I was just saying that the DOJ is NOT obligated to put in a brief, as the GP had suggested.
Never said they were. But if they do, it'll be on the side of existing law. And they probably will. For one thing, arguing that the law is unconstitutional is silly - it's clearly constitutional, just as it's clearly bad law (no, those two things aren't either/or). For another, the Democrats owe a LOT of favours to the entertainment industry.
Longer term, the deficit increase is far from certain. If successful, the stimulus will lessen the deficit in the next several years by increased employment, economic output, and tax revenue.
We're looking at a 2 trillion dollar deficit this year. If the deficit is ZERO for the rest of Obama's two terms, we'll still be looking at one of the highest deficits for a President in history.
And it won't be zero for any year of Obama's terms, much less for every year of his terms. You can reasonably expect that Obama will run up a deficit larger than the last four Presidents combined. Assuming he gets two terms. If things are still looking bad in four years (I don't expect that they will be, but you never can tell), he'll be a one-term President.
And that's if his deficit is "normal" (as we've come to define normal - on the order of a quarter trillion per year) for the rest of his terms. There's no indication that that will happen, since Obama has proposed some rather expensive social programs.
Some people still think the New Deal was a net loss.
Including FDR's Treasury Secretary.
Myself, I don't think it did any of the things it was ostensibly intended to fix. I do think it prevented a military coup in the USA. While it's not widely known, there was a group of officers planning a coup then, with an invasion of Canada, in order to break us out of the Great Depression.
The New Deal at least kept things from getting bad enough for that to happen.
I mean, can you imagine having Quebec as a State?! I shudder to think about it.
I'm confused. How can the DOJ, an arm of the executive, "intervene" with the courts? Doesn't that radically break the separation of powers? Or did I mix something else up?
/ a confused european
The Justice Department is the Federal Government's law firm. It is, in fact, their job to support the laws as written in any case where the Constitutionality of a law is questioned. Which usually means that they file an Amicus brief stating, in summary, "we're not doing anything wrong, and we won't do it again."
I'm not defending president Obama here, but do you really think Senator McCain would side with the public instead of the entertainment industry?
This has little to do with which Party is in power, or which industry is involved. In general, the Justice Department's job in cases like this is to support the Constitution and the currently applicable laws. Note that the Justice Department is NOT the court system. Nor is it part of the Judiciary. It is the Federal Government's lawyers. And their job is to defend the acts of the federal government.
Note that it is assumed that all laws are, in fact, constitutional, though it is clear from reading many of them that their constitutionality is iffy, at best.
Nonetheless, the Justice Department has to support the laws as written before the courts. Which they seem to be doing in this case (and in every other case I've read about).
In other words, this would be happening no matter who was President - Obama, McCain, Paul, Barr, Nader.
The vast majority of Americans are asking for a giant pork bill.
Polls seem to disagree with this assertion. At best, a slim majority approve of this bill, and that only by defining "approve" as "don't actively dislike it".
Not to mention, the guy's only 47 years old. He's going to have this job until he's at most 55. That means he'll have another 10 years before he can sit back and collect Social Security. Do you expect him to torpedo his chances of getting a decent job after he's done with government service if he pisses off lots of rich people in the private sector?
He gets a Presidential Pension as soon as he leaves office, whether in four years or eight. I'm not sure of the current amount, but it's over $150,000 per year, plus travel allowances and a permanent Secret Service detail.
No. The President does not "have a" Department of Justice. They are two of three distinct autonomous branches of government. I'm not saying Obama is without influence but don't conflate the judicial and executive branches or assert that they are controlled by a single individual.
Umm, no. The Justice Department isn't the Judiciary, it's a branch of the Executive. Specifically, it's the federal government's lawyers.
That's a myth. Most states got rid of those kinds of expurgation laws back in the 1980's. A felony conviction will still follow you, juvenile or not (unless you get some sort of gubernatorial pardon maybe).
Oddly enough, I can't find any evidence to support your statement unless you're restricting your definition of "felony conviction" to "violent crime felony conviction".
Even in that case, your statement only applies if the crime was tried in adult court (some states do, some don't), and if a Court Order is obtained granting access to the records. Or if the conviction was in Tennessee (which pretty much makes violent crime felony convictions by juveniles over 14 publicly available information).
And even in the restricted sense of violent crimes, I can't find any evidence that "most" states do this. Some states, yes, but not most.
You don't think that if the USA And the USSR had worked together that we wouldn't have gotten there just as quick, if not quicker?
If the USA and USSR had worked together on a moon landing, we'd still be debating the shape of Mission Control.
A bigger committee isn't always the best solution to a problem.
Especially when the USSR would have brought nothing to the table. It's not like they'd done anything that we hadn't, or that they had any hardware better than what we had.
So do all the kids still have these marks on their records?
Juvenile records are sealed when you reach the age of majority (18), and can neither be looked at (theoretically) nor used against you (again, theoretically) as an adult.
The author does seem a bit full of himself, as in the plot of the first book, the first people the military went running to when the aliens landed were the science fiction authors.....
Stealing from Niven and Pournelle (Footfall) isn't a sin.
On the other hand, this is the only author I know of who inserted himself and another author into a book as supporting characters, and then has the other author's character kill the character representing himself. Over book sales, I might add.
Unfortunately, Ringo is ex-military, so he's still in love with military jargon. Which is full of (mostly) incomprehensible acronyms - FEBA, anyone (which used to be called the Front, by the way)
In general, Subs are always in stealth mode. The only exception would be when they're snorkling (yes, Nuke boats snorkel, for drills practicing reactor damage/failures).
The only thing surprising about two boats colliding is that those two nations are nominally allied, and so should be operating in pre-assigned and separate areas of the ocean. The fact that they didn't hear each other just shows that they're working as intended.
Never mind the fact that getting to an equatorial orbit from where the ISS is now is not easy.
You can't easily turn your orbit 'left' or 'right'. Taking the extreme example, say you wanted to do a 90 degree left turn from the ISS's current orbit. You have to do two things simultaneously :
- Lower your current forward velocity from it's current value of approx 7 kilometres/sec to zero.
- Increase the velocity in the direction you want to travel from zero to 7 kilometres/sec.
Let's just say that you're not going to be doing that with an ion thruster any time soon.
Well, no. You just have to accelerate at right angles to your current motion vector until you have the desired motion vector. Total deltaV required would be on the order of 11 km/s, and it would take bloody forever with an ion drive, or the VASIMR they just put on the ISS. But it's doable with current technology - it would just take a while.
've wanted to see the ISS moved to a higher orbit for a long time now, preferably to an equatorial orbit. It could be very useful as a place to store and assemble components of a Mars mission spacecraft if it were in an orbit that is in the same plane as the planetary-solar orbits.
Note that those two sentences are mutually exclusive. Equatorial orbit is NOT the plane of the ecliptic.
Some Republican pork (e.g. tax cuts to spend on exotic dancers) may have been included in order to get the necessary Republican votes but the original stimulus tried hard to avoid being pork.
Umm, no. None of the Republicans voted for the stimulus bill. All the pork in it was Democratic pork.
This is simply not true. Clinton ran on budget deficit reduction as part of his campaign for 1992. I read his campaign book. He promised a balanced budget by the end of his second term, and he delivered it.
Well, no. Look carefully at the amount of DEBT, not the Deficit. The National Debit increased every year Clinton was in office. There was no deficit one year, because fancy bookkeeping allowed the deficit (difference between income and outgo) to be negative while the Debt (cumulative difference between income and outgo) to increase.
Many states didn't actually finish the process, ratified a slightly different version (they must be absolutely exact), or violated their own state constitutions (in my home state of Idaho, the Governor didn't sign it, which is required)
State Constitutions are irrelevant to the Federal Constitution. So a vote for an Amendment to the Federal Constitution won't actually be affected by the contents of the State Constitutions.* Nor is a Governor's signature required for an Amendment to the Federal Constitution - "when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states" is the relevant phrase. The Executives of the several States don't matter a hill of beans.
I'm not going to bother to look up the text of the Amendment as ratified by all 36 States, because I'm feeling lazy. But I suspect that "ratified a slightly different version" is urban legend by the loons who insist that the Income Tax is unconstitutional. I don't, personally, approve of the Income Tax, but there's no doubt in my mind at all that it's Constitutional.
* - caveat: if the State Constitution says "no legislator will vote to approve a Federal Constitutional Amendment that disagrees with the State Constitution", then the State Constitution will have some legal bearing on the issue. At least up till the State Constitution is challenged on 14th Amendment grounds, and overturned (and it will be).
P.S. Some legal folks say that the government is legally required to refund all income taxes ever collected. But I don't really know how much of that is true.
None of that is true. Income Taxes, as Excise Taxes, were around for decades before the 16th Amendment, and were reasonably legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Never said they were. But if they do, it'll be on the side of existing law. And they probably will. For one thing, arguing that the law is unconstitutional is silly - it's clearly constitutional, just as it's clearly bad law (no, those two things aren't either/or). For another, the Democrats owe a LOT of favours to the entertainment industry.
Every President and Congresscritter does the same. And yet, laws are passed most every day that are unconstitutional.
In other words, your argument is not persuasive. In an ideal world, maybe. But in an ideal world, the case would never have come up....
The actual breakdowns you cite are so broad as to be meaningless. Why not try pointing people at the actual text of the law?
Fascinating reading, really. Especially the oft repeated exception to exiting Federal laws at the discretion of the (Treasury) Secretary.
You answered your own question:
its a huge infrastructure to implement
We're looking at a 2 trillion dollar deficit this year. If the deficit is ZERO for the rest of Obama's two terms, we'll still be looking at one of the highest deficits for a President in history.
And it won't be zero for any year of Obama's terms, much less for every year of his terms. You can reasonably expect that Obama will run up a deficit larger than the last four Presidents combined. Assuming he gets two terms. If things are still looking bad in four years (I don't expect that they will be, but you never can tell), he'll be a one-term President.
And that's if his deficit is "normal" (as we've come to define normal - on the order of a quarter trillion per year) for the rest of his terms. There's no indication that that will happen, since Obama has proposed some rather expensive social programs.
Including FDR's Treasury Secretary.
Myself, I don't think it did any of the things it was ostensibly intended to fix. I do think it prevented a military coup in the USA. While it's not widely known, there was a group of officers planning a coup then, with an invasion of Canada, in order to break us out of the Great Depression.
The New Deal at least kept things from getting bad enough for that to happen.
I mean, can you imagine having Quebec as a State?! I shudder to think about it.
So do I. Mr Fusion would do nicely, though I'd prefer a ZPG.
Alas, I doubt either of us will get what we want anytime soon.
The Justice Department is the Federal Government's law firm. It is, in fact, their job to support the laws as written in any case where the Constitutionality of a law is questioned. Which usually means that they file an Amicus brief stating, in summary, "we're not doing anything wrong, and we won't do it again."
This has little to do with which Party is in power, or which industry is involved. In general, the Justice Department's job in cases like this is to support the Constitution and the currently applicable laws. Note that the Justice Department is NOT the court system. Nor is it part of the Judiciary. It is the Federal Government's lawyers. And their job is to defend the acts of the federal government.
Note that it is assumed that all laws are, in fact, constitutional, though it is clear from reading many of them that their constitutionality is iffy, at best.
Nonetheless, the Justice Department has to support the laws as written before the courts. Which they seem to be doing in this case (and in every other case I've read about).
In other words, this would be happening no matter who was President - Obama, McCain, Paul, Barr, Nader.
Polls seem to disagree with this assertion. At best, a slim majority approve of this bill, and that only by defining "approve" as "don't actively dislike it".
He gets a Presidential Pension as soon as he leaves office, whether in four years or eight. I'm not sure of the current amount, but it's over $150,000 per year, plus travel allowances and a permanent Secret Service detail.
Umm, no. The Justice Department isn't the Judiciary, it's a branch of the Executive. Specifically, it's the federal government's lawyers.
Oddly enough, I can't find any evidence to support your statement unless you're restricting your definition of "felony conviction" to "violent crime felony conviction".
Even in that case, your statement only applies if the crime was tried in adult court (some states do, some don't), and if a Court Order is obtained granting access to the records. Or if the conviction was in Tennessee (which pretty much makes violent crime felony convictions by juveniles over 14 publicly available information).
And even in the restricted sense of violent crimes, I can't find any evidence that "most" states do this. Some states, yes, but not most.
If the USA and USSR had worked together on a moon landing, we'd still be debating the shape of Mission Control.
A bigger committee isn't always the best solution to a problem.
Especially when the USSR would have brought nothing to the table. It's not like they'd done anything that we hadn't, or that they had any hardware better than what we had.
Juvenile records are sealed when you reach the age of majority (18), and can neither be looked at (theoretically) nor used against you (again, theoretically) as an adult.
Read some history of geology. Happened all the time.
Stealing from Niven and Pournelle (Footfall) isn't a sin.
On the other hand, this is the only author I know of who inserted himself and another author into a book as supporting characters, and then has the other author's character kill the character representing himself. Over book sales, I might add.
Unfortunately, Ringo is ex-military, so he's still in love with military jargon. Which is full of (mostly) incomprehensible acronyms - FEBA, anyone (which used to be called the Front, by the way)
In general, Subs are always in stealth mode. The only exception would be when they're snorkling (yes, Nuke boats snorkel, for drills practicing reactor damage/failures).
The only thing surprising about two boats colliding is that those two nations are nominally allied, and so should be operating in pre-assigned and separate areas of the ocean. The fact that they didn't hear each other just shows that they're working as intended.
Well, no. You just have to accelerate at right angles to your current motion vector until you have the desired motion vector. Total deltaV required would be on the order of 11 km/s, and it would take bloody forever with an ion drive, or the VASIMR they just put on the ISS. But it's doable with current technology - it would just take a while.
Note that those two sentences are mutually exclusive. Equatorial orbit is NOT the plane of the ecliptic.
Umm, no. None of the Republicans voted for the stimulus bill. All the pork in it was Democratic pork.
Not the hip pocket, the front pocket. So...something else needs to glow....
Well, no. Look carefully at the amount of DEBT, not the Deficit. The National Debit increased every year Clinton was in office. There was no deficit one year, because fancy bookkeeping allowed the deficit (difference between income and outgo) to be negative while the Debt (cumulative difference between income and outgo) to increase.
State Constitutions are irrelevant to the Federal Constitution. So a vote for an Amendment to the Federal Constitution won't actually be affected by the contents of the State Constitutions.* Nor is a Governor's signature required for an Amendment to the Federal Constitution - "when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states" is the relevant phrase. The Executives of the several States don't matter a hill of beans.
I'm not going to bother to look up the text of the Amendment as ratified by all 36 States, because I'm feeling lazy. But I suspect that "ratified a slightly different version" is urban legend by the loons who insist that the Income Tax is unconstitutional. I don't, personally, approve of the Income Tax, but there's no doubt in my mind at all that it's Constitutional.
* - caveat: if the State Constitution says "no legislator will vote to approve a Federal Constitutional Amendment that disagrees with the State Constitution", then the State Constitution will have some legal bearing on the issue. At least up till the State Constitution is challenged on 14th Amendment grounds, and overturned (and it will be).
None of that is true. Income Taxes, as Excise Taxes, were around for decades before the 16th Amendment, and were reasonably legal.