US Politics

Nick 0208 Ldn

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This does exist, right? ;) I've gathered a range of stories to start things off:






Arkansas Weighs Whether To Remove The Clinton Name From Little Rock's Airport

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/51784...ve-the-clinton-name-from-little-rocks-airport


Billboard About Gender Roles Sparks Debate, Protest In North Carolina

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/28/51772...roles-sparks-debate-protest-in-north-carolina


8/10 wildfires attributed to human causes

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...-leading-cause-of-wildfires-in-the-u-s-humans



I trust this is acceptable with you mods? Only the Trump Presidency thread has become so all-encompassing, and we're talking about nation state comparable to the whole of Europe.
 
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Ubik

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Good thread idea, Nick!
 

Raoul

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This does exist, right? ;) I've gathered a range of stories to start things off:






Arkansas Weighs Whether To Remove The Clinton Name From Little Rock's Airport

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/51784...ve-the-clinton-name-from-little-rocks-airport


Billboard About Gender Roles Sparks Debate, Protest In North Carolina

http://www.npr.org/2017/02/28/51772...roles-sparks-debate-protest-in-north-carolina


8/10 wildfires attributed to human causes

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...-leading-cause-of-wildfires-in-the-u-s-humans



I trust this is acceptable with you mods? Only the Trump Presidency thread has become so all-encompassing, and we're talking about nation state comparable to the whole of Europe.
Are you actually going to participate in the discussions of the things you post ? :)
 

Nick 0208 Ldn

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Are you actually going to participate in the discussions of the things you post ? :)
Once i've had time to read them all in full, very probably. However...if i know of posters with either local or expert knowledge, i would rather listen to them first before running my mouth on a topic.
 

Nick 0208 Ldn

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I don't know if we have any Arkansas natives on the forum, however Rep. Jason Rapert seems to be so far right that Farage be akin to a cuddly liberal.

A controversial figure himself, Rapert has most recently attempted to revive the abolition of same-sex marriage, criminalize abortion and install a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol. He is on the far right in a state that has become increasingly dominated by Republicans in the past decade.

On occasion, British politicians can be prone to adopting a somewhat condescending attitude toward our American cousins, yet the positon of various states is some ways of the UK.


I've been present at a few places where the wildfires were occurring not too many miles away, although mostly while on holiday.What is the position of the Californians among you (to name but one state) , as regards prescribed fires?
 

sincher

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There's a clue to how much of a c*** he is in his name, surely.
 

berbatrick

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For a mile outside Canton Multipurpose Complex on Saturday, the road was backed up. Many cars sported bumper stickers, pro-Bernie and pro-union.
They came in school buses, hot rods, church vans and motorcycles, with license plates from Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Illinois and Pennsylvania. A delegation of a dozen Nissan workers even came from Brazil, to support United Automobile Workers (UAW) activists who have faced illegal retaliation in a 13-year struggle to unionize the Japanese giant’s 5,000 workers in Mississippi.

“I feel their pain because we have been through the same thing with Mercedes,” said Kirk Garner of Vance of Alabama, who has been part of the decade-long UAW effort to unionize there.

Two weeks after the defeat of the Machinists Union at Boeing in South Carolina, an estimated 5,000 southern union activists gathered in Canton to lay the foundation of what they hope will be the large-scale community movements necessary to defeat anti-union forces nationwide – and in the White House.
...
As they marched on the plant on an unusually warm March day, workers sang: “We are ready, We are ready, We are ready, Nissan.”

They have organized a community coalition, the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan, that includes #BlackLivesMatter activists, church groups, the Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The coalition is calling for a mobilization not seen in the south since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

More than 80% of Nissan’s workers in Canton are black. A win at Nissan could be a game-changer. On Saturday, they had a guest speaker.

“If we can win here at Nissan, you will give a tremendous bolt of confidence to working people all over this country” Bernie Sanders told a crowd of 5,000. “If you can stand up to a powerful multinational corporation in Canton, Mississippi, workers all over this country will say, ‘We can do it too.’”
<3

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/05/union-rally-mississippi-nissan-bernie-sanders
 

JustAFan

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Surprising and at the same time not. Obviously would love to see education be the big winner here, and who knows over all better education might lead to lower incarceration rates. But when you consider that prisoners are under 24/7 "care" no holidays, no summers off, they don't go home to the family at the end of the school day, have to be fed 3 meals a day as opposed to one or two, it becomes easy to see why the cost is higher. Now some of those figures really are crazy. For me it talks more to seeking ways to lower the incarceration rate rather than going into cost cutting mode (though there are probably costs that could be cut, especially if the costs are high due to top heavy administrative staffs).
 

berbatrick

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Surprising and at the same time not. Obviously would love to see education be the big winner here, and who knows over all better education might lead to lower incarceration rates. But when you consider that prisoners are under 24/7 "care" no holidays, no summers off, they don't go home to the family at the end of the school day, have to be fed 3 meals a day as opposed to one or two, it becomes easy to see why the cost is higher. Now some of those figures really are crazy. For me it talks more to seeking ways to lower the incarceration rate rather than going into cost cutting mode (though there are probably costs that could be cut, especially if the costs are high due to top heavy administrative staffs).
Perhaps, and what is worse is that this is per : then you add in the insane incarceration rates and that will be a scary amount.
 

MTF

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Surprising and at the same time not. Obviously would love to see education be the big winner here, and who knows over all better education might lead to lower incarceration rates. But when you consider that prisoners are under 24/7 "care" no holidays, no summers off, they don't go home to the family at the end of the school day, have to be fed 3 meals a day as opposed to one or two, it becomes easy to see why the cost is higher. Now some of those figures really are crazy. For me it talks more to seeking ways to lower the incarceration rate rather than going into cost cutting mode (though there are probably costs that could be cut, especially if the costs are high due to top heavy administrative staffs).
The state to state variance is possibly the most interesting aspect to come out of it for me. As a general rule it does follow that both tend to be more expensive in the wealthier states (NY), but definitely some systems come out as more and less cost efficient if you look closely.

Other than that, agree with your point. To believe that education should inherently cost more than incarceration is a result of not thinking through the burdens that each activity entails.
 

berbatrick

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The Trump administration and Senate Republicans rolled back labor protection laws on Monday in a pair of moves that labor advocates predict will chill complaints by vulnerable workers, especially in the low-wage food processing industry, which relies heavily on easily exploited undocumented laborers.
...
The poultry industry will also likely benefit from continued exploitation of undocumented workers and recent refugees, noted by Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and many others, while undocumented workers themselves continue to live in fear of edicts like Trump’s executive order, she said. “Workers are already scared to talk to Osha; they definitely won’t talk to Osha now,” said Berkowitz, who worked as chief of staff and later senior policy analyst with Osha from 2009 to 2015.

There are reasons for that high level of mistrust: under George W Bush, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents impersonated Osha inspectors in order to gain access to facilities where undocumented immigrants were employed.

The specter of a 2008 raid on a Postville, Iowa poultry processors looms large over any worker afraid of being separated from family and community over immigration status. Workers at the Postville AgriProcessors chicken processing facility asked Ice to forego any planned enforcement actions while they unionized. Instead, Ice arrested 600 people and tried 300 of them in four days in an ad hoc courtroom set up at a local fairground, where they were sentenced five at a time.
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...otection-laws-repeal-poultry-industry-workers
 

Carolina Red

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Public Clinics Fear Federal Cuts To Planned Parenthood Would Strand Patients

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-...s-to-planned-parenthood-would-strand-patients



There is an illuminating (albeit odd) contribution from a pro-life representative on the corresponding audio report: by the way he was talking, Planned Parenthood walk around canvassing for women to have abortions, as if it is something they aspire to.
Republican propaganda against PP is quite rediculous. You wouldn't believe how many people believe that PP is an abortion clinic ONLY.
 

Ubik

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Not the ideal thread for this, but


Easy as that!
 

Adisa

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Everyone has a condo waiting, as a wedding gift. What's the big deal?
 

Organic Potatoes

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I don't know if we have any Arkansas natives on the forum, however Rep. Jason Rapert seems to be so far right that Farage be akin to a cuddly liberal.




On occasion, British politicians can be prone to adopting a somewhat condescending attitude toward our American cousins, yet the positon of various states is some ways of the UK.
Fairly standard views about same-sex marriage, abortion, and the Ten Commandments in this part of the country. Allowing the 10 commandments to decorate local court lawns is a common flashpoint.
 

JustAFan

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Not the ideal thread for this, but


Easy as that!


Here is the entire story. While at one point she gave up her car it seems that through it all she and her bf/husband were also able to buy some other properties and rent those out for extra income. This really does not come across as the type of thing the average person could do. I would love to know if her parents or grandparents helped with the financing of the other rental properties.
 

berbatrick

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chargemaster prices.
Yup, but AFAIK if something isn't covered, that means you as an individual have to negotiate with the hospital (as opposed to an insurance company representing many clients with many procedures). Which means pay up or declare bankruptcy, right?
 

Carolina Red

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Yup, but AFAIK if something isn't covered, that means you as an individual have to negotiate with the hospital (as opposed to an insurance company representing many clients with many procedures). Which means pay up or declare bankruptcy, right?
Yes. I've had insurance pay their portion, and the amount left over was still so much that I had to negotiate a payment plan with the hospital because there was no way I could pay it all at once.
 

PedroMendez

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Yup, but AFAIK if something isn't covered, that means you as an individual have to negotiate with the hospital (as opposed to an insurance company representing many clients with many procedures). Which means pay up or declare bankruptcy, right?
I don't really know how it works in practice. Imo know, it is just a price they slap on it to start the negotiation. It is not a price on the margin so it doesn’t reflect the costs to provide the service. I don’t really know enough about hospital administration to understand how they come up with it. I saw a couple of those figures and they seem to be incredible random.
In my opinion that is a great example of what happens to prices, if you don’t have markets. At least not one that is responsive to individual consumers (maybe this prices have some meaning for insurance companies, but I doubt it) and you are pretty much screwed without further information.
 

JustAFan

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Yes. I've had insurance pay their portion, and the amount left over was still so much that I had to negotiate a payment plan with the hospital because there was no way I could pay it all at once.

Same here, was not too bad, but still had to pay it off over time took about 6 months. Would have been worse had we not hit our max out of pocket part way through her hospitalization.
 

berbatrick

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Zack Beauchamp has a piece at Vox about how diversity is bad for economic justice. Normally I would ignore a piece like this, but it is part of a broader trend I’ve spotted within the liberal thinksphere after Trump that is worth discussing
...
The argument, offered by this text and some nice graphics in the piece, is that diversity leads to racism, which leads to lower support for the welfare state, and thus creates widespread economic immiseration at the bottom of society. Beauchamp does not explain why exactly he thinks this is, but other liberal commentators, such as Ned Resnikoff, have attributed it to the “ancient, tribal section of the human brain.”

What follows from this particular argument is pretty clear: you can have diversity or you can have economic justice, but you can’t have both.
...
Not keeping diversity down and different groups separated from one another, conservatives maintain, will destabilize society, turn politics into a dangerous racialized contest for political power, and immiserate people in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

And it’s not just white conservatives who say this either. Right-wing black nationalist/separatist movements also hold these views. This shared political vision is how the iconic photo above of the American Nazi Party at a Nation of Islam gathering came about.

More and more, it seems like liberals in The Discourse agree with this basic conservative assessment of how diversity affects society. But, despite that underlying agreement, they somewhat bizarrely resist the conservative conclusion. Despite telling you that they think increasing diversity will result in children going hungry, as well as the mass incarceration and widespread discrimination of minority groups, they nonetheless support it.

If liberals are going to adopt the conservative view on how diversity operates in society, then they really do need to also work out what they think the implication of it is. Conservatives are very clear: diversity has all these problems and so it should be restricted. But the liberal view  —  that diversity has all these problems and yet it should be expanded without restraint  —  is just incoherent on its face.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/...acy-donald-trump-bernie-sanders-bill-clinton/
 

Ubik

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This is so shameful on both sides:
"The leadership really does not want the bill to move," says Representative Chuck McGrady, R-Henderson, a bill sponsor. "I think it'll only occur when Republicans aren't sure that they're going to be in charge and Democrats aren't sure that they're going to be in charge."
Also :eek:
Tyler Daye, a student at UNC-Greensboro, grew up in the old House District 12, which snakes tightly along I-85, corralling as many African Americans as possible. "It's a famous district—it's taught in schools as an example of gerrymandering! The [legislature] at the state level and at the federal level does not represent the people," Daye told the INDY. Indeed, in last year's election, Republicans won 53 percent of the total vote for U.S. representatives but secured ten of thirteen seats.

The same pattern holds true in the state legislature. In November, Republicans won 52 percent of the cumulative vote for state representatives but won a veto-proof supermajority of 74 out of 120 seats. Fifty-seven representatives ran unopposed. In the state senate, 56 percent of the vote granted Republicans thirty-five of fifty seats. To Daye, "something is fundamentally wrong with that."
I'm hoping they didn't get the court packing measure through after Cooper got in? Or are fights still ongoing?
 

matherto

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American health care is basically anything but. Neither healthy nor caring.

Literally putting a number on the worth of people's lives scares the hell out of me, it's sociopathic.
 

JustAFan

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Gerrymandering is a very old problem and needs to be sorted. Even that one ridiculous district in NC has had both republucan and democrat hands in its odd design since the beginning. Some districts have been tried to be designed to give more representation to minorities others to of course decrease it.

But even when fixed there will always be chances that the results will yield representation not in accordance with the percentages. It is important to realize the reps are from each district not from a state wide vote. US Senators of course are voted at the state level.

Better designed districts would close the gap in most cases though.
 
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berbatrick

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Gerrymandering is a very old problem and needs to be sorted. Even that one ridiculous district in NC has had both republucan and democrat hands in its odd design since the beginning. Some districts have been tried to be designed to give more representation to minorities others to of course decrease it.

But even when fixed there will always be chances that the results will yield representation not in accordance with the percentages. It is important to realize the reps are from each district not from a state wide vote. US Senators of course are voted at the state level.

Better designed districts would close the gap in most cases though.
One of my favourite quotes
Justice Warren: "To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen. The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause."
 

JustAFan

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Nice quote but the reality is we have a system like many others in the world where our representatives are decided by district. That in and of itself is not s violation of the equal protection clause. It works quite well for the most part. Though things like gerrymandering need to be fixed.