American Politics 18

[Starkimus]

Woah that guy is a fucking idiot. He's in a race with Bachman for most insane member of the House.

I thought Nancy Pelosi held that title....

Sorry, could not resist :leaving:

[Peter Irving]

I think that it shouldn't matter ials long as their not forcing the religion down your throats. I hate how secularism has turned from not having the state fund the church to nthe state can't acknowledge some of their populaces holidays.

[TerraPrime]

One elected from a constituency does not truly represent all its citizens, only those who voted for him and to whom he is beholden. One chosen by lot represents no one and everyone equally

What a torturous piece of reasoning. I get the s/he representing nobody part, but I don't get the representing everyone part.

Well it's a really bad, very poorly thought out idea around 2500 years old, from the birthplace of democracy.

You mean Athens? Where they only allowed land-holding men to govern? That's the system you want us to emulate?

[Shryke]

30 Republicans say "Yes" to workplace rape: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/07/kbr-ra...ken-amendment/#

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.†(Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.â€

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.†Franken responded, “This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.â€

In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote

30 classy individuals.

[Lord O' Bones]

30 classy individuals.

32 in my mind. Unless those two abstensions were sick that day or something.

Edit: BTW, the abstensions? Both Democrats. The hell?

[Peter Irving]

I say this is truly a step in the right Direction thank you Franken your making me like you and be proud to be a Minnesotan.

[Shryke]

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA):

"When I was sworn into the Marine Corps, I was sworn to uphold the Constitution against every enemy, foreign and domestic," he said. "We've got a lot of domestic enemies of the Constitution and one of those sits in the speaker's chair of the United States Congress, Nancy Pelosi."

[Peter Irving]

How am I not suprised at this? At this rate the republicans are ensuring another 60 years of the Dems holding the House.

[Lightning Lord]

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA):

I am worried that these nutjobs are going to distract people from Rep. Bachmann from the my great state of Minnesota. Don't make her pull off the kids gloves in this crazy-off. She'll put her tin hat on in public and start a fire in the Supreme Court building after locking in the activist judges.

[lokisnow]

30 Republicans say "Yes" to workplace rape: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/07/kbr-ra...ken-amendment/#

30 classy individuals.

I'm sure our "government-is-the-problem" types will conveniently ignore that a good piece of legislation that corporations would obviously oppose (what corporation doesn't want to enable gangrape of its women employees? answer: none) was just passed. Not all government action/legislation is bad, clearly this was done to reign in an unacceptable private excess.

Clearly this amendment was written by the lobbyists for the benefit of da corporations.

[Inigima]

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA):

Wow. I don't know what to say. Some of the comments I'm hearing are direct attacks on the legitimacy of elections whose results they don't like, and it's scary and dangerous to see them fomenting these feelings in their constituents. Remembering that Newsmax article, it feels like they're taking a nice long look in the general direction of treason.

I thought Nancy Pelosi held that title....

Sorry, could not resist :leaving:

Dude, jokes are fine and all, but this isn't even a joke. It's just a petty, nasty snipe.

[Ormond]

Dude, jokes are fine and all, but this isn't even a joke. It's just a petty, nasty snipe.

I didn't take it as a joke. But it seems so silly to me on the face of it that it does seem laughable rather than offensive to me. :)

[Annelise]

More on the public option opt-in or out by state variation:

1) If the public option is indeed popular -- and the preponderance of public polling suggests that it is -- we should expect the solid majority of states to elect to retain it. Perhaps some Republican governors or legislatures would seek to override the popular will in their states -- but they would do so at their own peril (and at Democrats' gain).

2) Behavioral economics further suggests that default preferences are extremely powerful. Making the public option the default would probably lead to much greater adaptation than requiring states to "opt in".

3) If the public option indeed reduces the costs of insurance -- and most of the evidence suggests that it will -- than the states that opt out of it will have a pretty compelling reason to opt back in. Say that Kansas opts out of the public option and Missouri keeps it. If a Kansan realizes that his friend across the border is buying the same quality health insurance for $300 less per month, he's going to vote restore the public plan in a referendum or demand that his legislator does the same in Topeka.

4) Even in states that do opt out of the public option, the fact that voters could presumably elect later to restore it creates an extremely credible threat to the private insurance industry that will itself help to create price competition.

5) The ability to negotiate at Medicare or Medicare-plus-X-percent rates really is what makes the public option so powerful. It's not just having "another option". Although creating an additional competitor would certainly be valuable, as health insurance is a virtual monopoly or duopoly commodity in some regions, you could achieve that goal through a variety of other means such as co-ops or exchanges, some of which are already in the health care bill. Rather, it's the ability of the government to potentially provide more efficient (i.e. cheaper) delivery of health insurance than private industry because of its advantages of scale that distinguishes the public option from something like co-ops. As a general rule, then, compromises that allow the government to take advantage of its size and negotiate at Medicare-type rates should be preferred strongly to those that would neuter it.

6) If the policy wonks are wrong about the public option reducing health care costs -- I don't think they will be, but they could be -- this creates a relatively pain-free way to remove it.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/10/opt...ion-purism.html

[Tempra]

Don't ask, Don't tell does not discriminate against only gays, but it also affects women at a disproportionate rate.

(CNN) -- Women were dismissed from the military for being gay at a greater rate than men last year, according to new statistics obtained by a California research group.

All the services kicked out a disproportionate number of women under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, according to Department of Defense data obtained by the Palm Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The center studies gender and sexuality in the military.

Will this hasten the demise of Don't ask, Don't tell?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/09/military....sals/index.html

[Maithanet]

Don't ask, Don't tell does not discriminate against only gays, but it also affects women at a disproportionate rate

Will this hasten the demise of Don't ask, Don't tell?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/09/military....sals/index.html

Do [this is to everyone] people think that its possible that there are proportionally more lesbians in the military than gay men?

I could see that being potentially responsible for this higher percentage. I could also see other explanations. It's already a discriminatory policy, so I don't know that this changes much, but I wouldn't really say it is neccesarily discriminatory against women without further evidence.

[Annelise]

On state vs federal power:

The Obama administration is in the early stages of a major shift in government powers that may boost the authority of state and local officials on a wide range of policies.

In executive memos, proposed legislation and public statements, it has struck a markedly different tone on the issue of “pre-emption†from that of the Bush administration, which regularly allowed federal regulators to pre-empt state and local authorities. Under the shift, the federal government should trump state and local authorities on a more restricted basis.

“It’s almost a complete turnaround,†said Michael Bird, federal counsel at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

[...]

The issue of pre-emption is at work in many of the most contentious battles under way and affects nearly every policy arena, whether consumer products, banking laws or food standards.

The issue doesn’t fall on pure partisan lines, said Joseph Zimmerman, an expert on pre-emption at the State University of New York at Albany. “They both are lobbied heavily,†he said.

But pre-emption draws a bright-line distinction on K Street. State and local officials, the trial bar and a range of consumer advocacy groups have cheered the administration’s position. Most business lobbyists counter that it could create a “patchwork quilt†of different regulations that would lead to more lawsuits and hurt consumers by driving up costs.

“It is sort of taking a step backward to create a litigation atmosphere that I think we last saw a decade or so ago,†said Bryan Quigley, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. Business lobbyists typically prefer a single national standard and regulatory agency.

[...]

The financial industry, meanwhile, is stridently opposed to allowing state officials to pursue additional rules.

“If you get rid of pre-emption, there goes the national banking system as we know it,†said Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association.

Prentiss Cox, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said that in its proposal, the administration is recognizing “that states play a really vital role in consumer protections when federal offices are unwilling.â€

Cox said state laws played a much greater role in banking regulation prior to the 1990s before being steadily eroded.

“You got a double whammy,†Cox said. “You were not only going to have federal rules pre-empt state protections, but those federal rules would in fact simply eliminate the state protection and replace them with nothing.â€

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration...local-officials

Thoughts?

[lokisnow]

correct me if I'm wrong, but watergate always confused me as a kid, but it seems this was basically all it was.

Watergate - Clinton made a bad investment* and lost money, since republicans with power will abuse power flagrantly in order to never lose money in investments republicans assumed there was vast abuse of power at play. They were wrong. Clinton had nothing to hide and said he had nothing to hide. The press assumed that if he said that then he must have something to hide. Clinton gave them a special prosecutor (big mistake it turned out) and the republicans wasted millions of dollars and countless public hours of congress investigating this: there was nothing there, no wrongdoing. he made a bad investment and he lost money. the horror! the horror!

*another investor owned a savings and loan that later went bankrupt, the lack of Clinton's abuse of power in not protecting and not bailing out this fellow was an indication that abuse of power was going on, right?

[Annelise]

You mean Whitewater, but I don't remember the details, sorry.

[TerraPrime]

Do [this is to everyone] people think that its possible that there are proportionally more lesbians in the military than gay men?

I'm not aware of studies showing that lesbians are represented in disproportionate amount in the armed services.

However, there is a tenacious strain of sexism against women in the armed services for a long time. In essence, since the armed forces are often viewed as masculine, women who take roles in the armed forces, especially aside from desk and clerical jobs, are looked at as transgressors of gender roles. Since lesbianism (and homosexuality in general) is also a form of transgression against gender roles, the two are often conflated. During the McCarthy era, many women in the armed forces were forced out after being accused of being a lesbian. The accusations were often false, and originated from the women in question refusing to be sexual partners to some male soldiers. The reasoning was that if a woman does not want to sleep with me, that must mean that she hates all men, and that means that she's a lesbian.

So, it does not surprise me at all that DADT disproportionately affect women, regardless of whether the women being discharged are actually lesbians or not. There's a long and sordid history of miss-treatment of women amongst the armed forces. Just recently as we talked about women serving in the military we have witnessed some pretty unapologetically chauvanistic attitudes towards women in the armed forces. That's the stream that feeds the larger lake of sexism, which is the common underlying cause for many issues, such as questioning the heterosexuality of female soldiers.

[Swordfish]

Annelise - On the public option, #6 is one of the reasons that I think it's worth trying. If it is effective it's a good thing for most people and if it's not there isn't much harm done.

Ha....

Because the federal government is good at getting rid of ineffective entitlement programs?

Got an example?

;)