Senate Confirms Former Coal Lobbyist Andrew Wheeler To Lead EPA (cnn.com) 201
The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Andrew Wheeler as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, ratifying President Trump's choice of a former advocate for business interests to lead the agency. From a report: Wheeler, also a former Republican Senate aide on environmental issues, has been acting administrator since July, when former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned amid a host of ethics controversies. Since Wheeler began leading the agency, he has continued work on many of the same priorities as his predecessor, including looking to roll back Obama-era air and water pollution regulations. But Wheeler has brought a level of stability to the agency that didn't exist under Pruitt, keeping a relatively low profile while continuing to make progress towards meeting the Trump administration's policy goals for the agency. He has met often with industry representatives. Wheeler attended or held more than 50 meetings with representatives of companies or industry groups regulated by the EPA between April and August of 2018, a CNN review of his internal schedules found.
And In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)
Joseph Goebbels has been named Ambassador to Israel, and Karl Marx has been named an FCC commissioner.
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When you drain the swamp then the swamp monsters have no where to go except government agencies.
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The Holocaust was organized by Eichmann. Goebbels was just the salesman and hist teachings are still in use today. Especially his "Big Lie" technique is quite in favor with the Donald, who is a natural at it.
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What did Obama say? Elections have consequences?
It would be nice if no matter who got elected, things basically stayed the same. But if we can't have that, don't complain when the guys you don't like do things you don't like when elected.
(Specifically, this is why rule by presidential fiat is awful. But it was no less awful under Obama.)
Re:And In Other News... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be nice if no matter who got elected, things basically stayed the same. But if we can't have that, don't complain when the guys you don't like do things you don't like when elected.
Don't complain? In a democracy, it's a citizen's right (perhaps even her/his duty) to complain.
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Lets make one adjustment to that, it is the Citizens right to complain and their bloody responsibility to campaign. Don't just take your vote away, take as many votes as possible away. Don't just complain become politically active and campaign and let the people you are complaining about, know that you are campaigning against them.
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Ironic comment.
A republic is a democracy. Maybe you should go to a 5th grade social studies class and ask about "representative democracy" vs direct democracy.
Here's a link for your future non-perusal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The two terms are not mutually exclusive. Congress, the fundamental lawmaking body of the US, is democratically selected. The President is indirectly elected. Only the courts and Cabinet officials, and by extension heads of various departments, are not democratically constituted; though all those positions must pass muster in the Senate, which has been democratically constituted since the 17th amendment.
And really, this is no different than how it works in Parliamentary democracies. In a Westminster governm
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It would be nice if no matter who got elected, things basically stayed the same.
In regards to the EPA [and other large gov't agencies] you have a system that will basically stay the same. An administrator of the EPA is not all powerful, and there are lots of existing laws, policies and active projects the administrator has no control over. Steering the EPA is like steering a massive ocean cargo boat at full speed, there's a limit to how quickly the captain can change course. That can be good or bad depending on your view... if you want things to stay mostly the same, it's good; if you
Re:And In Other News... (Score:5, Funny)
Fact of the matter that coal still exists and provides many jobs and lively hoods for thousands of Americans.
Oh the irony.
live-li-hoods n. 1. Jobs that pay a living wage.
live-ly hoods n. 1. Energetic, active criminals. 2. Transferred epithet for head and face covering bobbing up and down (e.g., at a KKK rally.)
Re:And In Other News... (Score:5, Insightful)
You could make the same argument for crystal meth.
Re:And In Other News... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, let's see: In one year alone (2012), the DEA raided and closed 11,210 meth labs in the US. Now, let's assume that the DEA shuts down maybe one in four meth labs (I would bet that it's much less than that). So, we can say that there are probably about 50,000 meth labs operating at any given time in the US. Let's also assume that not all of those meth labs are one-man operations, so we have at least 50,000 jobs for Americans.
Let's further assume that the guys running the labs are not the same as the guys dealing the meth on the street. Even if we assume that for every meth lab, there is one person who actually deals the drugs, we're up to over 100,000 jobs.
That 100,000 jobs. Not counting the thousands of law enforcement jobs for people to try to stop the meth labs. The lawyers like Saul Goodman who represent the meth chemists, and on and on.
In 2013, there were 80,209 coal jobs in the US. So we can easily say that more people are working in the crystal meth industry than in the coal industry.
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The number of meth labs shut down and coal jobs are both publicly available. I'm sorry if you don't like facts, but facts don't care about your feelings, snowflake.
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You had me until you mentioned a fictitious TV character Saul Goodman. Nice try with the bullshit'n.
Actually, its likely that illegal drugs are the world's largest employer by industry. Think about it, the number of middlemen, the soldiers, the lawyers, and in a way, even enforcement are all caught up in a huge economy. All legal industries try to reduce the number of people they employ but not for illegal drugs. Not that any of this is good or anything, but strictly by a jobs created metric it might be the largest. The other metrics we might use, not so much...but when there is no attempt to reduce
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And it is probably one of the industries most resistant to automation. Not that it couldn't be automated, but it will most likely be one of the last.
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You had me until you mentioned a fictitious TV character Saul Goodman. Nice try with the bullshit'n.
Really? That's what you're using to dismiss this?
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Saul Goodman is a fictional character in a fictional TV show that is based on a real life industry. Just because Jimmy McGill doesn't actually exist doesn't mean that drug dealers and the lawyers they need don't exist in real life.
Re:Coal and Cops.... (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the states with the most meth labs are Republican, and the state with the most meth labs is Vice-President Pence's very own Indiana.
https://www.realclearpolitics.... [realclearpolitics.com]
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Maybe on the left you people care about jobs, with your Civilian Conservation Corp busy-work stuff, but conservatives are tired of subsidizing coal pollution. If the rest of us have to pay extra for all these people, we might as well get something for it. At least make them moderate Youtube comments or something.
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Re: And In Other News... (Score:4, Insightful)
We go back to the 70s and rivers start catching fire again?
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If you're referring to the 1969 Cuyahoga river fire it had nothing to do with coal. Also is was the last industrial river fire as they were quite common throughout early 20th century. These were a hinderance to the communties and the communities took action not the EPA. The rivers were already cleaned up way before the Clean Water Act was passed and the EPA really had no involvement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/22/the-fable-of-the-burning-river-45-years-later/?utm_term=.7
Agency name change? (Score:4, Insightful)
Environmental Pillaging Agency
Fox meet (Score:4, Insightful)
hen house
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AKA Trump's standard approach to appointing anyone to a position in government.
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This kind of behaviour is not common, especially with Democratic party presidents. To be clear, simply appointing a former lobbyist doesn't necessarily amount to putting a fox in the henhouse, although it's obviously not good. Appointing a lobbyist who used to lobby for a conflicting cause, a businessperson who currently profits from a conflicting interest, a person who denies the science that underpins the mission of the institution they're appointed to, or a person who had previously expressed interest in
The new normal. (Score:2)
This is what people voted for (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the key reasons for the "Green New Deal" (the "New Deal" part) is jobs for ex coal miners. These folks are clustered in critical voting districts where there is literally no work outside of Walmart, the mines and a handful of service jobs (doctors to treat black lung, police to lock up the occasional drunk miner, etc).
Folks are confused why these guys would fight so hard to mine coal given the health and safety risks. Folks who wonder that have never been without a job for 12 months and counting....
Re:This is what people voted for (Score:5, Insightful)
Folks are confused why these guys would fight so hard to mine coal given the health and safety risks. Folks who wonder that have never been without a job for 12 months and counting....
I do get that dying slowly and killing a lot of others slowly becomes an attractive option when the alternative is dying pretty fast. It is still something that people should be prevented from doing. They need to be given an alternative that does actually not do this incredible amount of damage.
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They need to be given an alternative that does actually not do this incredible amount of damage.
Isn't that what GP is point out with the paragraph about the "Green New Deal"?
Trouble is nobody wants to pay (Score:2)
That's what made Trump win. He listened to what folks like those coal miners were saying and promised them their jobs back. Heck, he even tried (a little) by trying to declare coal a national emergency so he could divert subsidies to them. Now, odds are most of that would have gone to the mine owners, but th
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Indeed. Of course not paying for going green now will just be incredibly more expensive later. But humans as a group are stupid that way. I guess pretending to listening to them was probably the winning move for Trump overall, people are suckers for anyone with power pretending to take them seriously.
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but I haven't heard a single solution to the widespread unemployment that grips the rust belt.
That's because we're currently running the GOP plan for these areas. It's the same as their healthcare plan: Die quickly.
Less snarky, the plan, such as it is, is to do nothing and let market forces deplete the population of these areas. Those ex-miners will either 1) die and no longer be a problem, or 2) move to a city, most likely making that city and/or state more Republican. As an added bonus, it doesn't require voting to fund any government programs.
Now, odds are most of that would have gone to the mine owners, but there'd at least be jobs in the meantime.
Not really. Mining is far more automated than the
Re:Trouble is nobody wants to pay (Score:2)
That's what made Trump win. He listened to what folks like those coal miners were saying and promised them their jobs back.
That's the thing he fonud a group of people who wanted something and told them lies about how they'd get it. The other side told the harsh truth: those jobs aren't coming back.
And they're not, no matter how much coal is deregulated. It's moving in the direction of ever larger open mines with massive machines run by very few people.
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if you want coal to come back you'll need somebody in charge who wants it to come back and wants it at any cost. Natural gas is just too competitive (let alone Solar and Wind). You're gonna have to start loosening environmental regs around coal.
The problem is even if you loosen the environmental regulations, it's still not competitive. They're the buggy whip factory workers asking for someone to save their industry instead of helping them move to the car factory
Most of those car factories moved to Mexico (Score:2)
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It's not just a new line of work. People think retraining coal miners will solve everything but there are many coal mining locations where coal mining is the only industry supporting the towns in the area. If coal goes, many lives are affected beyond the miners, with no help offered to them. So you need to look at not only helping out coal mines but helping out whole communities. The same thing has happened across the crop belt as family farms have been bought up by corporations. A great many towns have dis
Re:This is what people voted for (Score:4, Insightful)
"Folks who wonder that have never been without a job for 12 months and counting"
I was unemployed for 19 months. What I did during that time is look for a *different* job.
The confusing part is why they are fighting for jobs that aren't coming back even if coal comes back.
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There are no *different* jobs. At least, not without moving to a different state. And that's not all that easy to do when all you know how to do is mine.
I saw an interview with a kid (Score:2)
His answer was pretty sound. The only jobs in his town were at the mine and at Walmart. He could take another course, but then he'd have to move. That meant leaving friends and family behind, the town he grew up in, and coming up with the money to move a long distance and get an apartment in an unfamiliar city.
Basically, we've backed these kids
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I grew up in one of those small towns where the only opportunities were working on a farm and in the local convenience store (the town wasn't even big enough for a WalMart). I was smart enough to move away for opportunities. Why do you want me to worry about people that don't have the gumption to change their own lives for the better? I was backed into the same sort of "bad choice". I'm now making more money with a better life than I ever would have had living in that town. People who defend that way of lif
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"The only jobs in his town were at the mine and at Walmart. "
They may be the only jobs in town, but they won't be *increasing*. He's basically replacing the next one or two people that die.
"but then he'd have to move"
I moved across the US for my previous job. I moved back for my current job. I was applying for jobs in Europe. I might be tough, but that's no excuse to dangle the hope of terrible jobs *that aren't even coming*.
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'IT' might be tough, not 'I'
fscking typos...
So ... (Score:1)
Re:So ... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the same way that a lobbyist for buggywhip manufacturers might "know" about cars when crafting regulations. He'll have a skewed view that will favor old, out of date technology because that's what makes his former employers rich and will work against newer, cleaner technologies because those take business away from his old employers.
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his former and future employers rich
FTFY
Re:So ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I see "clueless" is still cool in come circles. A "lobbyist" is not an "engineer" or a "scientist". (You may want to look these words up....) His expertise is pushing what he gets told to push, not to understand anything except the pushing itself.
I once heard a talk by a US lobbyist about his work given to an expert audience. (Don't ask me how they got the guy to do that, but there were some pretty high-powered people in the audience...) Extremely interesting, extremely smart and capable guy, extremely disillusioning about the mental capabilities of politicians. Lobbyists do not explain things or create understanding in their targets, they use every trick in the book to create the illusion of understanding. That is why they do not actually need any facts or any expert knowledge to do their work.
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I see "clueless" is still cool in come circles.
How's that working for you? When attempting to teach someone something new, starting out by telling them they are an idiot?
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I find that you have two classes of people: Those that want to learn and those that do not. The second class is lost anyways, no way to reach them. May at least get some entertainment out of them. The first class is something else and I either do not insult them or apologize when I realize the mistake. That approach is working pretty well, thank you.
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You seem to have a reading problem. Or you just want so desperately to be right you ignore what is right in front of your eyes.
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You seem to have a reading problem. Or you just want so desperately to be right you ignore what is right in front of your eyes.
Nah I'm good. You're the one with nothing better to do than hurl insults. I agree though, it's very hard to rationalize that behavior, and even harder when someone calls you on it.
Cool. (Score:3)
I propose a novel approach to fight global warming. We'll remove all the filters from coal power stations and emit all that marvelous dust into the atmosphere so we can block out the sun's rays and hence reduce global temperature.
Making America Great Again (Score:5, Informative)
Andrew Wheeler is helping Make America Great Again by bringing back those glory days when rivers routinely caught fire.
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Think of it. We will save a fortune on electricity. We can turn the street lights off and walk by the lovely glow of hydrocarbon-infused water. MAGA!
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Andrew Wheeler is helping Make America Great Again by bringing back those glory days when rivers routinely caught fire.
And your actual evidence of this is?
Why do the politicos always pitch a fit about an appointee, even before they have a chance to do anything good or bad? Isn't it a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy to call some guy nasty names and accuse him of atrocities then complain he won't talk to you?
Re:Making America Great Again (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do the politicos always pitch a fit about an appointee, even before they have a chance to do anything good or bad?
Because time did not start today.
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Maybe not routine, but these rivers in the US have caught fire:
- Buffalo River, Buffalo NY, 1968.
- Rouge River, Detroit MI, 1969.
- Cuyahoga River, Cleveland OH 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, 1952, and 1969.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/is-the-cuyahoga-river-the-only-river-to-ever-catch-on-fire.html
https://www.mi-wea.org/docs/John_Hartig_-_Burning_Rivers.pdf
Re: Making America Great Again ^^ Mod up (Score:1)
Mod up please. I mean, how bad is the pollution if the river is catching fire -- let alone the long-term damage to the fish (very likely no longer edible) and other wildlife?
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2014 Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
1969 Rouge River, Detroit, United States
1968 Buffalo River, Buffalo, United States
1892 Schuylkill River, Philadelphia, United States
2015 Bellandur Lake, Bangalore, India
17 fires from 1868 to 1969 Cuyohoga River, Cleveland, United States
USA is a joke (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell us again how great your democracy is , how wonderful your freedom is.
Because countries with real democracies and greater freedoms are laughing hard at you.
Its obvious to the rest of us that your politicians are bought and paid for by industry, it is industry that actually runs the USA now, and you can NOT vote them out.
The US does want to destroy itself, does it? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Incredible.
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I guess Chinese do as well because their not ramping down on coal plants either.
..so, quietly poison all Americans. Gotcha. (Score:2, Interesting)
Swamp level, it's over 9000! (Score:1)
Step 1: Appoint industry cronies to regulate said industries.
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: No more regulatory capture!
And? (Score:2)
What exactly are we supposed to do about this?
The guys with the guns don't seem to think that there's a problem, and the ones who think there's a problem are too chickenshit to get up and fight. Meanwhile, the corporate owners of the Republicratic Party (and therefore the government) are laughing their asses off at both sides.
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Actually, Cohen said exactly the opposite. He had no direct evidence or knowledge of any Russian collusion during the campaign and said so under questioning yesterday.
Cohen said a lot of nasty things about Trump, but on that specific point he clearly has no direct evidence to provide. If he had, I doubt he'd be heading to jail right now, but would have been charged by Mueller and given a immunity deal for his testimony.
Re:Donald Trump is going to prison for TREASON (Score:5, Insightful)
I listened to the whole testimony yesterday and I have got to say, I keep seeing some QUALITY cherry picking going on today.
Comey testifies that a convicted russian mobster had a rent free office basically across the hall from Trump's, nothing.
He says he has no evidence that Trump colluded, but basically everything Trump ever said or did points in that direction, and all of the MAGA crowd start shouting "See, no collusion!"
And even better, the spin is, "He's a liar, you can't trust anything he said, except that no collusion thing."
Ya gotta laugh at it to keep from crying.
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And even better, the spin is, "He's a liar, you can't trust anything he said, except that no collusion thing."
Unfortunately, all this testimony from these various people is all suspect, because they're all liars and generally terrible people. Manafort, Cohen, Stone, Papadopoulos, Flynn, on and on. Far from bringing in "the best people," he has surrounded himself with the worst people, which unfortunately means when they're cast off you have no idea if the tell-alls that they tell are in any way accurate or just new lies to save their own miserable skins.
In other words, "yeah, I know, I lied for years for this guy,
Re:Donald Trump is going to prison for TREASON (Score:5, Insightful)
I take your point, but shouldn't that same standard apply to Trump, given how frequent and well documented his lying is? How do you dismiss liars while believing whole heartedly their king [politifact.com]?
(I'm using the impersonal you of course, it doesn't seem like you are defending him.)
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Also, where there are actual lies, Trump lies about stupid, irrelevant stuff...crowd size and the like.
Trump lies about everything, big or little. It just seems to be how he does things.
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there are people dying because of the border situation. I think that kind of justifies the emergency declaration.
But the point here is what's the LAW say about this. If you read the law, the president is given very wide latitude in making this decision, and Congress may disagree by passing legislation to undo the president's action, then override his veto if he chooses to stick with the declaration he's made.
So... Suck it up. Take your case to the courts and fight it there. But you won't get this overtu
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As much as it says about the folks who hired and paid Dennis Raider for the two plus decades he was on the lamb.. Or what does it say about the local hardware stores that sold the Uni-bomber the stuff for his bombs.. Nothing.
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You really should include the entire question and reply in that, otherwise you're just twisting what was said.
I've been trying to locate the exact clip I saw of it, but there's way too much noise to the signal at this time. I also tried going through the entire testimony but I keep falling asleep trying to listen to that horribly long video, and as to a transcript, I st
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"He had no direct evidence or knowledge of any Russian collusion during the campaign and said so under questioning yesterday." - Wrong, his testimony IS evidence. He said Jr. told Trump about that meeting beforehand.
Which is .... hearsay, and thus inadmissible as actual evidence... You cannot testify to what you *think* somebody else said to somebody else, especially when that somebody is available to testify as to what was said. ALSO... IF you are talking about the "Trump Tower Meeting" during the campaign, it is FAR from established that anything unseemly or unethical took place at that meeting, in fact, everybody who was at that meeting says that the topic being discussed was some obscure adoption rules and had not
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Hearsay is when the person testifying wasn't in the room and is relying on 3rd party info. He was in the room, he heard what he heard, he testified under oath. That's evidence, it's testimony. Fact. You're a moron.
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ALSO... IF you are talking about the "Trump Tower Meeting" during the campaign, it is FAR from established that anything unseemly or unethical took place at that meeting, in fact, everybody who was at that meeting says that the topic being discussed was some obscure adoption rules and had nothing to do with coordinating electioneering activities. But don't let the lack of actual evidence dissuade you from believing something else happened.
The US passed the Magnitsky Act December 14, 2012. This applied financial sanctions to Russia, particularly some Russian billionaires and high level officials. As a direct response, on December 19, 2012, Russia voted to ban the adoption of Russian children by US citizens. Russia has publicly stated that they would only lift the ban on adoptions if the Magnitsky sanctions were lifted. So when the say the 2016 meeting was about "adoptions", that directly translates to "sanctions" as the two are directly linke
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So "adoption" is a code word? You are kidding right...
You DO understand that you are basically making a conspiracy theory out of that assumption, a theory for which you have to make all sorts of assumptions to support because there are no facts to back up your claims.
The problem for your theory here is *everybody* in the room is saying the same things, that nobody was coordinating Russian efforts with Trump's campaign and besides this meeting there is nothing ,else really to discuss as evidence. This who
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Re:Senate = non representative corrupt dictators (Score:5, Insightful)
Senate = non representative corrupt dictators. They don't represent the people.
You are a moron. Senators are representatives of their state. If you want representatives of the people you go to the House.
This is by design, for good reason.
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It might help if we went back to having the state legislatures appoint the senators, rather than having them elected by the general vote.
This would make them more answerable to the state (the state legislatures voted in by the state people)....and it would take out all the $$$$$ involved in buying general senate elections, and end the influence of lobbying.
I think they
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I think they had it right the first time around.
I went back and looked to see why they changed it, as usually, when things get changed, there is a reason and unless that has changed, those reasons will just pop back up again. Turns out a major reason for the change was partisan bickering at the state level, where one party would sabotage another party's choice for the senate to the point of forgoing that senate seat. This was causing a disfunctional senate. Since partisan bickering probably hasn't stopped, Id' say we'd just run into the same issues that
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I do think the senate is broken as is, but wouldn't that just make it easier for the lobbyists to select favorable senators? They would only have to convince(or bribe) the state legislators, not the whole populace.
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"went back to having the state legislatures appoint the senators" No, unless they fix the gerrymandering in almost every state first. The nice thing about popular election of Senators is that the state legislature can't directly gerrymander the whole state. The state legislatures are NOT answerable to the state's voters, because of the gerrymandering. -- they are more answerable to the power brokers behind the state government, not even close to the same thing.
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I think they had it right the first time around.
The problem was that politicians couldn't help but play politics with it. Some states were going years without Senators because minority parties in some states weren't allowing votes to happen. If it could be arranged such that the vote happened on a normal ballot, on election day, and not during a state legislative session, I could see it possibly working then.
Lobbying money = re-election (Score:1)
Until the flow of lobbying money into election funds stops they represent an "electorate" of corporate donors, not the people, and they do serve their electorate.
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"They can be voted out."
Tell that to the people of North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Why? Did something other than the election results decide who got sent to the Senate from those states? You got proof of that I suppose?
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I presume he is talking about the representatives, where those states have badly gerrymandered districts.
Not particularly relevant to senate though.
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Show me a state that doesn't have gerrymandered districts and I'll show you one that has all one political party anyway..
Reminds me of my younger liberal brother from Illinois during 2016's election... He was complaining about the Senate's balance of power and blamed gerrymandered districts in "red states" for it. He also voted for Bernie in the primary... How'd we have the same parents?
Re:Senate = non representative corrupt dictators (Score:5, Informative)
I assume he's talking about the power grabs the state senates did in those two states. When the Republican governors lost their elections, the Republican state senates passed a bunch laws transferring a bunch of power from the governor to the senate. The outgoing governors were happy to sign the bills into law on their last days in office.
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There is also the ongoing controversy over absentee ballot fraud in NC. Some ex-con was paid for his super duper skills at turning out votes via absentee ballots. Turns out he had people illegally collecting ballots, illegally filling in votes in races which hadn't been marked yet on the ballots, witnessing the ballots illegally, and then sealing the ballots and mailing them in from different post offices to deliberately conceal the illegal activities. Only one race so far has been announced as needing a re
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Well, you know as in the unofficial US motto: "Maintaining world LEADership." I see Trump is finally starting to make good on his promises.
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as in "Pb"
Nope, as in Pitcher OK. (If you don't know, Look it up..)
Re: Fuck coal (Score:2)
Nobody cares about Hillary Clinton except failing right-wing talk show hosts.
Re:Fuck coal (Score:5, Informative)
And fuck coal miners. Leave that poison in the ground.
Let me remind you Hillary Clinton said the same thing and she was left in the dust. No pun intended.
No, she did not say "the same thing."
She said that the coal industry was dying (true) and that she wanted to offer opportunities for coal workers to train and transfer to other industries. That does not sound like "fucking" coal miners.
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You just made that that up she did not say that. She said "We're gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies outta business". I'll translate that for you "Fuck coal miners.". What a lying prick you are.
Here's the full context, from this article. [vox.com]
Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around politics that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these under-served poor communities. So, for example, I’m the only candidate who has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim [Ryan (D-OH)]?
And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce energy that we relied on.
Per the article, Clinton regretted the way she said the above. (From her book What Happened: “The point I had wanted to make was the exact opposite of how it came out. ... [I] felt absolutely sick about the whole thing.” But the full context shows she was not trying to "fuck" coal miners. Quite the opposite.