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clever username

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Posts posted by clever username

  1. Posted

     

    Trump won those counties by a wide margin. Wider than what Bush got in 2000. And those non-voters that sat out previous elections -- there is no reason to think that they would have voted for Obama at all. There is though very good evidence that stirring up pre-existing racial hatreds motivated them to get out. The biggest campaign promise that Trump is going to have to keep is kicking out all immigrants and building a wall on Mexico while Mexico pays for it.

     

    He won those counties because turnout was depressed, and turnout was depressed because Clinton sucked. We know the people who stayed home voted for Obama: that's how he won those counties in 08 and 12.

     

    And no, Trump's racism did not turn out more voters than Republicans usually do. Again, he got fewer votes than both McCain and Romney did.

  2. Posted

     

    The name is Shariq, not Tariq.

     

    And Ryan did not run unopposed. There were three other choices in that race. Cantor lost his seat in 2014 because you can credibliy make a point that Rethug voters wanted something different. In this case, Ryan won and so did Rand Paul -- the other Kentucky dipshit establishment senator that has been in there for long time.

     

    During neither of their previous terms, did they pass a jobs bill, so don't tell me that there was huge economic factors at play.

     

    I didn't say he ran unopposed, I said the Democrats didn't put any real effort into opposing him. His opponent was a no name with no backing by the party.

  4. Posted

    Can we stop with the made up narrative about the working class? The breakdown of Trump voters were older and wealthy. People who make under 50k broke heavy for Clinton. And Jason, this was not a rejection of establishment politicians. McConnell and Ryan both won their seats back as did most of the Republican politicians. If that was the case, then McConnell and Ryan would have been out on their ass.

     

    They did, but they did at a much lower margin than they did for Obama over either Romney or McCain.

     

    You're making the same mistake liberals always do when looking at the working class: ignoring non-voters. When the Democrats lost white workers, it wasn't because most of them started voting Republican. It's because most of them stopped voting at all. Clinton just exacerbated this trend.

     

    This is what Wong misses. This wasn't a wave of voters raising Trump into office. In fact, Trump got less votes than Romney did in 2012. This was Hillary Clinton running a tone deaf, negative campaign where she moved to the right to try and attract "moderate" Republicans who were never going to vote for her, where she refused to attack Republicans or talk about the Ryan budget was going to do to the poor, and where she ranted about Russian plots instead of telling people how she was going to improve their lives. And people stayed home. And she lost.

     

    What you are selling is not what reality is. The reality is that they wanted another white man in charge. That is what they meant when they said they were going to "take their country back."

     

    The counties in the Rust Belt that swung the election by voting for Trump went for Barack Obama twice. Obama is not, I don't think I have to remind you, a white man. Your explanation doesn't make sense.

  5. Posted

    According to EPI, it costs $15 to manufacture an iPhone. Let's say a third of that is labor costs, which I think is generous. Line workers at Foxcon make about $2/hour. You could raise that to $50/hour and Apple would still be making $150 of profit per phone. Even if Apple raised prices to maintain it's current rate of profit (even though that's not how supply and demand works), you still wouldn't be paying thousands of dollars for a smartphone.

  10. Posted

    Oh, and just to triple post, the argument that we've been eating GMOs for decades and there have been no negative health effects is bullshit because:

     

    a ) In order to actually figure that out, we'd need to run studies, but that's impossible because without labeling you can't have a non GMO eating control group. People smoked for decades before scientists proved it was linked to cancer.

     

    and

     

    b ) There actually are huge differences between people now and people 30 years ago. I'm sure everyone saw that story about how it was easier to lose weight in the 1980s. Endocrine disruption from GMOs in the food chain could be a part of why that's so.

  12. Posted

    Hey, thank you for sharing this. I did not know much about GMOs, like a lot of people, but also like a lot of people, I had the vague idea that they were bad. The video you linked to was definitely illuminating, not just in terms of how GMOs help us, but also why it's very easy for people to misunderstand what they are. I think you're right about how rapidly things are changing and how little we are informed without having to dig for information. I think many of us have a very primal reaction to the notion of food being "modified" and that a small number of corporations are doing most of the modifications, and I'm glad Hank touched on those ideas.

     

    I'm glad I watched this, and I hope to learn more about this stuff. Thanks for posting.

     

    I'd suggest reading Altered Genes, Twisted Truth if you want the opposite side, Paul. It's written by a lawyer who sued the FDA over it's GMO policy, and in discovery found a bunch of documents from FDA scientists arguing that GMOs ought not be be assumed to be safe, but instead should go through extensive testing by the government. FDA administrators overruled them and gave GMOs a designation of Generally Recognized as Safe, which meant they could get around the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Safety Act. Because they're GRAS, the FDA just has to approve tests run by the biotech companies themselves, which often don't even use the crop in question, just the proteins that are assumed to be in the plant.

     

    Independent researchers who study GMOs are often attacked harshly when they report results that clash with the narrative biotech companies are trying to spin. This Democracy Now! story goes into the case of Arpad Pusztai.

     

    One thing that I really want to push back on is the idea that humans have been "genetically engineering" plants for thousands of years. That's pure sophistry. There's a huge difference between breeding plants with each other on the one hand and genetically inserting a mammal gene into a bacteria, which is in turn inserted into a plant. This goes along with the idea that scientists can target specific proteins they want to change and go in with a scalpel and make fine alterations, which massively overstates the level of control we have and understates the level of randomness. When a new GMO is bred, scientists create dozens or even hundreds of new plants, and pick out the few that seem to be exhibiting the phenotype they want. But phenotype isn't the same thing as genotype, and the only way you can find out if there are novel proteins that could have a huge effect on human health is through long term animal feeding studies.

     

    A lot of progressives buy into the line the biotech industry pitches that portrays GMOs as "Yay, Science!" I'd recommend people watch the Cosmos episode on leaded gasoline (ironic because NDT himself is a big GE booster, but he doesn't write the show) if they want a reminder of how corporations can hide behind a facade of scientific legitimacy to make a bunch of money. I think Jane Goodall had it right in the forward she wrote to Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, where she says that it's the pro-GMO lobby that's actually anti-science.

     

    TL;DR: Paul, trust your gut. It's good to be skeptical of corporations modifying the basic building blocks of life with minimal oversight. Even if you don't buy the health concerns, the whole experiment has been an ecological disaster.

  13. Posted

    I think Dan is massively overestimating the power the party establishment has, especially on the Republican side. If he was right that the party bosses could crush any insurgent candidate they didn't like, Eric Cantor would still be in the House of Representatives instead of being out of a job because a Tea Party candidate beat him despite being outspent something like 20:1.

     

    Jeb Bush is not going to be the nominee. I don't know if Trump is going to win (though I suspect Dan is being way too confident in declaring he has no chance), but he's killed Jeb's candidacy. Jeb's dead. If Republicans were smart, they'd nominate Rubio, but he's way too soft on immigration to make it out of the primaries alive.

     

    Clinton still has a good shot at winning the nomination, but to say Sanders has no chance is also an overstatement. He might not have big donors, but he almost beat Clinton in fundraising this latest quarter. Clinton has a lot of Super PACS behind her, but when one of the (Correct the Record) tried to go after Sanders, not only did the attack not stick but it caused an avalanche of small donations to flow into the Sanders campaign.

     

    I also think Dan's wrong to say the private server controversy is "nothing." Republicans are definitely pushing it for political reasons, but it is not okay for a government official to use a private email address to get around FOIA requests and Congressional subpoenas. And despite all the attention it's been getting, it also is not the worst thing Clinton did as SoS by far. She backed the right wing coup in Honduras, and then told all the refugee children who fled the violence in its aftermath to go home. She overlooked unions in Columbia being disbanded at gunpoint, and the oil magnate who was doing the disbanding was a big donor to the Clinton Foundation. She also rewarded Arab dictators (who were also donors) with even bigger weapon deals then they usually get. And even though Republicans fixate on Benghazi to an unhealthy degree, she was the main member of the Obama administration pushing for intervention in Libya, and that's turned into a massive shit show.

     

    And on domestic politics, she's been flip flopping wildly lately in order to try and stem Sanders's rise. But even though she's come around to opposing the TPP (even though she easily could have killed it if she'd opposed fast track), she still won't come out in favor of some basic progressive goals. Take Wall Street. She just released a plan that aims to "nudge" (ugh) big banks to voluntarily decrease in size. But she says she won't bring back Glass Steagle, which separates commercial banks (like your savings account) from investment banks. And she won't commit to forcibly breaking up too big to fail banks. In a very anti-Wall Street primary, those are going to hurt her.

  14. Posted

    There is so much of the Toy Marker scene that needs to be explored.

     

    Why is the Toy Maker still at large? The police know he makes these weapons and know exactly where to find him. Why is he not in jail? How many people and/or dinosaurs have been killed by this man's exploding insects? Those deaths could have been prevented with the Toy Makers capture.

     

     

    Clearly, the future police are much more respectful of our God Given Second Amendment Rights then the police of our time.

    • Like 2

  15. Posted

     

    Yeah it was terribly written, but it was not a "free form what he was thinking" essay like the lady in the audience was suggesting. Here is him discussing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AblFtHxIP8

     

    He's also a terrible singer

     

    Personally, he's such a good statesman that I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I would recommend watching the full speech he gave during his presidential announcement:

     

     

    Matt, can you please bring this up on your next podcast? Besides Elizabeth Warren (and she's not running for president), no one beats Senator Sanders on his honesty and his progressive policies.

     

    Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation being spread about it. I've heard the "he was in college when he wrote it" thing before, which isn't true either.

     

    If Sanders was 20 in 1973 then he must have been attacked by that Star Trek salt-eating monster to explain what he looks like in 2015.

    • Like 3

  18. Posted

    International Business Times just broke another story about Clinton's corruption while she was Secretary of State, this time involving Cisco Systems and China:

     

    Cisco Systems had a public relations problem: Having invested $16 billion in the Chinese market, the technology giant was suddenly facing congressional scrutiny over its alleged complicity in building the so-called Great Firewall that helps China's authoritarian regime censor information and surveil its citizens.

     

    The San Jose, California, company endured a high-profile Senate hearing about its Chinese operations in 2008 and reaffirmed its “continued commitment to China.” But the issue wouldn’t die. A group of investors stormed the company’s annual meeting in November 2009, pressing a shareholder resolution that would force the company to prevent the Chinese government from using Cisco technology to engage in what critics said was widespread human-rights abuse.

     

    That’s when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tossed the company a lifeline. Weeks after Cisco executives opposed the initiative and it was then voted down by shareholders, Cisco was honored as a finalist for the State Department’s award for “outstanding corporate citizenship, innovation and democratic principles.” The next year, the company

    the award. While the honors were for the company’s work in the Middle East, they gave Cisco a well-timed opportunity to change the subject and present itself as a champion of human rights.

     

    What Clinton did not say at the State Department award ceremonies was that Cisco had been pumping money into her family’s foundation. Though the foundation will not release an exact timeline of the contributions, records reviewed by International Business Times show that Cisco had by December 2008 donated from $500,000 to $1 million to the foundation. The company had hired lobbying firms run by former Clinton aides. After the money flowed into the foundation, Clinton’s State Department not only lauded Cisco’s human rights record, it also delivered millions of dollars worth of new government contracts to the company.

     

    I think this final quote perfectly encapsulates everything that I think is wrong with the Clintons:

     

    Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Cisco has continued. In August, she appeared at the company for a surprise visit. Chambers interviewed her onstage, telling employees: “I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park."

  20. Posted

    I don't know a ton about Whitewater specifically, but Hillary had huge conflicts of interest while she was Secretary of State. In 2011, there was an oil strike in Columbia that the government put down with the military:

     

    Yet as union leaders and human rights activists conveyed these harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence, these organizers say. The State Department publicly praised Colombia’s progress on human rights, thereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers.

     

    At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire.

     

    It'd be really nice if we could see her State Department e-mails from the period, wouldn't it?

     

    I think your admiration of Clinton is misplaced, Matt. She's a Reaganite through and through. Sadly, I think her victory is nearly inevitable at this point. The only Republican I think might be able to beat her is Scott Walker, which just scares me more.

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