The reason I voted for Jill Stein is that Rahm Emanuel, speaking for the White House, told the progressives who were organizing for single payer that they were "fucking retarded."
Then, when the story came out, Emanuel apologized to the retarded organizations.
I'm a fucking retard? OK, I'll vote for a fucking third party. Eugene Debs and all.
What I don't understand is this --
The Democrats lost Florida, and the Presidency, in 2000, by less than the 2% or something that Ralph Nader got. There are elections that are close enough to lose if they don't get the progressive vote, and yet they tell us to go fuck ourselves. They're losing elections because of that. "Vote for me because the other guy is worse" doesn't always work. Are they stupid? Do they think that with $1 billion a year in campaign contributions from special interests, all they have to do is blast TV commercials and forget about what their progressive constituents want?
Last year, Chirayath began working at ARC, where he helps develop small, compact research satellites known as “CubeSats.” The technology, developed in part at Stanford, reminded him of Viking explorers who, from the eighth through 11th centuries, “travelled farther and saw more in much smaller ships than had been used before their time.”
The simple reason is that every bureaucrat thinks their job is so very important. Thus any government weenie who got their hands on it would start sending out "helpful" messages. A missing child is not the worst use for this but per usual the government did it about as badly as they could; The message being basically useless.
It's not government weenies who are responsible for this, it's lobbying groups. It started out with legitimate problems, such as laws against help-wanted ads that said, "White Christian gentleman," and laws against KKK lynchings. Once they got enhanced penalties for crimes against black people, everybody wanted in -- Jews, women, the elderly, the handicapped, etc.
One of the problems is that a lobbying group thinks its a success if they can get the penalties increased for breaking the laws they're promoting. That contributes to the draconian jail terms in our prisons. So Mothers Against Drunken Driving got the penalties for drunken driving lengthened. The drug war people got the penalties for marijuana, cocaine, etc. lengthened. The anti-sex people made it a felony for teenagers to have sex. And I don't have to tell you about the anti-abortion movement.
The underlying problem is that voters vote for politicians who push things like this. A lot of the government weenies don't want to do these things at all, but it's popular among the voters. So blame the voters.
In 1963, a manual of the office instructed that prosecutors should not take “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated.” In 1986, the Dallas Morning News reported that county prosecutors were still trying to keep almost all blacks off juries by using peremptory challenges.
They took it out of the manuals but if you look at the voir dire they're still doing it.
It is well known among lawyers that there are ways to manipulate jury selection. In the South, the first step is to keep blacks out of the jury pool in the first place. In Florida, they use the voter rolls, and they exclude anyone who has been convicted of a "crime". For example, a black guy was arrested and convicted for falling asleep at a bus stop while waiting for the bus. He was excluded from the jury pool.
If the prosecutor wants to throw the case, he can simply make no effort to avoid an all-white jury. In Florida, they have this peculiar 6-man jury, which makes it even easier to get an all-white jury.
If you have any black friends, you should have noticed that black and white people perceive some things differently. That's because their experience of discrimination is different. Throughout the South, if black people violated the racial code, there were gangs of self-appointed vigilantes who would kidnap and kill them. Trayvon Martin was certainly aware of that when he saw George Zimmerman following him.
Every lawyer knows that you can get a different result with white people or black people on the jury (especially in a case like this). That's why Southern prosecutors usually try so hard to keep blacks off the jury.
If I'm a defendant -- or if I'm the family of the victim -- I have a right not to be tried by a jury of all white jurors or all black jurors. I have a right to be tried by a jury that's randomly and fairly selected from the population. This jury looks very suspicious to me. They couldn't find one acceptable black juror in a racially-charged case like this?
I hear a lot of bullshit now about that's what the jury decided and we have to accept it. If you wanted me to accept it, you should have had a jury I can trust. I don't trust an all-white jury in the South.
Yes, the system has been racist for 300 years. And it still is. Zimmerman was acquitted by a white racist jury.
Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.
"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon, you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they say 'Thank you' and walk away.
They don't put up arguments." Rosado doesn't know how many people in Volusia were dropped from the list as a result of being identified as felons.
Many Orange County voters never got the chance to appeal in any form. Condrun noted that about one-third of the letters, which the county sent out by regular mail, were returned to the office marked undeliverable. She attributed the high rate of incorrect addresses to the age of the information sent by DBT, some of which was close to 20 years old, she said.
A Republican administration in Florida prevented enough black voters from voting to swing the election for Bush. ChoicePoint deliberately targeted blacks. Over half the purged voters were black. ChoicePoint didn't do a similar analysis of hispanic names, because the Cubans voted Republican. It is well known that the Republican state legislatures around the country have a strategy of Gerrymandering districts to prevent blacks from influencing elections.
Florida was a slave state and a Jim Crow state that didn't let blacks vote at all until they were forced to by the voting right act in the 1960s. They're still a racist, Jim Crow state.
Zimmerman was tried for the killing of a black man by an all-white jury, and as always happens in those cases, the jury found him innocent. When was the last time a white man was convicted of killing a black man in Florida?
P.S. My parents went to Florida in the 1940s. My mother told me that she was riding on a bus, and she saw a pregnant black woman standing. She got up to give the black woman her seat, and pandemonium ensued. The black woman got off the bus.
Here's another doctor who made the same argument about testing for illegal drugs. Be sure to catch the distinction between screening tests and diagnostic tests.
... The problem of a false positive test is frequently encountered in the practice of medicine. Depending on the clinical circumstances and the nature of the initial test, follow up evaluation with more expensive and possibly more invasive testing is often required in order to verify the results. For example, an abnormality found on the chest x-ray of a smoker with a bad cough requires further evaluation. A CT scan of the chest, bronchoscopy, and even a needle biopsy to obtain a tissue sample for analysis are required before making a diagnosis of lung cancer and starting treatment.
However, the possibility of a false positive drug screen and the need for further testing and evaluation is rarely considered outside the context of clinical practice. Employers, school administrators, government agencies, and law enforcement can and do consider a positive drug test to be perfectly equivalent to an admission of illicit drug use. This frequently results in the administration of some form of punishment or corrective action being delivered without giving the accused the right to defend themselves in any way. Essentially, drug testing is an effective way to violate a person’s right to due process since most drug screening is managed by lay people in non-clinical roles who believe that drug testing is 100% reliable. But this would be the same absurdity as giving chemotherapy to the smoker with the abnormal chest x-ray without first trying to verify the diagnosis with further evaluation (due process).
The other problem comes from the mass drug testing of large numbers of people (either random or at the initial point of contact). The interpretation of the results of a medical test are never as simple as positive or negative. The statistical probability of a false positive or a false negative result must be considered in concert with the pretest probability....
I'm not going to look them up, but there are statistics to show that black people who kill white people are more likely to get the death penalty than vice versa.
Here's a case where a black man who thought his family's life was in danger killed a white teenager who was threatening him -- and got convicted.
Zimmerman's case was entirely based off of normal self-defense laws that exist even in the most anti-gun state. He was pinned to the ground and was having his head bashed into the pavement - that's attempted murder. Even in your most anti-gun area, that's still full grounds for using deadly force to protect yourself.
You have a right to use deadly force if you're in immediate danger of life-threatening injury. Getting your head bashed into the pavement isn't life-threatening injury, as the prosecutor's expert witness testified. When I was younger, I got into a few fights. If I got on top of the other guy, I bashed his head against the pavement. If the other guy got on top of me, he bashed my head against the pavement. That was street fighting rules in Brooklyn. Sure, it's not pleasant to get your head bashed against the pavement, and maybe it's an assault, but it doesn't justify killing the other guy with a gun.
Whether Zimmerman was in enough danger to use deadly force is a jury question. If I were on the jury, I would have decided that he wasn't.
George Zimmerman joined (or apparently created) a neighborhood watch. If you choose to go around your neighborhood at night, alone, following strangers and confronting them, ignoring the advice of people who know better (like the 911 operators), and ignoring the neighborhood watch rules, you're looking for trouble. You better be prepared to have one of those strangers decide that you're a threat, and bash your head against the pavement. If your prepared response in that situation is to carry a gun and shoot the stranger, you better be prepared to have the jury find you guilty of some degree of homicide.
You're just assuming that the costs associated with those services are greater than the power they generate.
The only evidence you have to support that is a study by a contrarian economist whose views are not widely accepted.
It's interesting to be a conservative economist. You start out by saying, "Assume the government is less efficient than private enterprise. Now go out and find some facts to prove it."
I would start out by saying, "Is the government more efficient, less efficient or as efficient as private enterprise? What are the facts?"
I'm saying that the government does create GDP. If you look at a Leontief input/output matrix, which summarizes the entire economy by sector, there is a sector for the contribution of government services.
One example is the TVA. The TVA is definitely generating electricity, much of it through hydropower and some of it through nuclear power.
Whatever TVA's efficiency is, and whatever their wisdom in ordering new nuclear plants, when they generate electric power, they're definitely contributing to the GDP. During WWII, they were manufacturing aluminum, which was a critically-needed weapons component.
You may be able to come up with an economist who believes the government is inherently inefficient, who can create an argument that the economy would have grown faster if the TVA had never been built. That's definitely a contrarian view. If I saw that argument in a less ideological publication, like Science, I would take it seriously. The Wall Street Journal news section used to cover the electric power generating industry, and I don't remember them saying anything like that.
But right now the TVA is generating electricity and contributing to the GDP.
There was a lot of enthusiasm for nuclear power construction in the 1970s, in private and government facilities. After Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, it became much more difficult to build plants, private or public.
I would look for a more objective source of information than Reason. After all, if one of their writers researched a story and it turned out that the government was actually doing a good job, they wouldn't print it, would they?
I'll look for something in Science magazine. I don't get Nucleonics Week, Nucleonics and Electrical World any more, and I don't talk to people in the energy industry any more. I'll take this article in Reason under advisement if I ever return to the subject.
When I asked people in the industry to name the best-run nuclear power plants in the U.S., they named the TVA (and Commonwealth Edison Chicago). There are standard metrics, particularly down time, for nuclear power plants and conventional plants, so you can judge them with reasonable objectivity.
I'll have to disagree with Ralph Nader on this one.
I live in the city. We have problems with essential services too. Housing is more expensive here, and so is food. We have government subsidies for the poor. I don't mind government subsidies for the rural poor. In Canada they say, "We care for each other."
While these subsidies were going on, we turned into the wealthiest, most powerful economy in the world (we do have a few distribution problems).
If we're so wealthy, and our system is so efficient, we can help out the ones who aren't doing so well.
Give them a helping hand, not a lecture on the free market.
I did some Googling too. Here's what I found about their lobbyist, C. McClain Haddow. And somebody else found this link. http://www.nndb.com/org/319/000168812/ We're doing IT World's job for them.
The real pedigree of the group Green represents is hidden under layers of PR and politics. The Seniors Coalition was cofounded in 1989 by conservative activist Dan C. Alexander Jr., three years after he was sent to prison for arranging construction kickbacks as an Alabama school-committee member. Today, its top outside lobbyist is C. McClain Haddow, a former Health and Human Services official who spent time in prison with Alexander for failing to file a timely ethics waiver when he gave his wife a government contract. Haddow has also lobbied for generic-drugs manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
The organization’s Washington activities regularly blur the needs of seniors with the agendas of corporate donors. After it took money from Microsoft in 1999, the coalition lobbied on antitrust litigation, and after it took money from Lottery.com in 2000, it lobbied on a bill that would restrict Internet gambling. Money also poured in from the American Petroleum Institute and the American Public Power Association—just as the coalition spoke out against the Kyoto Protocol and lower gas-mileage standards.
The Seniors Coalition is especially tied to the drug industry. PHRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, gave the organization $2.2 million between 1999 and 2000 (the only two years for which full financial disclosure is available). Other drug industry sources funneled the group an additional $300,000 during that time. But Tom Moore, the coalition’s chief operating officer, writes in an email that only 22 percent of his organization’s funding comes from industry, and that the group “retains its complete independence in developing [its] legislative agenda.”
The real pedigree of the group Green represents is hidden under layers of PR and politics. The Seniors Coalition was cofounded in 1989 by conservative activist Dan C. Alexander Jr., three years after he was sent to prison for arranging construction kickbacks as an Alabama school-committee member. Today, its top outside lobbyist is C. McClain Haddow, a former Health and Human Services official who spent time in prison with Alexander for failing to file a timely ethics waiver when he gave his wife a government contract. Haddow has also lobbied for generic-drugs manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
The organization’s Washington activities regularly blur the needs of seniors with the agendas of corporate donors. After it took money from Microsoft in 1999, the coalition lobbied on antitrust litigation, and after it took money from Lottery.com in 2000, it lobbied on a bill that would restrict Internet gambling. Money also poured in from the American Petroleum Institute and the American Public Power Association—just as the coalition spoke out against the Kyoto Protocol and lower gas-mileage standards.
The Seniors Coalition is especially tied to the drug industry. PHRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, gave the organization $2.2 million between 1999 and 2000 (the only two years for which full financial disclosure is available). Other drug industry sources funneled the group an additional $300,000 during that time. But Tom Moore, the coalition’s chief operating officer, writes in an email that only 22 percent of his organization’s funding comes from industry, and that the group “retains its complete independence in developing [its] legislative agenda.”
There is some interest group behind this that is going to save a lot of money if they eliminated the Universal Service Fund (which has its pros and cons), and this outfit is crying crocodile tears over the urban poor. Or generational equity. I'd take them more seriously if they were up front with their real agenda.
If Commonwealth Edison is contributing to the GDP, why isn't the Tennessee Valley Authority?
The government It creates federal highways, and a lot of bridges and infrastructure. There are federal hospitals. When the VA hospital gives you a hip replacement so that you can get out of a wheelchair, that contributes to the GDP. There are government-run power plants which are just as efficient as any private power plants. When the FDA inspects a pharmaceutical plant so we don't get another outbreak of contaminated drugs, that contributes to the GDP. The federal government is investigating that air crash. Doesn't accident investigation contribute to the GDP?
I'd rather get my data from somebody more objective and without the political agenda of the Heritage Foundation.
I used to get the Statistical Abstract of the United States every year but our federal budget-cutters stopped publishing it.
(I don't know if this applies to the Heritage Foundation specifically, but I've seen people in the Wall Street Journal claim that payroll taxes aren't taxes, therefore half the population is moochers who don't pay taxes.)
Slashdot Mirror
I too voted for Jill Stein, Green Party.
The reason I voted for Jill Stein is that Rahm Emanuel, speaking for the White House, told the progressives who were organizing for single payer that they were "fucking retarded."
Then, when the story came out, Emanuel apologized to the retarded organizations.
I'm a fucking retard? OK, I'll vote for a fucking third party. Eugene Debs and all.
What I don't understand is this --
The Democrats lost Florida, and the Presidency, in 2000, by less than the 2% or something that Ralph Nader got. There are elections that are close enough to lose if they don't get the progressive vote, and yet they tell us to go fuck ourselves. They're losing elections because of that. "Vote for me because the other guy is worse" doesn't always work. Are they stupid? Do they think that with $1 billion a year in campaign contributions from special interests, all they have to do is blast TV commercials and forget about what their progressive constituents want?
Shit. I had a whole collection of Astounding Science Fiction that I left behind when I moved.
Chirayath's name may have been multiply determined.
FTA:
Last year, Chirayath began working at ARC, where he helps develop small, compact research satellites known as “CubeSats.” The technology, developed in part at Stanford, reminded him of Viking explorers who, from the eighth through 11th centuries, “travelled farther and saw more in much smaller ships than had been used before their time.”
Well, they certainly won't allow sex with 14-year-olds, like Romeo and Juliet.
I don't understand this article clearly. If he's not allowed to refer to it, why is he writing about it now? Did the gag order expire?
I see from the Guardian article that he ran for Senate in Utah, but lost to Orren Hatch. Too bad.
The simple reason is that every bureaucrat thinks their job is so very important. Thus any government weenie who got their hands on it would start sending out "helpful" messages. A missing child is not the worst use for this but per usual the government did it about as badly as they could; The message being basically useless.
It's not government weenies who are responsible for this, it's lobbying groups. It started out with legitimate problems, such as laws against help-wanted ads that said, "White Christian gentleman," and laws against KKK lynchings. Once they got enhanced penalties for crimes against black people, everybody wanted in -- Jews, women, the elderly, the handicapped, etc.
One of the problems is that a lobbying group thinks its a success if they can get the penalties increased for breaking the laws they're promoting. That contributes to the draconian jail terms in our prisons. So Mothers Against Drunken Driving got the penalties for drunken driving lengthened. The drug war people got the penalties for marijuana, cocaine, etc. lengthened. The anti-sex people made it a felony for teenagers to have sex. And I don't have to tell you about the anti-abortion movement.
The underlying problem is that voters vote for politicians who push things like this. A lot of the government weenies don't want to do these things at all, but it's popular among the voters. So blame the voters.
I used to write for legal magazines, and I often interviewed lawyers about how they select juries, which, they say, is where you win or lose the case.
It is well known among lawyers that prosecutors, especially in the South, try to keep blacks off juries, especially when the defendant is black.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/texas-reaches-death-penalty-milestone/
In 1963, a manual of the office instructed that prosecutors should not take “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated.” In 1986, the Dallas Morning News reported that county prosecutors were still trying to keep almost all blacks off juries by using peremptory challenges.
They took it out of the manuals but if you look at the voir dire they're still doing it.
It is well known among lawyers that there are ways to manipulate jury selection. In the South, the first step is to keep blacks out of the jury pool in the first place. In Florida, they use the voter rolls, and they exclude anyone who has been convicted of a "crime". For example, a black guy was arrested and convicted for falling asleep at a bus stop while waiting for the bus. He was excluded from the jury pool.
If the prosecutor wants to throw the case, he can simply make no effort to avoid an all-white jury. In Florida, they have this peculiar 6-man jury, which makes it even easier to get an all-white jury.
If you have any black friends, you should have noticed that black and white people perceive some things differently. That's because their experience of discrimination is different. Throughout the South, if black people violated the racial code, there were gangs of self-appointed vigilantes who would kidnap and kill them. Trayvon Martin was certainly aware of that when he saw George Zimmerman following him.
Every lawyer knows that you can get a different result with white people or black people on the jury (especially in a case like this). That's why Southern prosecutors usually try so hard to keep blacks off the jury.
If I'm a defendant -- or if I'm the family of the victim -- I have a right not to be tried by a jury of all white jurors or all black jurors. I have a right to be tried by a jury that's randomly and fairly selected from the population. This jury looks very suspicious to me. They couldn't find one acceptable black juror in a racially-charged case like this?
I hear a lot of bullshit now about that's what the jury decided and we have to accept it. If you wanted me to accept it, you should have had a jury I can trust. I don't trust an all-white jury in the South.
Yes, the system has been racist for 300 years. And it still is. Zimmerman was acquitted by a white racist jury.
That's not the way Greg Palast, who produced the story for the BBC, described it.
http://www.gregpalast.com/floridas-flawed-voter-cleansing-program-saloncoms-politics-story-of-the-year/
But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters.
Etta Rosado, spokeswoman for the Volusia County Department of Elections, said the county essentially accepted the file at face value, did nothing to confirm the accuracy of it and doesn't inform citizens ahead of time that they have been dropped from the voter rolls.
"I don't think that it's up to us to tell them they're a convicted felon," Rosado said. "If he's on our rolls, we make a notation on there. If they show up at a polling place, we'll say, 'Wait a minute, you're a convicted felon, you can't vote. Nine out of 10 times when we repeat that to the person, they say 'Thank you' and walk away.
They don't put up arguments." Rosado doesn't know how many people in Volusia were dropped from the list as a result of being identified as felons.
Many Orange County voters never got the chance to appeal in any form. Condrun noted that about one-third of the letters, which the county sent out by regular mail, were returned to the office marked undeliverable. She attributed the high rate of incorrect addresses to the age of the information sent by DBT, some of which was close to 20 years old, she said.
A Republican administration in Florida prevented enough black voters from voting to swing the election for Bush. ChoicePoint deliberately targeted blacks. Over half the purged voters were black. ChoicePoint didn't do a similar analysis of hispanic names, because the Cubans voted Republican. It is well known that the Republican state legislatures around the country have a strategy of Gerrymandering districts to prevent blacks from influencing elections.
Florida was a slave state and a Jim Crow state that didn't let blacks vote at all until they were forced to by the voting right act in the 1960s. They're still a racist, Jim Crow state.
Zimmerman was tried for the killing of a black man by an all-white jury, and as always happens in those cases, the jury found him innocent. When was the last time a white man was convicted of killing a black man in Florida?
P.S. My parents went to Florida in the 1940s. My mother told me that she was riding on a bus, and she saw a pregnant black woman standing. She got up to give the black woman her seat, and pandemonium ensued. The black woman got off the bus.
Here's another doctor who made the same argument about testing for illegal drugs. Be sure to catch the distinction between screening tests and diagnostic tests.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/07/drug-testing-considered-screening-tests.html
Should drug testing be considered screening tests?
Chris Rangel, MD | Conditions | July 12, 2013
However, the possibility of a false positive drug screen and the need for further testing and evaluation is rarely considered outside the context of clinical practice. Employers, school administrators, government agencies, and law enforcement can and do consider a positive drug test to be perfectly equivalent to an admission of illicit drug use. This frequently results in the administration of some form of punishment or corrective action being delivered without giving the accused the right to defend themselves in any way. Essentially, drug testing is an effective way to violate a person’s right to due process since most drug screening is managed by lay people in non-clinical roles who believe that drug testing is 100% reliable. But this would be the same absurdity as giving chemotherapy to the smoker with the abnormal chest x-ray without first trying to verify the diagnosis with further evaluation (due process).
The other problem comes from the mass drug testing of large numbers of people (either random or at the initial point of contact). The interpretation of the results of a medical test are never as simple as positive or negative. The statistical probability of a false positive or a false negative result must be considered in concert with the pretest probability....
Zimmerman's life was not in danger, and defending yourself is *never* an excuse to harm someone with impunity...
That's what I would think if I were on the jury.
It looks like Martin also decided that he wasn't going to wait and see how things go before he defended himself.
What are the odds of getting six white people on a jury? What are the odds of tossing heads six times in a row?
I'm not going to look them up, but there are statistics to show that black people who kill white people are more likely to get the death penalty than vice versa.
Here's a case where a black man who thought his family's life was in danger killed a white teenager who was threatening him -- and got convicted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30white.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/nyregion/23trial.html
Florida was a slave state.
In 2000, they falsely identified about 10,000 black people as felons and prevented them from voting.
There were 6 white jurors in the Zimmerman trial. What are the odds of getting 6 white jurors? What are the odds of getting heads 6 times in a row?
Zimmerman's case was entirely based off of normal self-defense laws that exist even in the most anti-gun state. He was pinned to the ground and was having his head bashed into the pavement - that's attempted murder. Even in your most anti-gun area, that's still full grounds for using deadly force to protect yourself.
You have a right to use deadly force if you're in immediate danger of life-threatening injury. Getting your head bashed into the pavement isn't life-threatening injury, as the prosecutor's expert witness testified. When I was younger, I got into a few fights. If I got on top of the other guy, I bashed his head against the pavement. If the other guy got on top of me, he bashed my head against the pavement. That was street fighting rules in Brooklyn. Sure, it's not pleasant to get your head bashed against the pavement, and maybe it's an assault, but it doesn't justify killing the other guy with a gun.
Whether Zimmerman was in enough danger to use deadly force is a jury question. If I were on the jury, I would have decided that he wasn't.
George Zimmerman joined (or apparently created) a neighborhood watch. If you choose to go around your neighborhood at night, alone, following strangers and confronting them, ignoring the advice of people who know better (like the 911 operators), and ignoring the neighborhood watch rules, you're looking for trouble. You better be prepared to have one of those strangers decide that you're a threat, and bash your head against the pavement. If your prepared response in that situation is to carry a gun and shoot the stranger, you better be prepared to have the jury find you guilty of some degree of homicide.
There's obviously a racial issue here. When white people kill black in the South (or even in the North) they get acquitted. When black people kill white people, they get convicted. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30white.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/nyregion/23trial.html
There were 6 white jurors. What are the odds of getting 6 white jurors by chance? What are the odds of getting heads 6 times in a row?
You're just assuming that the costs associated with those services are greater than the power they generate.
The only evidence you have to support that is a study by a contrarian economist whose views are not widely accepted.
It's interesting to be a conservative economist. You start out by saying, "Assume the government is less efficient than private enterprise. Now go out and find some facts to prove it."
I would start out by saying, "Is the government more efficient, less efficient or as efficient as private enterprise? What are the facts?"
I'm saying that the government does create GDP. If you look at a Leontief input/output matrix, which summarizes the entire economy by sector, there is a sector for the contribution of government services.
One example is the TVA. The TVA is definitely generating electricity, much of it through hydropower and some of it through nuclear power.
Whatever TVA's efficiency is, and whatever their wisdom in ordering new nuclear plants, when they generate electric power, they're definitely contributing to the GDP. During WWII, they were manufacturing aluminum, which was a critically-needed weapons component.
You may be able to come up with an economist who believes the government is inherently inefficient, who can create an argument that the economy would have grown faster if the TVA had never been built. That's definitely a contrarian view. If I saw that argument in a less ideological publication, like Science, I would take it seriously. The Wall Street Journal news section used to cover the electric power generating industry, and I don't remember them saying anything like that.
But right now the TVA is generating electricity and contributing to the GDP.
There was a lot of enthusiasm for nuclear power construction in the 1970s, in private and government facilities. After Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, it became much more difficult to build plants, private or public.
Cherry-picked facts aren't too useful.
I would look for a more objective source of information than Reason. After all, if one of their writers researched a story and it turned out that the government was actually doing a good job, they wouldn't print it, would they?
I'll look for something in Science magazine. I don't get Nucleonics Week, Nucleonics and Electrical World any more, and I don't talk to people in the energy industry any more. I'll take this article in Reason under advisement if I ever return to the subject.
When I asked people in the industry to name the best-run nuclear power plants in the U.S., they named the TVA (and Commonwealth Edison Chicago). There are standard metrics, particularly down time, for nuclear power plants and conventional plants, so you can judge them with reasonable objectivity.
I'll have to disagree with Ralph Nader on this one.
I live in the city. We have problems with essential services too. Housing is more expensive here, and so is food. We have government subsidies for the poor. I don't mind government subsidies for the rural poor. In Canada they say, "We care for each other."
While these subsidies were going on, we turned into the wealthiest, most powerful economy in the world (we do have a few distribution problems).
If we're so wealthy, and our system is so efficient, we can help out the ones who aren't doing so well.
Give them a helping hand, not a lecture on the free market.
I did some Googling too. Here's what I found about their lobbyist, C. McClain Haddow. And somebody else found this link. http://www.nndb.com/org/319/000168812/ We're doing IT World's job for them.
The Artful Codger
Trashing the AARP with Grandma Green.
By Michael Scherer
July/August 2005 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/07/artful-codger
The real pedigree of the group Green represents is hidden under layers of PR and politics. The Seniors Coalition was cofounded in 1989 by conservative activist Dan C. Alexander Jr., three years after he was sent to prison for arranging construction kickbacks as an Alabama school-committee member. Today, its top outside lobbyist is C. McClain Haddow, a former Health and Human Services official who spent time in prison with Alexander for failing to file a timely ethics waiver when he gave his wife a government contract. Haddow has also lobbied for generic-drugs manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
The organization’s Washington activities regularly blur the needs of seniors with the agendas of corporate donors. After it took money from Microsoft in 1999, the coalition lobbied on antitrust litigation, and after it took money from Lottery.com in 2000, it lobbied on a bill that would restrict Internet gambling. Money also poured in from the American Petroleum Institute and the American Public Power Association—just as the coalition spoke out against the Kyoto Protocol and lower gas-mileage standards.
The Seniors Coalition is especially tied to the drug industry. PHRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, gave the organization $2.2 million between 1999 and 2000 (the only two years for which full financial disclosure is available). Other drug industry sources funneled the group an additional $300,000 during that time. But Tom Moore, the coalition’s chief operating officer, writes in an email that only 22 percent of his organization’s funding comes from industry, and that the group “retains its complete independence in developing [its] legislative agenda.”
Thanks. I couldn't find that link.
And who's paying them ~$100,000 a year?
http://www.guidestar.org/organizations/26-2171390/alliance-generational-equity.aspx
Their web site www.truslseniors.org is down
Another question is, who the fuck is C. McClain Haddow, the guy who's running Alliance for Generational Equity?
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/lobbying/client/alliance-for-generational-equity
Mother Jones has a hint.
The Artful Codger
Trashing the AARP with Grandma Green.
By Michael Scherer
July/August 2005 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/07/artful-codger
The real pedigree of the group Green represents is hidden under layers of PR and politics. The Seniors Coalition was cofounded in 1989 by conservative activist Dan C. Alexander Jr., three years after he was sent to prison for arranging construction kickbacks as an Alabama school-committee member. Today, its top outside lobbyist is C. McClain Haddow, a former Health and Human Services official who spent time in prison with Alexander for failing to file a timely ethics waiver when he gave his wife a government contract. Haddow has also lobbied for generic-drugs manufacturer Mylan Pharmaceuticals.
The organization’s Washington activities regularly blur the needs of seniors with the agendas of corporate donors. After it took money from Microsoft in 1999, the coalition lobbied on antitrust litigation, and after it took money from Lottery.com in 2000, it lobbied on a bill that would restrict Internet gambling. Money also poured in from the American Petroleum Institute and the American Public Power Association—just as the coalition spoke out against the Kyoto Protocol and lower gas-mileage standards.
The Seniors Coalition is especially tied to the drug industry. PHRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, gave the organization $2.2 million between 1999 and 2000 (the only two years for which full financial disclosure is available). Other drug industry sources funneled the group an additional $300,000 during that time. But Tom Moore, the coalition’s chief operating officer, writes in an email that only 22 percent of his organization’s funding comes from industry, and that the group “retains its complete independence in developing [its] legislative agenda.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
There is some interest group behind this that is going to save a lot of money if they eliminated the Universal Service Fund (which has its pros and cons), and this outfit is crying crocodile tears over the urban poor. Or generational equity. I'd take them more seriously if they were up front with their real agenda.
What evidence do you have that the TVA destroyed economic value (in ways that Commonwealth Edison did not)?
The government creates a lot of the GDP.
If Commonwealth Edison is contributing to the GDP, why isn't the Tennessee Valley Authority?
The government It creates federal highways, and a lot of bridges and infrastructure. There are federal hospitals. When the VA hospital gives you a hip replacement so that you can get out of a wheelchair, that contributes to the GDP. There are government-run power plants which are just as efficient as any private power plants. When the FDA inspects a pharmaceutical plant so we don't get another outbreak of contaminated drugs, that contributes to the GDP. The federal government is investigating that air crash. Doesn't accident investigation contribute to the GDP?
I'd rather get my data from somebody more objective and without the political agenda of the Heritage Foundation.
I used to get the Statistical Abstract of the United States every year but our federal budget-cutters stopped publishing it.
(I don't know if this applies to the Heritage Foundation specifically, but I've seen people in the Wall Street Journal claim that payroll taxes aren't taxes, therefore half the population is moochers who don't pay taxes.)