US Politics: Shryke and Commodore agree (and other signs and portents)

[Maithanet]

Whether the Democrats hold the Senate or not makes a HUGE difference. Especially with appointments.

All national elections are somewhat important. Would you seriously argue that this election is as important as, say 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 or 2012? Because I think it is obviously less important than any of these.

[Ormond]

I sure am really tired of all the fundraising emails.

During the last few years i gave online to the groups on the pro-same-sex-marriage side in referendums in Minnesota, Maine, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida. These groups must have shared their donor lists with local Democrats, because in addition to getting the national Democratic fundraising emails (and those from Nebraska Democrats), I get them all the time from candidates in those states, too. So I have had literally hundreds of these things in my home email box over the last month. I really think the annoyance has made me LESS likely to donate this year. I am concentrating on just giving to particular candidates in Nebraska rather than to the national committees.

[Commodore]

No one is talking about the most important elections of 2014; control of state legislatures.

Right now there are 28 GOP controlled state legislatures.

34 are needed to propose constitutional amendments, and 38 to pass those amendments.

All of which can be done without consent of the federal congress, governors, or the POTUS.

The push for a BBA and federal congressional term limits hasn't been this strong in decades.

[Ice Queen]

Coal plants put out far more radioactive waste than nuclear plants do. Barring a catastrophic failure which is highly, highly unlikely at this point, nuclear plants are pretty damn safe.

edit: Right now, nuclear is so far ahead of the competition it isn't funny. Lets get nuclear going, and going well, until we can spend more money to transition to even better sources. Coal ain't it.

I agree that nuclear, at this point in time, is the only option if everyone wants zero emissions. There is no other alternative.

Modern reactors cannot melt down. Not won't--can't.

Now, I'm all for protecting the environment as much as possible, but the environmentalists can't have it both ways. You can have zero emissions or you can accept some degree of environmental impact. You're never going to get both. There is going to be some environmental impact no matter what we do. I'm from the Rust Belt and there's no denying that our environment--air, water, quality of life--improved dramatically after the collapse of the steel industry. Trouble is, now we have to put up with fracking. But that's another story. :)

We need fossil fuels until the other technologies are viable, efficient, and cheap. We shouldn't abandon solar just because it's inefficient (not to mention that production of solar panels is just as polluting as any coal plant). We need to allow the technology to develop. When it becomes a better product, people will buy it. These alternative energy companies keep going bankrupt because they're trying to produce too much before there's a demand for their products.

As for running out of oil, IMO if we were really running out of oil they wouldn't package everything in plastic to the point where you break your kids' toys just trying to get it out of the box!

[Suttree]

Hadn't read the follow up on the OK murder.

An Oklahoma man was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder in the beheading of a co-worker, but federal officials said they had found no links between him and Islamic extremist groups that have beheaded several Western hostages in the Middle East and North Africa in recent weeks.

The accused, Alton Nolen, 30, who worked on the production line of a food processing plant in Moore, Okla., remained in a hospital after being shot by the company’s chief operating officer, who is also a reserve deputy sheriff, the authorities said.

The attack Friday was apparently spurred by Mr. Nolen’s suspension from Vaughan Foods after an employee told supervisors that Mr. Nolen had made inflammatory statements about white people. Mr. Nolen is African-American.

& from the Dish article linked:

It turns out now that more facts are in that he’s obviously a deeply disturbed individual, singled out people he had a grievance about, had shown up at a local mosque and asked to have pictures taken (even though he was not a member of it and its members had no idea who he was), and had gotten into his sick head that he was an Islamic warrior, from reading on the Internet and watching the recent ISIS beheadings. He had just “converted” to Islam and was full of racist and misogynist poison. It would not be the first time an unstable individual had grappled with his demons by adopting some new religion and then went on a rampage to avenge those he had a grievance against. His weapon? A kitchen knife he had gone back to his apartment to get after being dismissed.

My point is not that this was not a horrifying act, and he faces the death penalty for it. My point is simply that the way this was covered reveals ever more starkly that we are in a new era now of the kind of paranoia and terror that sees a terrorist conspiracy behind any and every act of violence, that seeks to equate the acts of this disturbed and violent man as somehow indicative of the many Muslims in that community who were as appalled as anyone by this murder, and that is fast becoming national hysteria that shows no sign of abating.

Given the hysteric tone in the Fox coverage cited, guessing we all know where tptwp gets his news.

[DanteGabriel]

Hadn't read the follow up on the OK murder.

& from the Dish article linked:

Given the hysteric ton in the Fox coverage cited, guessing we all know where tptwp gets his news.

The right wing cranks on my Facebook feed who posted breathlessly about his allegiance to ISIS (one of who actually advocated "three to four nuclear strikes" in the Middle East because OMG Muslim Terror Comes Home!!!) have yet to post about any of that, strangely enough.

[Wee baby Shamus]

None of my right wing friends have done that. I guess "cranks" share the same feed.

[Wee baby Shamus]

BREAKING NEWS

Appeals court allows Texas to begin enforcing tough new abortion restrictions

A federal appeals court Thursday allowed Texas to immediately begin enforcing tough new abortion restrictions that will effectively close all but seven abortion facilities in America's second most-populous state.

A panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans stayed a lower judge's ruling while it considers the overall constitutionality of key portions of Texas' sweeping 2013 abortion law, which Republican Gov. Rick Perry and other conservatives say is designed to protect women's health.

U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel ruled in August that part of the law requiring Texas clinics to spend millions of dollars on hospital-level upgrades was less about safety than making access to abortion difficult.

Yeakel's ruling in Austin suspended the upgrades requirement. But Texas is appealing, and asked the appeals court to let it enforce the law during that process -- clearing the way for the panel's ruling.

Allowing to go forward the rules on hospital-level upgrades -- including mandatory operating rooms and air filtration systems -- would shutter more than a dozen clinics across Texas. It means only abortion facilities will remain open in the Houston, Austin, San Antonio and the Dallas-Fort Worth areas.

None will be left along the Texas-Mexico border or outside any of the state's largest urban areas.

Meanwhile, some clinics have already closed after another part of the 2013 law required doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. That portion of the law has already been upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit, where the state is now seeking a second outright reversal.

The trial in Texas is the latest battle over tough new abortion restrictions sweeping across the U.S. The office of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who is the favorite to become governor in November, is leading the defense of the law.

Clinics call the measure a backdoor effort to outlaw abortions, which has been a constitutional right since the Roe v. Wade ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973.

Attorneys for the state have denied that women would be burdened by fewer abortion facilities, saying nearly 9 in 10 Texas women would still live within 150 miles of a provider. The law's opponents, however, note that still leaves nearly a million Texas women embarking on drives longer than three hours to get an abortion.

Democrat Wendy Davis launched her campaign for governor behind the celebrity she achieved through a nearly 13-hour filibuster last summer that temporarily blocked the law in the state Senate. Her opponent in November is Abbott.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/10/02/appeals-court-allows-texas-to-begin-enforcing-tough-new-abortion-restrictions/

Yes, the article is from Fox News but notice that Fox News is only reprinting the article from the Associate Press.

[The Notorious]

Unemployment rate falls below 6% for the first time since 2008 .... just in time for the upcoming midterm election. :-)

[awesome possum]

Americans be stoopid, news at Eleventy-o'clock

More than one-third of Americans cannot name a single branch of the United States government, according to a recent poll.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania released a poll on Wednesday that shows 35 percent of those polled could not name one branch of the U.S. government. This amount is almost equivalent to the 36 percent of Americans who could successfully name the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

Alabama saw that and wondered to itself, how can we be more even stupider?

On Tuesday, the ACLU sued to halt an extreme new Alabama law targeting minors who are seeking abortions. The measure is very clearly designed to degrade and humiliate teenage girls, far beyond what any state has previously attempted (and what the Supreme Court has allowed). Alabama already requires a minor to secure parental consent before obtaining an abortion, but if she cannot—if, for instance, it was her parent who raped and impregnated her—she can ask a judge to bypass this requirement. The new law takes that judicial bypass and turns it on its head, permitting the judge to appoint a lawyer to represent the minor’s fetus and advocate for its best interests. The judge may bring the district attorney into court to question the minor. And, worst of all, the district attorney can call witnesses to testify against the minor—and in favor of her fetus.

Although this sort of races right past stupid and straight into fucking insane. Fuck you Alabama.

Unemployment rate falls below 6% for the first time since 2008 .... just in time for the upcoming midterm election. :-)

You can thank Republicans for that, for fighting Obama's economy-killing laws that almost drove the world into a second Great Depression.

/FoxNews

[lokisnow]

The jobs numbers won't effect the election, however the revisions to July and August were extremely good, another 80,000+ on top of the 248,000 headline number, that bumped August up into the 180,000 range, which is much more close to the trend line for 2014 and makes the month less of an outlier.

In a rare bit of Senate happy news, for the first time this cycle, when I clicked on the Upshot's page and played their little roulette game it came up with a democrat win the very first time. That means nothing, but literally every time I've visited that page I've had to play roulette more than five times to get a democrat win. So it was satisfying to see a positive outcome for once, even if the trend is currently breaking against democrats. On the other hand, I wonder about that, the safe democrat states are breaking further democrat in the last few polls that have bothered, and even kentucky moved towards democrats in the last poll, so I wonder if there's going to be a shift towards democrats next week, like this last week had a shift towards republicans. It's a pretty volatile race with a surprising amount of uncertainty.

The big unanswered question I have is that Upshot has all the races moving independently, but there are network effects, states and races bunch and move together, and you'll see similar movement in the safe races, I don't see that being acknowledged anywhere really, you're never going to see an outcome like the one that put me in a good mood, losing iowa and louisiana but winning north carolina, kansas, colorado, arkansas, new hampshire, alaska and GEORGIA.

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/senate-model/

[DanteGabriel]

The horse race aspect of the election depresses me. Like watching some sloppy slapfight Thursday Night Football game between two teams you don't like, but some asshole signed you up with a one-sided wager where if one team wins you don't get anything, but if the other team wins, you will owe someone a bunch of money.

[Fez]

Unemployment rate falls below 6% for the first time since 2008 .... just in time for the upcoming midterm election. :-)

The unemployment rate at this time right before the 2006 election fell from 4.7% to 4.5%, it didn't do Republicans a lick of good.

[drawkcabi]

The horse race aspect of the election depresses me. Like watching some sloppy slapfight Thursday Night Football game between two teams you don't like, but some asshole signed you up with a one-sided wager where if one team wins you don't get anything, but if the other team wins, you will owe someone a bunch of money.

That is the best metaphor for any election, but especially this one, I ever heard. :thumbsup:

[lokisnow]

Precisely, why bother to vote when dems are also going to launch wars in the middle east whose only function is to recruit and create more terrorists to insure we have a supply ready for the next war.

[Shryke]

Because the Republicans would do this too and try to turn your home state into Kansas.

And try to fuck over gays/women/the not-rich/etc.

[TrueMetis]

And try to fuck over gays/women/the not-rich/etc.

Also if the Repubs lose enough power that might encourage candidates who are actually good to step up.

[Inigima]

It's pretty depressing when your best option is a sandwich with a little less shit in it.

[Swordfish]

I mean it's clear from your first sentence that you don't care about science overly much, but just to be clear you're advocating what exactly? The good old ostrich approach. Sounds sensible.

Ha! What, exactly, is it about that first sentence that allows you to draw the overly presumptuous conclusion that I don't care about science? Or are you one of those people who can only communicate using sound bytes?

My goodness.....

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Inigima,

It's pretty depressing when your best option is a sandwich with a little less shit in it.

Welcome to my world where if you choose not to eat the shit sandwich people scream that you are an idiot to not eat shit.