All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

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

for argument's sake, imagine the drone that crashes over the U.S. is from Iran.

I think we wouldn't consider war and instead would ramp up a cold war.

Iran is scary.

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 (Yesterday) Bookmark Permalink

otm

washingtonpost The Washington Post -- Obama now: "Ask Osama Bin Laden... or whoever's left out there, if I engage in appeasement" http://wapo.st/k5onQj

wow

this man is usually sane:

The Churchill Comparison
December 8, 2011 11:39 A.M.
By Ramesh Ponnuru
My friend Steven Hayward isn’t exactly for Gingrich’s nomination. He just thinks we ought to consider the possibility that he might turn out to be a great statesman–just as Churchill did, even though people criticized him in terms similar to the ones Gingrich’s critics use. “[W]e cannot prospectively identify those whom we will later come to laud as great statesmen.” He wonders whether we need someone unconventional given the special challenges of our time. And he thinks it’s possible that Gingrich has learned lessons from his earlier failures, as Churchill did.

These strike me as equally good arguments for giving the presidential nomination to Alan Keyes. People have called him grandiose and erratic, just as they said of Churchill. We can’t rule out with 100 percent confidence that he will be a fine statesman. He is certainly unconventional. And we can’t rule out the possibility that he has learned from his mistakes

I'm gonna go ahead and rule out some of those possibilities, if that's okay with y'all

Sebelius is making the correct political calculation. The majority of parents think they wouldn't want their young daughter to have unfettered access to contraception without their knowledge. Apparently, they would prefer to find out their daughter is having sex when she tells them she's already pregnant, wtf.

just do the recess appointment already

lol @ President Brown

"When the regulators go to work everyday, like most people go to work, their work assignment's a little different," Poe said. "In my opinion, they sit around a big oak table, sipping their lattes. They have out their iPads and their computers, and they decide, 'Who shall we regulate today?' And they write a regulation and send it out to the masses and make us deal with the cost to that."

oh my god

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/house-passes-bill-to-grant-congress-veto-power_n_1135030.html

tbf he's correct *sips latte*

wanna regulate some shit?

there's an app for that

there's no way that will stand up in court, even if it passes the senate (and Obama - any president, really - would surely veto anything this stupid anyway...?)

regulations create jobs. fact.

regulations created MY job, at a small business, in the private sector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1plPyJdXKIY

hey decide, 'Who shall we regulate today?

Yup. This is how it works.

Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), argued that if Congress can stop rules in their tracks, businesses will flourish.

"Poll after poll of small business owners, of medium-sized business owners -- they will show you and tell you that major regulations are holding back their expansion and the ability of them to hire more workers," Quayle said.

less flashy but this is a bigger lie

yeah that really irritated me

like what regulation is there that says "don't hire people"

dude fuck you:

President Obama, noting that he was the father of two daughters, threw his wholehearted support on Thursday behind a decision by his Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, not to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers.
Related

“The reason Kathleen made this decision is that she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going to a drug store should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could have an adverse effect,” Mr. Obama said to reporters at the White House.

the Welfare Queen again, buying vodka with food stamps.

http://www.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.982292!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_370/image.jpg

^^ overregulated

Over-pampered petulance.

re: plan b, all politicians bend before Big Dad

regulations create jobs. fact.

this is as stupid as 'regulations destroy jobs'. 'regulations' is a word that encompasses both 'good' and 'bad' regulations. and sometimes even things that we all agree are 'good' regulations are still going to, as a whole, result in a net job loss, which is still fine because it's prob not a good idea to run your economy w/ absolutely nothing but 'the most jobs possible' as the goal.

'ALL POSSIBLE JOBS' for campaign slogan