All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

They all need to eat more pretzels.

Adams lost teeth but not brains.

14 years for blogojevich.

14 years of explaining his complete innocence to the prison guards.

well, he said at sentencing that he was sorry for his "made terrible mistakes," but that he "never intended to break the law." the judge said, "the jury didn't believe you and neither do i."

a provision that would make it more likely that construction would begin soon on a controversial oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh, they're so transparently servants of the oil industry

Well, why not? Do you believe this climate change twaddle?

totally. it was in the 50s around here recently. you see? it's C-O-L-D-E-R than expected, not h-o-t-t-e-r.

with that alone, you can ignore what you hear from egghead "scientists."

when time magazine sums up the twenty first century it will just be the word scientists in sarcastic quote marks

I like the implication that TIME magazine is run by and written for cockroaches

TIME 2100: They blinded us with "Science."

Maybe it is!

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/hitler/sources/40s/414-141HitlerTime.jpg

dude! ugh.

blast from the past: 90s icon Mumia taken off death row

woah really, I thought he'd already been executed

blago's wife is my landlord -- thankfully my rent being four days late this month is prob the least of her worries now

haha that's awesome jord

I really need to figure out who's who in this here sandbox.

oh god:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday and refused to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold as freely as aspirin, setting up just the kind of clash between politics and science that President Obama had promised to avoid.

Under the law, Ms. Sebelius has the authority to overrule the agency, according to an F.D.A. spokeswoman, but no health secretary has ever done so before. Her decision continues a history of political meddling in the agency’s decisions regarding emergency contraceptives that tarnished the drug administration’s credibility during the Bush administration. Ms. Sibelius’s decision to overrule a recommendation by government scientists will also almost certainly reverberate in this presidential election season.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/health/policy/sebelius-overrules-fda-on-freer-sale-of-emergency-contraceptives.html?ref=politics

rust belt catholics, thumbs up to u

weak. i kinda haven't heard a lot about her since she's been in the admin but sorta remember feeling like she was one of the good guys, blarg

This is such bullshit, but it doesn't surprise me.

Catholic bishops for Obama 2012

wow what the fuck at that hhs ruling, fucking shameful

otoh mumia!

What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/dec/05/goodbye-serenity/

Just noticed these details on this...

The drug, Plan B One-Step, has been sold for several years over the counter to women age 17 and older, but girls under that age need a prescription.

“I have concluded that the data … do not conclusively establish that Plan B One-Step should be made available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age,”

loved that, kinda a perfect halfway between a newspaper letter & a sobering memoir
xp

btw

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject,” Obama said. “Everybody should be on notice. The reason is because the payroll tax cut is something House Republicans and Senate Republicans should want to do regardless of any other issues.

The tax cut “shouldn’t be held hostage to any other issues they may be concerned about,” Obama continued. “My warning is not just related to Keystone. Efforts to tie a bunch of other issues to something they should do anyway will be rejected — by me.”

mad ups to obama for this

I'm still worried that he'll just approve it 2013 but who knows...

re: payroll tax cut, he knows he's got the GOP backed into a corner so he can afford to be a dick about it

Backed into a corner... Reid and company keep watering down the Dems proposal and nobody mentions that the Republicans never insisted that the Bush tax cuts be paid for

nobody mentions that the Republicans never insisted that the Bush tax cuts be paid for

uh Obama and Reid have both said this iirc

also I don't know how it's been watered down...? Bill in the Senate sets the payroll tax cut even higher than it currently is now, unless I've misread something.

has this been posted? the boy boy young ratigan went ham

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=G4yDCUJJm_U

yeah that's relatively old i think - ratigan is pretty awesome

yeah i think that happened 2 or 3 months ago. i'm pretty bummed that it doesn't have 3 million views and my idiot facebook feed wasn't saturated with it for a solid week following

this plan b no longer OTC bullshit has me exactly as fucking pissed off as y'all might imagine

this kind of has to go here too btw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2fKmeFR_ko

this plan b no longer OTC bullshit has me exactly as fucking pissed off as y'all might imagine

― undervalued aerosmith tchotchkes sold in bulk, Wednesday, December 7, 2011 9:06 PM (5 minutes ago)

it still will be available w/o a prescription to 17+; nothing's changed, but the FDA had voted to make it available OTC for anyone

this woman: not a doctor, not a pharmacist, no background in medical or outcomes research i can find, no prior public health experience other than her work at the HHS. but she knew better than the scientists on the FDA panel. she does have a pretty strong pro-choice background though

this is complete bullshit, there is truly nothing else to be said

the thing is back when she was a veep possible I really thought she seemed ok, she was strong pro-choice. this is such a bullshit next-year's-an-election-year move (at the expense of pregnant teenagers) - politicians second-guessing the fda is up on some "global warming? it snowed today, ya morons!"

otm

see man, one of the things i thought i liked about obama - and a point in his favor over any GOP prez - was that i thought in some ways he was at least could be a pretty good and effective bureaucrat - cf his administration's decision to require all insurers to provide OCs without copay. but fuck them for this

(i know this doesn't fit squarely into a u.s. politics thread, but the underlying reasons are very closely intertwined with u.s. politics, and also i don't feel like creating a climate change/energy sandbox thread)

at the UN Climate Talks in Durban, the U.S. is pushing a proposal to delay significant action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions until at least 2020. for those that don't follow climate science, delaying action until 2020 is essentially a guarantee that temperatures will rise at least 2 degrees Celsius, which is more than enough to absolutely alter life as we know it. And delaying action until 2020 makes it even more likely that we'll approach utterly catastrophic scenarios (4, 5, 6+ degrees celsius increase). David Roberts writes:

It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that we're going to hit 4 degrees C. It won't be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.

It's seductive logic. After all, to hit 4 degrees C we would "only" have to peak global emissions in 2020 and decline thereafter at the relatively leisurely rate (ha ha) of around 3.5 percent per year.

Sadly, even that cold comfort is not available to us. The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, "a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond 'adaptation', is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable."

anyway, tying it back to "U.S. Politics", what a fucking disappointment. the fact that the U.S. negotiating team is pushing this indicates that the people in the Administration who actually knew what they're talking about (Holdren, Browner, Chu, Jackson, Van Jones (RIP)) didn't really get through to Obama.

seriously, what a joke

sorry, let me turn my outrage elsewhere.

so, a top-secret U.S. drone crashed in Iran. serious question: what do you think the reaction would be in the U.S. if a top-secret drone from another country crashed here?

i don't accept your premise b/c we da best

who we?

i mean, if the drone were from a country that was considered not the bestest of friends with the U.S., i wonder if a significant part of the media (and administration) would immediately consider war