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U.S. Politics: The Biggest Trade in WNBA History

John Madden

resident policy guy
Main thing I've gotten from this election (that I haven't already posted): polls here are ultimately as absolute trash as they have been in Canada for the last 3 years.

Also that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz needs to get the hell away from that DNC job yesterday.

Good news on state ballot initiatives:

Arkansas Issue 5: Raise minimum wage to $8.50 per hour in 2017 = YES
Colorado Amendment 67: Definition of personhood = NO
Illinois Question 1: Raise minimum wage to $10 per hour in 2015 = YES
Illinois Question 2: Require health insurance plans to cover birth control = YES
Nebraska Initiative 425: Raise minimum wage to $9 per hour in 2016 = YES
South Dakota Measure 18: Raise minimum wage to $8.50 per hour in 2015 = Close but yes is winning
Washington Initiative 591: Limit background checks for gun sales = Close but no winning
Washington Initiative 594: Require background checks for gun sales = Yes winning
 
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WizardTrubbish

much more beastly
Unless Begich wins and Landrieu survives her runoff, Republicans have the Senate now. It also looks like they'll somehow net gain in the governor's mansions
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
Good to know people in my state aren't COMPLETE idiots. I haven't seen the results on who they elected, so maybe they did elect the criminal and the person whose name sounds like a mafia don for governor and lieutenant governor. Not that I'm all that stoked about Pat Quinn, especially with Paul Vallas as his running mate.
 

bobjr

You ask too many questions
Staff member
Moderator
So Reublicans are learning that they can sabotage the workings of Congress, brag about sabotaging the workings of Congress, and be rewarded for it is the message we've learned tonight?
 

LDSman

Well-Known Member
Can't win? Change the Constitution.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/11/04/when-dems-lose-media-annihlate-constitution

There is a reason we vote every two years. Helps to keep the gov't under control.

The problem with the 594 measure in Washington state is that it addresses a non-existent problem and is in response to an issue that the measure wouldn't have stopped. I read the measure and any transfer will require a background check.
It was opposed by a large number of police departments. It's just another gun law bill that will be used to hamper legal gun owners while the criminals, who are already ignoring the current gun laws, will ignore this new one. And once again, there is no "gun show loophole." Private citizens are intentionally exempt from the background check law that applies to gun stores. Most criminals get their guns from family members or in a manner that they know is illegal. How exactly is that going to change under 594?

https://www.voteno594.com/initiative-594/

https://www.voteno594.com/blog-posts/majority-of-washington-state-sheriffs-oppose-i-594/
 

WizardTrubbish

much more beastly
So right now the results are looking like:

Senate: R+8/9, depending on the result of Louisiana's runoff in December

Governor: R+3

House: R+17

This is probably a worse year for Democrats than 2010
 

John Madden

resident policy guy
There is a reason we vote every two years. Helps to keep the gov't under control.

there's a reason we vote every two years and it's not because it "helps keep the gov't under control" of any group that has a positive influence on policy
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
So Reublicans are learning that they can sabotage the workings of Congress, brag about sabotaging the workings of Congress, and be rewarded for it is the message we've learned tonight?

Not so much "be rewarded for it" as much as "continue to prey on the fact that most Americans who do vote only vote in years with presidential elections."
 

Excitable Boy

is a metaphor
So Reublicans are learning that they can sabotage the workings of Congress, brag about sabotaging the workings of Congress, and be rewarded for it is the message we've learned tonight?

yeah, but their reward is Congress

...oh.
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
So, minimum rage increase has been approved in Alaska, Arkansas, and South Dakota by the voters.

I know this was a typo, but I like it better that way.

Anyway, it's good to see that a few states actually voted to raise the minimum wage.
 

ccangelopearl1362

Well-Known Member
Fox News Channel: ‘You Want to Kill’: ISIS Deserter Recounts Training, Torture and Terror
Fox News Channel: Source Says Reported Letter from Obama to Ayatollah ‘F***s Up Everything’

After so many massacres against non-Muslims and apparently low wages, some have taken to abandoning the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, including one who grew up in a village near the jihad franchise’s headquarters. This deserter observed the brutality unleashed by Bashar Al-Assad’s units, whether distantly or personally, “spending 10 months in a Syrian jail in 2012, where he said his captors pulled out his fingernails and flayed his skin”, before joining the Free Syrian Army and watching Al-Qaeda’s other franchises erupt. He went to “a remote boot camp for 40 days of training under battle-scarred foreign fighters, including Chechens and Afghans”, not to mention fighters from Western Christendom. Whereas battles led by Libyans tended more toward hand-to-hand combat, battles led by Chechens tended more toward tactical advantages. ISIL once took 300 prisoners, including women and children, and held them for about a day before finding them too burdensome and “mowing them down in the desert”. The breaking point came at a place called Markada, at which ISIL started killing everything and everyone in its path, even other Sharia terrorists. That source inside Congress can’t be accused of reticence in that description, as relayed to the Wall Street Journal… nor can one Ralph Peters, calling this an act of “ferocious stupidity”. In a nutshell, President Barack Obama didn’t alert anybody else to this, and the joint statement from Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham might speak for itself. Thus will the spiteful eruptions be set, exactly three years after David Goldman’s warnings first embedded themselves into my memory, generating that perfect storm propelling me all the way toward friendship and harmony. Those Sunni tribes throughout the Middle East could’ve ended up consulting that humble author, and the Islamic Thirty Years’ War might as well roll away and spill into the Russo-Ukrainian War. I wouldn’t want to be Donetsk People’s Republic leader Alexander Zakharchenko, Main Intelligence Directorate director Igor Sergun, or Russian President Vladimir Putin at this point in time, and the current free-for-all throughout the intended territory of their joint project certainly can’t help our perceptions.:

Spiegel: Christian Neef: The Chaos Republics: Stagnation and Infighting Take Hold in Eastern Ukraine
Jamestown Foundation: Mairbek Vatchagaev: Is Russia Facing the Growing Possibility of Muslim Revolt?
Jamestown Foundation: Valery Dzutsev: Cossacks Demand Government Halt ‘Forcible Islamization’ of Stavropol Region

Hoo, boy. A special round of congratulations will be in order for this colossally unwelcome history lesson, alongside our regular gratitude to that militia entirely instigated by those special operators, recounting a visit by a 77-year-old singer no longer allowed to enter Ukraine or Latvia, the former of which held some parliamentary elections repudiating the Eurasianists last week. That said, it appear the aforementioned group turned to the singer because the Kremlin has no idea how to proceed with its project, competing with the White House in manipulating not only the ayatollahs, but also the Israelis, the Sunnis, the Houthis, and everyone else in between. Moscow’s television stations “continued unperturbed last week with their venomous attacks on neighboring Ukraine”, cheering and praising the Donetsk People’s Republic after proceeding on its own with that series of votes this past Sunday, whose results we clearly don’t recognize. It turns out that the militias influenced by Moscow are avoiding subordination to Kiev, which had demonstrated that “Novorossiya was not originally a Moscow-led project”. Indeed, some in the militias have no idea what to do should the concept crumble, reflecting broader uncertainty about the “social situation” for the rest of Ukraine. If the blast furnaces and steelworks still in the area “remain out of operation this winter, tens of thousands of people could lose their jobs”. If all this isn’t enough, Donetsk’s leaders are growing more distant and pursuing different agendas, with the so-called Cossacks taking to controlling a different city near Donetsk, such that there’s no one to take seriously enough for any discussions with the militias and their backers. Absorption of Muslims probably never had a chance after all these centuries, either, with opposition to new mosques in, well, Moscow popping up and a crowd of “thousands of Muslims” forcibly freeing a detained individual from Ingushetia and resisting arrests from the authorities. The police in Dagestan’s capital detained “several random Muslims” at a mosque there without offering an explanation and thus receiving a warning that “this might end up provoking the parishioners, and people started asking questions and a scandal ensued, after which the police fired in the air and used tear gas” on the crowd. An underground movement dedicated to spreading Sharia is starting to emerge in various Russian cities, which can only spill toward the Black Sea even today. About 200 Cossacks showed up for the rally to call on “President Vladimir Putin to stop dividing the Cossacks into those on the government payroll, the so-called Registry Cossacks, and those not in government service, the so-called Non-Registry Cossacks”, opening the Crimean Peninsula to constant unhappiness with the Eurasian Union’s… inefficiencies before it even kicked into high gear. The Cossacks and other nationalistic ethnicities still inside Russia consider Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov and other Muslims too close to the Kremlin for their comfort, translating into opposition to new mosques. The overlap between the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Islamic Thirty Years’ War seems eerily close at this point.:

British Broadcasting Corporation: Ukraine crisis: Tanks ‘cross border’ from Russia
Daily Telegraph: Vladimir Putin says there was nothing wrong with Soviet Union’s pact with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany

Mark this week as another round of fan-hitting manure (hint, hint), with the column barreling toward a town known as Krasny Luch and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization looking into the situation as only it can. The bombardments against the population centers accompanying that aforementioned history lesson will have left Eastern Europe and China unnerved at once, one might think, and the blame against Great Britain and France for Munich and the accusations over something called the Livonian War might safely stand together. With Eurasianism and Islam now looking to mirror each other in world-ending bloodlust, the Anglosphere can’t act quickly enough in entrenching itself for now.
 

The Admiral

the star of the masquerade
What the hell does "Obamacare for the internet" even MEAN, other than the fact that high-visibility Republicans are apparently only capable of speaking in buzzwords?

Like, I'm seriously lost here. That makes no sense, and hopefully someone else from the party can maybe take the reins and start saying things that at least make sense in terms of the words used.
 

LDSman

Well-Known Member
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Silver Soul

Well-Known Member

LDSman

Well-Known Member
First off, lay off the Breitbart.
How about...no.


Secondly, the EFF changed their position on their Net Neutrality in regards to preventing Internet "Fast Lanes" from being created. Last I recall, open internet benefits the free market and companies like Comcast and TWC monopolizing it would actually hurt businesses.

And the EFF is still expressing doubt about the FCC getting it right.


Gruber, an Obamacare architect, calls American voters stupid and admits to making Obamacare convoluted so that the CBO wouldn't call it a tax.


http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/11/1...he-american-voter-was-key-to-passing-the-law/

In the clip, Gruber goes on at length about how it would have been impossible to pass Obamacare if the American people really knew what it would do. That echoes then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s admission that Democrats would have to pass the bill before the American people could find out what is in it.

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure that the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber admits. The Supreme Court decision upholding the mandate did regard it as a tax, at least in Chief Justice John Roberts’ mind.

“If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies,” Gruber says.

“If you had a law that…made it explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in and sick people are gonna get money, it would not have passed,” Gruber admits.

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said. He added that even with all of that deception, perpetrated by his party on a grand scale, “I would rather have this law than not.”

and that's not the only time Gruber has called voters stupid.

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/...-Made-Lots-of-Off-the-Cuff-Insulting-Speak-os
And then there is the redistribution of healthcare from the old.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/12/Four-Times-Obamacare-Lie
 
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