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You force a decision long before the environmental impact report is finished and this is what you're going to get.
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Egypt will be an interesting case study. Let's hope some modernity wins out.
My Way News - Egypt's Islamists win 75 percent of parliament Quote:
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I love the rhetoric from the third paragraph where I couldn't figure out which party was more "Islamist" between one being described as fundamentalist and the other as ultraconservative.
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Intuitively I understood this but had no idea the true deficit $. I'm sure there can be quibbles but at least a method to quantifying it overall.
Ezra Klein: Doing the math on Obama's deficits - The Washington Post Quote:
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Whoopsie:
Alabama immigration crackdown costs state up to $11 bln: study - Yahoo! News I'm sure Alabama is just happy that there's less, darker than white people, in the state now. So it's probably a wash to them. |
Utah has a pretty successful model on how states can handle this since the Federal government has shown no interest in doing anything:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/utah-...8#.TymaibES01I |
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I wonder though, if someone opposes states enforcing their own anti-immigration laws on constitutional grounds, how do they distinguish that from states granting some type of legal immigration status? |
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One could easily go the other way and nail Obama for failing to alter the policies he inherited and allowing the debt to continue to spiral out of control. |
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Easy, by not being consistent. I'd happily use constitutional means to get something like Alabama's law thrown out if it were in place in Wisconsin. But if we adopted Utah's laws, I'd fight against it getting thrown out for constitutional reasons. Totally inconsistent, but I'm trying to get something accomplished here. The means of accomplishing it are fairly irrelevant. It's been that way in politics forever. |
If you look at deportations and inflow of illegal immigrants it certainly doesn't look like the federal government is doing nothing.
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Ya, that's refreshingly candid and true. The constitution doesn't really have meaning, it's just a tool to get your preferred policy enacted, or your opposed policy stopped. Still, in the legal fight, people will have to come up with some made-up distinction or justification (so will appellate judges). This could be a tricky one. |
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This is true, but in terms of comprehensive reform or somesuch thing, it's been talked about for ages and nothing has gotten done. I think W had the best opportunity to do something reasonable. No way the right let's Obama do anything that resembles amnesty. Quote:
That's what lawyers are for :) I'm sure they could frame separate arguments that are completely inconsistent and as long as they aren't heard in the same courtroom by the same judge, it could probably work both ways, no? |
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Maybe not quite "forever" but certainly for a pretty long time. This isn't much different with what I've said at times in the past, at this point I see the Constitution as little more than a means to an end. Any meaning it had beyond that was lost long ago afaic. |
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Well if the only constitutional reason they oppose state anti-immigration laws was that it usurps federal authority, thus violating the Supremacy Clause, then they obviously can't make a reasonable distinction there. But that is hardly the only reason people oppose the laws in Arizona and Alabama. |
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As the article said, Utah is attempting to get a federal waiver. If they don't get it, then, as much as I think its a good idea, the law should be struck down. Quote:
Well yeah. The Constitution is simply the highest (legal, as opposed to moral or whatnot) law in the land. It doesn't get any divine favor simply for being that ;). It is like all laws are, a means to an end. The question is what end do people have in mind. |
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I disagree. To me, the point of the Constitution is to protect the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Without the Constitution, what would stop a state from deciding, for example, Hispanics should not be allowed to vote? We're not too far removed from that happening with African Americans in the south. The only thing stopping it from happening is the knowledge that it would never pass Constitutional muster. If the Constitution is just another set of laws, there is not a right that the government can't take away from us. It seems odd that people who (correctly) note that our government serves the needs of corporations and the military to a much greater extent than the needs of the people are the most eager to throw away the few restrictions that remain on its power over us. |
Unemployment drops another .2% to 8.3%, the same number as Obama's first full month in office. So much for that holiday hiring spin.
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Politics notwithstanding, that's really good news. Things could change for the worst overnight (i.e. Europe implodes), but, for now, I'll take a dose of good news.
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Yeah- it's going to take getting a lot more jobs to pull back those who have left the workplace and decrease wage stagnation to really make big changes
SI |
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Yeah, that's the crazy part about the unemployment numbers. I think true unemployment numbers were hovering around the 16% range. If those people get encouraged by dropping unemployment rates, they could actually reenter the job market and spike the number back up to 8.5-9%. That's why you always have to be reserved about small changes such as this. |
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To be fair, the U-6 number is down quite a bit (unemployed + underemployed). It's at 15.1 now and Obama's first numbers (Feb 09) were 15.1. That ramp up in 2008 is just crazy: 9.2 up to 15.1. It peaked at 17.2 but really, very little has happened under Obama- positive or negative- for the employment numbers. The hole was really deep, it got a little deeper, and now we're starting to dig back out.
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Europe will go fucky-fuck in March. Greek default will happen. I met with someone yesterday who has connections at the very high-level (we're talking EU heads-of-state), and that was the conclusion he's drawn/they're prepping for.
Only question is to what extent have the markets priced it in, and to what extent will they react anyways. And will there be an effective ECB/EFSF/EU firewall to protect Italy/Spain. |
Yeah, none of the numbers are good. Underemployment is likely a big problem too. But any improvement is still improvement in the big picture. At least it's not getting worse.
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My work is so busy right now that we cannot hire people quickly enough (and I wish we could...its killing me). Niche jobs but still not a bad thing.
I imagine the same to be true with some of the vendors we buy things from as we are seeing really big delays in getting product so clearly they don't have the manpower to produce enough for the market. One thought about the depressed wages thing I had (anecdotally). Since late 2008 we've lost a LOT of management overhead. Directors, VPs, and even Presidents & a CIO. Only 1 of them have been replaced in actual title and the rest have just had job duties repurposed. That would (in my company's case) account for quite a bit of wage depression I imagine but overall the company is close to flat on employee count so I dont know if thats a good thing or not but we definitely have more "doers" (and are hiring more) than we have management than we did in the past. |
Even if there is some progressivity in the federal tax code it's largely offset by the states.
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I'd like to see the ratio of the bottom 1% to the top 1%, or even the bottom 20% to the top 20%.
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First six words reduced the rest of the statement to "sensationalistic twaddle" |
Why does it have to be government or charities? There are programs better run by charities ad there are programs better run by government.
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"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," per old Arab proverb.
Leader Of Al Qaeda Calls On Muslims To Help Syrian Rebels | Fox News Quote:
I actually feel sorry for Assad. As ME strongmen goes, he seemed relatively pragmatic and the only time he bumps against us is Lebanon (I think). Any government faced with civil war would ultimately take up arms against the population advocating for it. His main problem was not wanting to compromise (enough) before it escalated to this point. Its pretty serious crap when Turkey and large number of ME Muslim countries turn against you. Hope he goes. It'll further isolate Iran and Russia/China will have lost a degree of influence. |
And Chris Christie decides to be the "before" picture in future civil rights textbooks.
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dola
Chris Christie may be miscalculating how the gay marriage issue will have developed by 2016. It would be sweet justice if his veto dooms his future presidential hopes. |
I have no doubt that by 2020, the GOP candidate will be running on a plank that will include married gay voters as part of their social outreach platform. What we're seeing now is the death throngs of bigotry as they desperately lash about trying to fight the inevitable.
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Given the steady decline in our civilization you could be right. He'll still be just as correct then as he was today. |
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And the Democrats knew this was going to happen and failed to push this through when they held a majority in the state senate and had a Democrat as governor a few years ago. I wonder how many Democrats in the state senate voted yes purely because they knew Christie would veto but would have voted no otherwise. |
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In other words, not at all. |
Big Banks Accused of Manipulating Key Interest Rates | Business | TIME.com
and heeeeeeeeeerrre comes the next banking scandal... |
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However, he's playing his cards well for someone who vetoed a marriage equality bill, by saying that he thinks this is something for the voters to decide on the ballot rather than just the representatives. So he can, plausibly, say he wasn't against marriage equality, just the manner in which it was attempted. |
But wait, isn't Obama not in favor of gay marriage?
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Exactly. But some liberals have convinced themselves that he's just faking for political reasons (wouldn't that be worse though?)
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Of course Obama is lying on the issue - gay marriage opinion is evolving over time, and he's done more for gay rights than any president to date.
But IMO, I look forward to the time when Craig or JIMGA or any of the others who hold on so dearly to the past have a gay kid, or a gay niece or nephew, or grandkid, and see if they can explain to them in good conscience why they ought to be second class citizens. |
I actually think that those who think Obama is lying on the issue are deluding themselves (just as most liberals thought Obama would be the great lefty hope instead of a centrist).
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Whether he's faking it or not isn't important. He absolutely will not look as good in historical context as if he'd supported it sooner, but the reason liberals will and have given him a pass is (as Crapshoot noted) that he's done more for gay rights than any other President. Obama will be known as the President that ended DADT, and before his term is up maybe DOMA as well. If you can't see how that will differ him from Christie in the historical context, then I don't know what to say.
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Making people vote for their civil rights is a bunch of bullshit and I'm confident it will be correctly seen as such by 2016. |
Obama flew over my office today in a helicopter. I got nothing.
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And he can say that until he's blue in the face, it's still a bullshit argument. Saying that "it ought to be decided by the voters" is to say that Congress giving women and non-whites the vote via the 14th and 19th Amendments was illegitimate because white males should have made that decision instead. Saying "I'm not against marriage equality, I just think the voters should have made the decision" is going to be wishy-washy as all hell with the Republican base, and is not going to be the winner he thinks it'd be among independent voters, either. It's basically a no-win play, other than to shore up his right to prevent a primary opponent if he chooses to run for re-election as Governor of NJ. |
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You think so? Gay marriage support is at over 50% in the latest Gallup poll. Do you truly believe that Obama doesn't support gay marriage? Hell, I'd expect him to note it officially right after the 2014 mid-term elections (to blow back any potential politiical implications). |
Yeah, I truly believe that Obama doesn't support gay marriage. If he did, he'd be backing it right now. A lot of liberals have assigned a lot to Obama that he never actually backed. I think marriage equality is one of those things.
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