Ah. So basically our Commander-in-Chief deferred to some EPA bureaucrat instead of taking charge and applying some common sense. I guess that's what you get when you elect someone with zero executive experience.
I'm not so sure that your idea would have worked even if Jindal the pair to try it but either way he does come across looking worse for this experience. I've not been real impressed by him. I'll find out what the locals think in October -- taking a trip to NOLA.
RICO requires that the Government go through the courts and be able to prove their case. You were professing a desire for the President to seize their assets without according them due process. The former really has nothing to do with the latter.
Are you so blinded by your distaste for BP that you can't see the downsides of the President having the power to freeze and/or seize privately held assets without going through the courts or abiding by the 4th amendment?
Bush took more time off than any of his predecessors... But who the fuck cares about Bush?
Apparently you do;)
What Obama could/should have done is issue an executive order freezing/seizing all BP assets to insure the taxpayers wouldn't have to pay for the cleanup and loss of income to the locals.
Please point out the Federal statue and/or section of the US Constitution that authorizes the President to seize assets by Executive Order. We have a little thing called "Rule of Law" in this country, perhaps you've heard of it?
Until we can structure a space organization that won't be a political football
Short of a war that includes activities in space I really don't see how that's going to happen. There's no way to involve the Federal Government in anything remotely related to appropriations that won't become a political football.
It's BP's fault as well as the fault of the administration, which essentially did nothing to clean up the spill. That ass Obama said he was looking to kick? It was a whopping 20-minute meeting with the head of BP. This is Obama's Katrina.
Actually, I cut Obama a lot of slack until he started grandstanding on the issue. For better or worse the Federal Government doesn't have the experience or the resources to deal with a problem of this nature. Of course coming out and stating the obvious would be political suicide, so instead he has to go on TV and deliver a rhetorical smackdown to BP so the American public gets the impression that he's "doing something"
Oh, that'd be why nearly everything the GOP/Bush wanted got rammed through on a party-line vote. Right.
I guess you weren't paying attention during the immigration and social security debates then. Plenty of dissent in the GOP. Not that I would expect a political partisan such as yourself to be able to observe our political process without bringing your own biases to the table.
That'd be why the party has been going farther right since '94
Says who? As I previously stated, the only reason that the GOP has moved further to the right is because the moderates got voted out of office. That's what happens when a political party loses power. Do you think the partisans from safe districts are the ones that pay the price for the excesses of the party? Nope. You'll see the same repeated this November with the Democrats.
Oh, boo hoo, conservatives are so disadvantaged and discriminated against; you even see yourself as so downtrodden that you have to capital-C your "ethnic group". That's a cute touch.
I capitalized "Democrats" and "Democratic Party" too but I guess you couldn't be bothered to notice. Proper nouns are supposed to be capitalized. Didn't you pay attention in school?
That's a cultural thing about liberals: differing viewpoints are generally tolerated more than in conservative circles.
Bullshit. Witness Senator Gillibrand's wholesale rejection of her previously pro 2nd amendment platform so that she could supplicate to the anti-gun primary voters in New York City. Both parties are guilty of forcing politicians to cater to the extreme. It's a consequence of the way our primary process works.
You've got your nutters, sure, but they're less numerous and less powerful
Really? Is that every member of the Congressional Democratic Leadership save Harry Reid is a urban liberal?
there's a cultural thing with conservatives that one must obey authority and toe the party line, and belong.
Give me a fucking break. This is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard on this site and that's saying quite a bit.
When the Republicans were in power they had every bit as much dissent and disagreement in their ranks as the Democrats. The only reason they don't any longer is because most of the moderate GOP'ers got voted out of office. That's what tends to happen when a political party loses power -- the die-hard members of the party come from safe districts while the moderates come from districts that are closer to being evenly divided between the two extremes.
This November it's going to be the moderate Democrats that pay the price for the excesses of Nancy Pelosi and her ilk. She won't pay the price -- her district is completely safe. The moderates are the only ones that come from competitive districts and remain vulnerable to challengers. When the Democratic Party's elected office holders consist almost entirely of urban liberals will you make the same claim about them that you just made about Conservatives?
You can't expect to secure dozens of shipping lanes, each thousands of miles long.
Except that we managed to do exactly that against a nation-state that was bent on closing those same shipping lanes. Twice as a matter of fact. Securing shipping lanes against savages in speedboats with AK-47s is child's play compared to that.
It's harder to survive there than most of us can imagine, and piracy is their one source of income.
Cry me a river. Maybe they should turn all those AK-47s and RPGs on the people that are ripping their country apart instead of merchant sailors just trying to earn a living?
Still, the USS Stark was a frigate. And it survived it's two hits.
Not sure the terms 'frigate', 'destroyer' or 'cruiser' have much meaning anymore. The Perry Class displaces more than most (all?) WW2-era destroyers. The Ticonderoga Class were originally classified as destroyers and subsequently became cruisers to appease some Congress-critters that thought the US Navy had a "cruiser gap" or some such. The Arleigh Burke class beats them in almost every department except weapons capacity (90 VLS cells vs 126 if I recall correctly) but are classified as destroyers.
The Stark's survival was pretty amazing -- good damage control on the part of her crew -- though it should be noted that one of the missiles failed to explode.
Mark 8 shell for the 16"/50 mounted on an Iowa: 1200 kg 820 m/s at the muzzle. ~20km range Unable to find amount of explosives.
Actually the range was closer to 40km. Maybe you were thinking miles instead of km? I couldn't find any information on the explosive charge in those shells either. You'd think it would be commonly available for a weapons system that was introduced over seventy years ago.
Because this was originally about the risk of having reactor breaches due to battle damage to nuclear powered ships in combat
I agree with you on that point. Not much danger of that. Even on the non-capital surface ships that previously carried them (the Virginia class cruisers). The reactor vessel is probably the strongest part of a nuclear powered ship -- it has to be to contain the radioactivity -- and the least likely to be breached as a result of battle damage.
Sadly, I'm fairly sure Verizon asked Moto to do this- they always seem to find a way to miss the point and try to assert "control" over everything.
Remember Verizon's "open network" imitative that was announced in 2008? Two years ago -- so where's my market for open non-branded devices that I can use on the Verizon Network? Surely they didn't make that announcement just to forestall regulation and maintain their walled garden, right?
now you want to attack ships at sea without them having done anything simply because pirates use the same harbor ?
Yes. When the Somalis are willing to behave in the manner of civilized nations then they can have the same rights as those civilized nations. As long as they permit their citizens to commit crimes on the high seas they have no grounds to complain when we deny them access to those same seas.
If the West doesn't want to be building nations... maybe it should stop destroying them in the first place ? Western interference was the primary reason Somalia's original government collapsed and that government wasn't great (it was a post-collonial government) so you can trace the West CAUSING the pirate problem back to raping the country for about 300 years.
Then when the government collapsed, the West made NO effort to prevent corporate ships from overfishing those unpoliced shores and polluting them until the local fishing industry (the ONLY local industry) collapsed....
The West created this problem - it's our responsibility to solve it, or deal with the consequences of our own decisions.
What's that noise I hear? It sounds like the World's smallest violin.....
Amen, brother! Remember, guns are super-effective against suicide bombers
Who said anything about suicide bombers? We were talking about the whackjobs that attack cartoonists and the like for exercising their freedom of speech. The guy who went after the Danish cartoonist was armed with an axe. The last time I checked,.45 ACP > axe. Of course the Danish cartoonist was such a pussy that he abandoned his granddaughter to hide in his safe room but there you go.....
Thank God He sent His only son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to personally write the US Constitution.
Who said that?
Without divine help, we might accidentally have ended up without gun rights
We already had gun rights. The 2nd amendment merely codified them into law.
No, because I'm right. You don't get to excuse MSNBC's bias by pointing out the fact that they suck in the ratings department. Liberal biased programming always trails in the ratings department -- witness the demise of Air America -- that doesn't mean it's any less biased or damaging.
Can you name a single destroyer or cruiser that's powered by a nuclear reactor?
Russia still maintains at least one active Kirov class missile cruiser.
I'd say that modern destroyers/cruisers actually have an excellent chance, not 100% but not 0% either, of surviving at least a single hit from a WW2 era shell.
I think not. Considering the damage done by Exocet missiles to the USS Stark and British Destroyers during the Falklands conflict..... how do you suppose the Exocet compares to a WW2 era shell in terms of explosive and kinetic energy?
At this time the nuclear ships you have to worry about are carriers and subs.
Why limit the conversation to nuclear powered ships?
Trying to solve this situation with military presence in the area (by means of military ships) simply isn't feasible, because of the size of the area
Fortunately you don't have to secure the entire area. You just have to secure safe transit lanes for merchant shipping. A more aggressive posture with our naval assets (how about preemptively attacking ships that sail out of known pirate enclaves?) and use of land forces (targeted raids against those same enclaves) might also prove to be productive.
The only way we can solve the situation in the seas around Somalia is by solving the situation in Somalia itself. Somalia needs a stable government with an active police force and/or army to do something about the criminals that are ruling the country today.
Yeah, because what the West needs is another nation building exercise....
The US already dealt with them by placing armed men on US flagged vessels and showing a willingness to prosecute any captured pirates in US courts.
Many of the states participating in the naval mission off Somalia claimed that they didn't have jurisdiction to prosecute the pirates they captured and wound up releasing them. AFAIK only a handful of countries (France, the US, Denmark, who else?) have shown a willingness to bring the pirates back to their respective countries and prosecute them for the crimes they have committed.
It only holds in that both were laws that the public vehemently disagreed with and disregarded.
Does John Q. Public really care all that much about file sharing? It doesn't seem to hold much sway (in either direction) outside of the geek/teenager/record-label-executive world.
Slashdot Mirror
ICMP TYPE 0
I'm sorry that you feel that our legal system does not afford you enough rubber stamping.
I guess it turned the quote bot on.
Ah. So basically our Commander-in-Chief deferred to some EPA bureaucrat instead of taking charge and applying some common sense. I guess that's what you get when you elect someone with zero executive experience.
I'm not so sure that your idea would have worked even if Jindal the pair to try it but either way he does come across looking worse for this experience. I've not been real impressed by him. I'll find out what the locals think in October -- taking a trip to NOLA.
RICO requires that the Government go through the courts and be able to prove their case. You were professing a desire for the President to seize their assets without according them due process. The former really has nothing to do with the latter.
What, you mean to say that a bureaucracy cut off it's nose to spite it's face? Say it isn't so.....
What was the rationale the Administration provided for declining the help of the Dutch?
Are you so blinded by your distaste for BP that you can't see the downsides of the President having the power to freeze and/or seize privately held assets without going through the courts or abiding by the 4th amendment?
Bush took more time off than any of his predecessors... But who the fuck cares about Bush?
Apparently you do ;)
What Obama could/should have done is issue an executive order freezing/seizing all BP assets to insure the taxpayers wouldn't have to pay for the cleanup and loss of income to the locals.
Please point out the Federal statue and/or section of the US Constitution that authorizes the President to seize assets by Executive Order. We have a little thing called "Rule of Law" in this country, perhaps you've heard of it?
Until we can structure a space organization that won't be a political football
Short of a war that includes activities in space I really don't see how that's going to happen. There's no way to involve the Federal Government in anything remotely related to appropriations that won't become a political football.
Of course it was the previous administration's fault. Bush lied and pelicans died!
It's BP's fault as well as the fault of the administration, which essentially did nothing to clean up the spill. That ass Obama said he was looking to kick? It was a whopping 20-minute meeting with the head of BP. This is Obama's Katrina.
Actually, I cut Obama a lot of slack until he started grandstanding on the issue. For better or worse the Federal Government doesn't have the experience or the resources to deal with a problem of this nature. Of course coming out and stating the obvious would be political suicide, so instead he has to go on TV and deliver a rhetorical smackdown to BP so the American public gets the impression that he's "doing something"
You don't become the head of a huge corporation by having human emotions.
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are on the phone and would like to speak with you.....
Now that they have the cap in place, if it works I don't see why they don't just turn the well into a producing well.
Because it was never intended to be a production well? IIRC this was always supposed to be a test well.
Oh, that'd be why nearly everything the GOP/Bush wanted got rammed through on a party-line vote. Right.
I guess you weren't paying attention during the immigration and social security debates then. Plenty of dissent in the GOP. Not that I would expect a political partisan such as yourself to be able to observe our political process without bringing your own biases to the table.
That'd be why the party has been going farther right since '94
Says who? As I previously stated, the only reason that the GOP has moved further to the right is because the moderates got voted out of office. That's what happens when a political party loses power. Do you think the partisans from safe districts are the ones that pay the price for the excesses of the party? Nope. You'll see the same repeated this November with the Democrats.
Oh, boo hoo, conservatives are so disadvantaged and discriminated against; you even see yourself as so downtrodden that you have to capital-C your "ethnic group". That's a cute touch.
I capitalized "Democrats" and "Democratic Party" too but I guess you couldn't be bothered to notice. Proper nouns are supposed to be capitalized. Didn't you pay attention in school?
That's a cultural thing about liberals: differing viewpoints are generally tolerated more than in conservative circles.
Bullshit. Witness Senator Gillibrand's wholesale rejection of her previously pro 2nd amendment platform so that she could supplicate to the anti-gun primary voters in New York City. Both parties are guilty of forcing politicians to cater to the extreme. It's a consequence of the way our primary process works.
You've got your nutters, sure, but they're less numerous and less powerful
Really? Is that every member of the Congressional Democratic Leadership save Harry Reid is a urban liberal?
there's a cultural thing with conservatives that one must obey authority and toe the party line, and belong.
Give me a fucking break. This is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard on this site and that's saying quite a bit.
When the Republicans were in power they had every bit as much dissent and disagreement in their ranks as the Democrats. The only reason they don't any longer is because most of the moderate GOP'ers got voted out of office. That's what tends to happen when a political party loses power -- the die-hard members of the party come from safe districts while the moderates come from districts that are closer to being evenly divided between the two extremes.
This November it's going to be the moderate Democrats that pay the price for the excesses of Nancy Pelosi and her ilk. She won't pay the price -- her district is completely safe. The moderates are the only ones that come from competitive districts and remain vulnerable to challengers. When the Democratic Party's elected office holders consist almost entirely of urban liberals will you make the same claim about them that you just made about Conservatives?
You can't expect to secure dozens of shipping lanes, each thousands of miles long.
Except that we managed to do exactly that against a nation-state that was bent on closing those same shipping lanes. Twice as a matter of fact. Securing shipping lanes against savages in speedboats with AK-47s is child's play compared to that.
It's harder to survive there than most of us can imagine, and piracy is their one source of income.
Cry me a river. Maybe they should turn all those AK-47s and RPGs on the people that are ripping their country apart instead of merchant sailors just trying to earn a living?
Still, the USS Stark was a frigate. And it survived it's two hits.
Not sure the terms 'frigate', 'destroyer' or 'cruiser' have much meaning anymore. The Perry Class displaces more than most (all?) WW2-era destroyers. The Ticonderoga Class were originally classified as destroyers and subsequently became cruisers to appease some Congress-critters that thought the US Navy had a "cruiser gap" or some such. The Arleigh Burke class beats them in almost every department except weapons capacity (90 VLS cells vs 126 if I recall correctly) but are classified as destroyers.
The Stark's survival was pretty amazing -- good damage control on the part of her crew -- though it should be noted that one of the missiles failed to explode.
Mark 8 shell for the 16"/50 mounted on an Iowa: 1200 kg 820 m/s at the muzzle. ~20km range Unable to find amount of explosives.
Actually the range was closer to 40km. Maybe you were thinking miles instead of km? I couldn't find any information on the explosive charge in those shells either. You'd think it would be commonly available for a weapons system that was introduced over seventy years ago.
Because this was originally about the risk of having reactor breaches due to battle damage to nuclear powered ships in combat
I agree with you on that point. Not much danger of that. Even on the non-capital surface ships that previously carried them (the Virginia class cruisers). The reactor vessel is probably the strongest part of a nuclear powered ship -- it has to be to contain the radioactivity -- and the least likely to be breached as a result of battle damage.
Sadly, I'm fairly sure Verizon asked Moto to do this- they always seem to find a way to miss the point and try to assert "control" over everything.
Remember Verizon's "open network" imitative that was announced in 2008? Two years ago -- so where's my market for open non-branded devices that I can use on the Verizon Network? Surely they didn't make that announcement just to forestall regulation and maintain their walled garden, right?
now you want to attack ships at sea without them having done anything simply because pirates use the same harbor ?
Yes. When the Somalis are willing to behave in the manner of civilized nations then they can have the same rights as those civilized nations. As long as they permit their citizens to commit crimes on the high seas they have no grounds to complain when we deny them access to those same seas.
If the West doesn't want to be building nations ... maybe it should stop destroying them in the first place ? Western interference was the primary reason Somalia's original government collapsed and that government wasn't great (it was a post-collonial government) so you can trace the West CAUSING the pirate problem back to raping the country for about 300 years.
Then when the government collapsed, the West made NO effort to prevent corporate ships from overfishing those unpoliced shores and polluting them until the local fishing industry (the ONLY local industry) collapsed....
The West created this problem - it's our responsibility to solve it, or deal with the consequences of our own decisions.
What's that noise I hear? It sounds like the World's smallest violin.....
Amen, brother! Remember, guns are super-effective against suicide bombers
Who said anything about suicide bombers? We were talking about the whackjobs that attack cartoonists and the like for exercising their freedom of speech. The guy who went after the Danish cartoonist was armed with an axe. The last time I checked, .45 ACP > axe. Of course the Danish cartoonist was such a pussy that he abandoned his granddaughter to hide in his safe room but there you go.....
Thank God He sent His only son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to personally write the US Constitution.
Who said that?
Without divine help, we might accidentally have ended up without gun rights
We already had gun rights. The 2nd amendment merely codified them into law.
No, because I'm right. You don't get to excuse MSNBC's bias by pointing out the fact that they suck in the ratings department. Liberal biased programming always trails in the ratings department -- witness the demise of Air America -- that doesn't mean it's any less biased or damaging.
Can you name a single destroyer or cruiser that's powered by a nuclear reactor?
Russia still maintains at least one active Kirov class missile cruiser.
I'd say that modern destroyers/cruisers actually have an excellent chance, not 100% but not 0% either, of surviving at least a single hit from a WW2 era shell.
I think not. Considering the damage done by Exocet missiles to the USS Stark and British Destroyers during the Falklands conflict..... how do you suppose the Exocet compares to a WW2 era shell in terms of explosive and kinetic energy?
At this time the nuclear ships you have to worry about are carriers and subs.
Why limit the conversation to nuclear powered ships?
Trying to solve this situation with military presence in the area (by means of military ships) simply isn't feasible, because of the size of the area
Fortunately you don't have to secure the entire area. You just have to secure safe transit lanes for merchant shipping. A more aggressive posture with our naval assets (how about preemptively attacking ships that sail out of known pirate enclaves?) and use of land forces (targeted raids against those same enclaves) might also prove to be productive.
The only way we can solve the situation in the seas around Somalia is by solving the situation in Somalia itself. Somalia needs a stable government with an active police force and/or army to do something about the criminals that are ruling the country today.
Yeah, because what the West needs is another nation building exercise....
The US already dealt with them by placing armed men on US flagged vessels and showing a willingness to prosecute any captured pirates in US courts.
Many of the states participating in the naval mission off Somalia claimed that they didn't have jurisdiction to prosecute the pirates they captured and wound up releasing them. AFAIK only a handful of countries (France, the US, Denmark, who else?) have shown a willingness to bring the pirates back to their respective countries and prosecute them for the crimes they have committed.
It only holds in that both were laws that the public vehemently disagreed with and disregarded.
Does John Q. Public really care all that much about file sharing? It doesn't seem to hold much sway (in either direction) outside of the geek/teenager/record-label-executive world.