US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

lol, you go, Bernie

Inhofe is such a goddamned idiot

less godwin's law and more pascal's wager imo

i.e. act as if climate change is real and you create a better world anyway

it also makes me wonder how good a poker player the guy really is, because he hasn't been able to bluff for shit all year.

― hellzapoppa (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, 23 February 2010 16:16 (6 hours ago)

apparently he's just a nit who waits for aces and folds to 3bets constantly.

dude got his aces Nov '08, limped in thinking he'd quadruple up, forgot to iso, is getting beat by bottom 2 pair

i.e. act as if climate change is real and you create a better world anyway

We might save hundreds of thousands of future lives that would otherwise be cut short by pollution-causing cancer. Then again it would be bad for CEOs..

the increase in skin cancer was caused by the ozone layer depletion, which was caused by CFCs, which have been banned for years.

if we cure diseases, we're just going to have overpopulation and famine, so why bother...

neo-malthusian-ism is never the answer

Worrying about resource constraints is never the answer

Not that I agree that curing diseases would imply overpopulation and famine, but let's postpone ridiculing Malthus until we figure out how to feed 9-10 billion people on eroded, mineral-drained land.

^^^worrying about resource constraints?

Oh I was being a smartass about saying resource constraints are a problem. Resource constraints are THE problem

argh, I was being a smart about saying resource constraints are NOT a problem.

gosh darnit

smart ASS

DANGIT

Malthus deserves ridicule because he blamed the geometrically expanding population of sexually gluttonous third-worlders for resource scarcity when the real problem was politics - this remains the case

And anyway - doing something serious about climate change will require a stop to massive deforestation which will mean a serious slowdown in intensive globo-farming and one-crop bonanzas like palm oil, which will mean it will be slightly less easy for Archer Daniels Midland et al to assrape half of humanity and leave their ground infertile

Here we go

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/cmxclimate.jpg

You just want to make hiring and retaining employees and running businesses too expensive---Republican response to everything

p depressing news cycle right now

house may not have hcr votes, volcker plan scrapped, apparently states are loosening gun laws in anticipation of the coming obama socialist takeover

what an embarrassing country we live in

Everyone has their non-issues; mine are guns.

house may not have hcr votes

you mean not enough house votes to pass the senate bill and send hcr to reconciliation?

stock up now, while you still can.

http://www.bubbabohacks.com/photos/redneck_hunter.jpg

obama has been great for the gun industry. wouldn't be surprised if the NRA finds some way to quietly funnel money into his re-election campaign.

my brother-in-law is stocking up on guns! no joek.

you mean not enough house votes to pass the senate bill and send hcr to reconciliation?

― Daniel, Esq., Wednesday, February 24, 2010 10:01 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, hoyer has been casting doubts on his/pelosis ability to whip the votes. it was a thin margin last time, may be even thinner especially if stupak bolts.

dammit. and damn single-issue stupak, too.

Everyone has their non-issues; mine are guns.

― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, February 24, 2010 10:00 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

eh--its low-priority for me, provided its mostly rural hunting-type states doing the gun control-loosening, but its depressing because of the story behind it, that people are convinced obama really wants to take away their guns. which is--i think the fight obama REALLY wants to have right now, after spending a year pushing through a mediocre health-care bill and failing to regulate finance or get cap and trade, is a gun-control law. i mean jeez.

Slate has a good article on the uses of reconciliation over the years, specifically on the puzzling decision to use it to pass "welfare reform" in 1996 when the bill commanded comfortable majorities.

Reconciliation has been used to raise taxes. It's been used to cut taxes. It was used (by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create COBRA, the program that compels employers to allow departing employees to buy into their health plan for 18 months. COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986 [italics mine], signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. Reconciliation was used several times to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor during the 1990s and the early aughts. It was used (again, by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create in 1997 the beneficial Children's Health Insurance Program and the wasteful privatization experiment known as Medicare Advantage. It's been used repeatedly to set federal policy regarding higher education loans and grants. "It's done almost every Congress," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Feb. 23, "and [Republicans are] the ones that used it more than anyone else." (For a complete list of all reconciliation bills signed into law between 1980 and 2008, click here.) In a Feb. 10 essay for the New England Journal of Medicine, Henry Aaron, a veteran health policy expert at the Brookings Institution, argued:

Congress created reconciliation procedures to deal with precisely this sort of situation—its failure to implement provisions of the previous budget resolution. The 2009 budget resolution instructed both houses of Congress to enact health care reform. The House and the Senate have passed similar bills. Since both houses have acted but some work remains to be done to align the two bills, using reconciliation to implement the instructions in the budget resolution follows established congressional procedure.

i couldn't care less about guns, either. mainly b/c i grew up w/ people who hunted and/or went into the military after high school/college. some were already right-wing nuts, but most were just regular guys who liked hunting and otherwise didn't pay much mind to politics. w/ very few exceptions, all of them seemed to know how to handle their guns responsibly and were law-abiding and i never saw the point in needlessly antagonizing/radicalizing them over this issue. esp. since (old-school liberal idea of mine) i always thought that tackling poverty was the key issue to getting rid of criminals getting their hands on guns.

the 2nd amendment business never concerned me -- the bit about "a well-armed militia" always made the NRA interpretation a dead letter as far as i'm concerned.

alfred i wouldn't be surprised if reconciliation was used for welfare reform in order to allow congresspeople to avoid being on record as voting for it

but welfare reform was popular!

I grew up with tons of guns around - both in my house due to my grandfather and in the region due to hunting being a huge deal, to the point that the first day of deer season was a holiday at some of the local schools. My wife had to take hunter's safety class to pass 5th grade, for instance. In a lot of ways I'd support this for everyone everywhere, because most people didn't have an insane fear of guns simply existing and knew how to handle them safely.

I see guns and abortion as the ultimate things that rile people up but will always exist - the US is never going to be able to get rid of millions of them no matter what happens, and people are always going to figure out how to terminate pregnancies. Neither is ever going to be banned, just messed with every couple of years to get people's dander up.

but welfare reform was popular!

certain, specific congresspeople may have wanted to not be on the record as having voted for it

this is just a hunch but it seems pretty likely to me

I see guns and abortion as the ultimate things that rile people up but will always exist - the US is never going to be able to get rid of millions of them no matter what happen

babies?

sorry i brought up guns guys

I see smoking as the ultimate thing that riles people up but will always exist - the US is never going to be able to get rid of millions of tobacco habits no matter what happens, and people are always going to figure out how to smoke. It's never going to be banned, just messed with every couple of years to get people's dander up.

i think guns rile people up a lot more than smoking ever did

http://liveshot.cc/images/John%20Kerry%20Hunting%204.jpg

yeah it's kinda hard (tho not impossible!) to kill other people with your cigarettes.

i mean, wasn't there that one bit in Octopussy?

you mean the greatest movie ever made? yes.

anyway, i shoulda bought gold & handguns last January

And renewed your passport.

really lets not talk about guns

did somebody on ilx link to the (Slate?) article about betting on conservative paranoia? I'm always a day late on these things...

day late/ $$ short