these indictments seem to be direct consequences from that. That memo from Deputy AG Rosenstein seems to be what you are alluding to, since several of the leadership from the House Republicans have been desperately trying to get their hands on the unredacted version of it, as it laid out much more specifically the special prosecution's mandate last year. Of course, that is law enforcement sensitive material and outing it would tip off the targets of the probe, which seems precisely the intent of their "oversight" given how quickly they leaked other things like the Comey memos after receiving them.
There's another reason why this is such a big deal that very often gets glossed over in these discussions: the fraudulent nature of the source of propaganda. Psychological warfare and propaganda is nothing new, even if these are newer methods, but the Russians went so far as to obscure that they were the ones pushing the propaganda, representing themselves to be Americans or at best leaving the source intentionally ambiguous. In American parlance, these are black psyops, and are definitely hostile acts.
If you want so see why this distinction matters, contrast with RT. That plays the line from Russian government, but it is open about its connection to the Russian government, so you can get that channel in standard TV packages in America to this day.
Fraud is not protected speech.
Speaking of propaganda...
A lot of you guys have some sort of strange fun house mirror view of how your political opposition thinks, or perhaps it is a distorted projection of some sort of your thought process on to others, I don't get it. It seems to have short circuited much in the way of critical thought on the issue.
The election was won and lost on the margins, and turnout is a critical factor. It's not enough to have someone prefer Clinton or Trump, they actually have to show up and vote. Propaganda doesn't have to convert a Clinton supporter into a Trump voter or vice versa, it is sufficient if it can motive the marginal voters on one side to turn out and demotivate them on the other to stay home. Clinton had very high negatives, and democrats tend to be strongest in the demographics that have lower turn out rates, so trying to demotivate the marginal edge of the earlier Obama voters was an obvious way to try to help Trump win. Conversely, Trump also had very high negatives, so pushing some traditional Republican voters out the door to hold their nose and pull the lever for Trump even if they didn't like him was also major a pathway to help him win.
As to how well this worked, see the previous post. Quantifying these effects is extremely difficult.
Carrying 10 more states and 77 more votes isn't really close. It was only a "close" race if you ignore the actual rules and result.
Of course the US doesn't elect it's president by the popular vote, but your numeric framing of the issue is even more misleading. Clinton got 2.86 million more votes from voters overall, but the electoral college means that what mattered was where those votes where more that just the number. It didn't matter if Clinton won California with 100% of the vote, and likewise it didn't matter if Trump won Utah with 100% of the vote. So to really figure out how close it was, you need to focus on the "tipping point" states, a combination of the closest states with enough EVs to swing the election depending upon their outcome. The "tipping point" state in the conventional definition of the term was Wisconsin, as losing that would have made her still lose the EC even if she had won the closer states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Clinton lost Pennsylvania by about 44.3k votes, Michigan by about 10.7k votes, and Wisconsin by about 22.7k votes. So those are the margins Clinton would have needed to make up to win, or a higher number of votes in a less optimal mixture of states.
I know Trump lives in the alternative reality where he won the popular vote somehow, but practically speaking his win in the EC was due to those margins, which is less than 100k votes total. That's pretty close for a presidential election. Not as close as 2000 and Bush vs Gore, but still pretty close.
The uncomfortable nature of this issue is that it is very difficult to quantify the impact that Russian propaganda had on the US electorate, and the big question over whether it altered the outcome of the election is probably impossible to answer. Counterfactuals are hard, we can't easily go back and spin off a different parallel universe without the Russian operations to form a control and compare the differences. The election was close enough (but not as close as 2000) that we might not be able to reach a conclusion even if we were willing to expend significant effort and resources in trying to answer that question.
Contrast this with the French elections, the Russians tried to some similar efforts to help out Le Pen versus Macron, but Macron won 66% to Le Pen's 34%, so it's pretty clear that the Russians had no substantial effect on the final outcome in that match up. The only plausible thing that they could have made a major effect on that I can think of would be in the first round of the Presidential election, where most of the top candidates had in ballpark of 20% of the vote but Le Pen at 21% and Macron at 24% were the top two and made it to the runoff. It's a lot more plausible that Russian psyops could shave a percent or two off the next in line, Fillon or Mélenchon, who had around 20% of the first round, to put Le Pen in the second spot. FT has an interesting graph showing how the different electorates split between first and then second round candidates.
Of course, the Russians wouldn't resort to psychological warfare if they thought the effort would be inherently pointless. As highly a people like to think of their own intellects and inability to be manipulated by information and disinformation, there wouldn't be so much propaganda if it didn't work.
Right or wrong, we had a deal. And the law says: bust a deal, face the wheel!
Tina Turner would probably make a better national security advisor than John Bolton.
What you are doing is not "being rational", it's borderline willfully ignorant. This is widely reported publicly available information.
NK was not supposed to be testing rockets either, not just nuclear weapons themselves. And their rocket did cross into Japanese airspace. Russia and China are on the UNSC too, and they got that denouncement watered down enough that it was mainly a slap on the wrist. Again, just being denounced was enough to cause NK to test another nuclear weapon right after, when the plutonium processing at Yongbyon was supposed to be shutting down, so regardless of mean words NK definitely was "up to no good".
Is the world so upside down that we even have reflexive apologia for North Korea here now? I certainly don't want a war with them, but you have to be living in an alternative universe to think that they operate in anything remotely close to good faith. These guys have even given unambigious casus bellis, such as by launching an artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong. I hate to think what would happen if they tried that sort of thing again with Trump and his NSA John Bolton in charge now.
It's probably not worth responding to an empty headed partisan AC, but this shows some of the point I was trying to get across. The North Korean nuclear program has its roots in the 1950s and 1960s. Some folks like the parent are such shortsighted partisans that they can't appreciate that this issue has much longer scope and goes beyond the simple internal political divide of the US of the moment.
Bill Clinton failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. George W Bush failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. Barack Obama failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. I pessimistically expect Donald Trump to fail to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue, I just hope he doesn't do so in a catastrophic way that leads to Korean War II or WWII.
It's not the US that holds most of the cards on dealing with this. It's the Chinese and the North Koreans themselves who have the best ability to resolve this problem in a way that doesn't end up with millions dead.