Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
![]()
Is being a woman good enough? You know, those terrifying creatures that never seem to get that Nice Guys are indeed entitled to sex?
Trump moves to open Atlantic coast to oil drilling for first time in more than 30 years
The White House is considering an executive order instructing the Interior Department to reverse President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of hundreds of millions of offshore acres from future drilling in December.
The executive order — which could come out in the next few weeks — represents President Trump’s latest attempt to promote domestic energy exploration by rolling back restrictions put in place by previous administrations, though it would take considerable time for Interior to carry out aspects of the proposed directive.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday, in an address to the annual meeting of the National Ocean Industries Association, confirmed that there was an executive order addressing offshore, “on the way … likely next week,” according to Nicolette Nye, a spokeswoman for the group.
However, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said that Zinke was alluding to the executive order Trump signed last week and that the department was “reviewing our offshore policies and regulations.”
Other oil industry officials, participants at the NOIA meeting, and a GOP lawmaker from an affected state said that they had not been briefed and that the order might not be issued any earlier than May. People familiar with the planned order spoke on the condition of anonymity because it has not been formally announced yet.
Zinke’s comments highlighted the extent to which Trump’s March 28 executive order is already reverberating throughout the federal government. That directive instructed the heads of all agencies to “review all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and any other similar agency actions (collectively, agency actions) that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources, with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources.”
Andrew Weissman, senior counsel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, said in an interview that industry officials, legal experts and others are just beginning to understand how the order could affect “almost every environmental regulation that affects energy in any way” as well as many non-environmental rules.
“It literally applies to everything the federal government does that affects energy development and use,” he said.
The Pacific coast has been closed to new oil and gas exploration since the disastrous oil spill off Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. There has been no drilling off the Atlantic coast since the early 1980s.
Early in his administration, Obama considered allowing seismic work in preparation for exploration off the southeastern coast, from Florida to Virginia. And he did not move to stop Royal Dutch Shell from drilling an exploratory well in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s Arctic coast; the well turned out to be a dry hole. But near the end of his presidency he closed off vast areas.
The Trump directive under consideration has two elements, according to people familiar with it. One part would instruct Interior to revise its current five-year leasing plan to schedule sales of some areas in both the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean, which are not included now. A second part would rescind the designation Obama made under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) in December to withdraw large portions of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic and a string of undersea canyons in the Atlantic stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia from leasing for an indefinite period.
Bloomberg first reported news of the directive on Thursday.
Environmental groups are sure to challenge both initiatives in court, and the effort to rescind the protections Obama put in place under OSCLA could prove difficult to defend because a president has not reversed such a move in the past. But presidents have wide latitude to revise the Interior Department’s five-year leasing plan, and have done so in the past, so it is unclear how any challenge to that element of the order would fare in court.
Jacqueline Savitz, Oceana’s senior vice president for the United States, said in an email that the administration would soon find there is widespread opposition to renewed drilling efforts.
“Expanding offshore drilling into new areas like the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans would put vibrant ocean ecosystems at risk and be bad for business, threatening thriving coastal economies and lucrative industries, including tourism, recreation and fishing,” Savitz said.
“Business leaders along the Atlantic coast have been vocal in their opposition to offshore drilling, and the decades-long push to drill in the Arctic has put its unique and diverse ecosystem at risk, cost tens of billions of dollars and created significant controversy without profitable results.”
It remains unclear whether opening up the remote Chukchi and Beaufort Seas for leasing would attract any bids. After Shell spent more than $7 billion to lease and drill an uneconomic well, other major oil companies have dropped plans to drill in the region.
From someone who would've voted for Tzeentch and Nyarlathotep over Trump and Pence and who I Ds quite left, I'm more than aware that: a) I'm not the only person in the country and have to drag everyone along on policy and b) as a consequence of that fact, I'm not going to wake up in an anarchist/social democratic utopia tomorrow. Tis a long game of finding out how supporting whom will make life a bit better and, maybe, help leave the world a better place than when I found it...
And last but foremost, always remembering that I can be wrong. And as a corollary, so can they. Hence, I'm not going to spend any time searching for the messiah. Good is good enough. Or, in recent times, the bar seems to be: not wishing for my violent death/exile from the country/servitude...
vast-ocean is Series Of Numbers ban evading. Torched.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm not defending her. I'm defending against the idea that a progressive can only like her because she supported Sanders. And I haven't heard any wide-spread progressive support for Tulsi after she started trying to play nice with Trump.
...I'm not surprised. I was just about to ask him whether he could whitesplain this away
.
New York (the state, that is) has reached a deal to provide free tuition for SUNY and CUNY students for families with incomes of up to $125,000
. The program begins with this fall's intake, although the cap for this batch is at $100,000.
![]()
*gestures at Political_Revolution, SandersForPresident and WayOfTheBern*
edited 8th Apr '17 11:37:15 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotl'll admit, I was somewhat suspicious of them - they had made very few edits, and both of them were recent.
Oh God! Natural light!Are you pointing me towards Reddit?
Alright well I'll start checking them out then.
@Mad Skillz: To be honest, the reasons that you gave are still not good enough to make me think why anyone who claim to be a progressive support her. As I've typed before, she isn't a good democrat, and she is in Hawaii. The fact that she also idolizes Assad just make the entire thing more idiotic.
Only an experienced editor who has a name possesses the ability to truly understand my work - What 90% of writers I'm in charge of said.The oil drilling thing reminds me of the fact that Exxon Mobil spent millions of dollars trying to get the rights and then making exploratory missions to the far arctic only to come to the conclusion that drilling up there was not going to be profitable because they couldn't get to whatever oil happened to be up there.
Gonna say that further attempts aren't going to be profitable any time soon, though the Atlantic coast is clearly a different story.
Standards are different for everyone. I just realize that she has things to her that democrats can get behind even if they don't meet my personal standards or are close to.
Continuing to play devil's advocate here, but from what I remember, she doesn't. Correct me if I'm wrong though. I remember her calling Assad a brutal dictator but there that were no moderate rebels to support in Syria.
And she is against regime-change which Obama agrees with (as do I) although maybe not for the same reasons.
Now her saying that even when presented she wouldn't acknowledge Assad used chemical attacks is just plain lunacy though.
If she's done more than that let me know.
edited 8th Apr '17 12:38:30 PM by MadSkillz
Because the bank bailouts of 2008 are still considered The Devil even though they're part of what kept the recession from turning into the Clutch Plague 2: Electric Boogaloo note . Or, if you prefer, because people don't know how banks work beyond the (sometimes fair) assertion that they exist as cash-grab machines and as disincentive for rich people to spend money.
edited 8th Apr '17 12:42:05 PM by math792d
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.A document purportedly featuring the American rationale for the strike has been released
. Its veracity is unconfirmed, so take things with a grain of salt.
Hillary supported the TPP and then switched on it mid-campaign. That's the difference. Hillary came off as a flip-flopper.
And I think Hillary implied that she would've proposed a softer TPP.
Does it need to have helped in 2008 for it to be a good policy?
No, it's not. It continues to today just in a different form. We just don't have actual "boots" on the ground. We're still bombing them though.
I mean ISIS, the refugee crisis, millions of Middle-Easterners dead, those are all the consequences that Congress voted for.
That's still a good position to have.
You really gonna attack a politician for going to Standing Rock?
You know Obama proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare at one point, right?
I said proposed not supported. I already knew she supported the GOP bill.
I'm demonstrating some progressive positions of Tulsi not giving you a full picture of her which is a lot more damning.
edited 8th Apr '17 12:57:01 PM by MadSkillz
[Washington Post] The media loved Trump’s show of military might. Are we really doing this again?
Short version: Trump's little firework show (seeing as it hasn't even made the base useless, that's what it was in the end) has captivated the hearts and minds of the media, again. Fucking hell, someone give him his phone already and some inane bullshit to tweet about.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVFuck, can we just get Trump a suit of power armor to use as a teddy bear for him to hug whenever he gets upset, so that he doesn't have to blow shit up instead?
Someone did tell me life was going to be this way.And I think Hillary implied that she would've proposed a softer TPP.
There's not much wrong with supporting the idea of the TPP or large parts of it. there's some genuinely bad stuff in the deal, but deciding that A. we should attack someone whose job was to promote it as Secretary of State and B. we should try to pull Clinton left and then attack her for moving left, as well as C. just make TPP a worthless buzzword because Bernie talked about it?
I haven't met many who're able to form a cogent opposition to why it's bad except in the abstract. It's not the One True Issue it's been made into and it's getting really annoying how something with a genuinely good framework of "Let's take China's trading partners and establish a way for why it's best to do business with us" is now the symbol of evil.
And you know what? Yes, I will attack Gabbard for going to Standing Rock for a worthless photo op. She didn't give the slightest hint of a damn about helping those people and didn't do anything to effect it in a substantive way at all.
Oh, there are reasons like the genuine IP protections which are awful
But there's a pretty bad section of argumentation on economic protectionism and the notion that US trade deals should be based around never losing a single job in the US with no considerations for any benefits. And I really do blame Sanders for this because he's made any intellectual discussion of the TPP impossible.
Does anyone know about "Shadowing Trump"? They call themselves a sort of "Justice League" of policy experts and former officials dedicated to deciphering Trump and calling out the false narratives and lies. Each person involved covers a "cabinet position" based on there area of expertise. It's pretty neat.
Mission statement: https://www.shadowingtrump.org
Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/shadowingtrump
edit: Also here's a guide to swing districts put together by the people at Swing Left.
https://swingleft.org/district-resources
_____________
Edit: And some good news, Oregon is considering passing a bill, that if passed, would require that any proposed fossil fuel projects to undergo an extensive environmental review process before it can even be considered for approval in their state. It would also make the Oregon department of energy the lead coordinator in the approval process, and require emission analysts to consider the project in terms of the Paris Agreement.
https://thinkprogress.org/oregon-climate-test-fossil-fuel-legislation-c72b7f31bcce
Edit: Come on, the organ department of energy would be the blower. Where else does the air come from.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o_oA3Mig7Gk
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OC2gReO90_c
edited 8th Apr '17 5:37:33 PM by megaeliz

Maybe not...but lying about her is. And that's what you are doing: lying. Inventing scenarios. Pulling unsupported claims out of midair. You are using the Breitbart bogeyman of "the Deep State" to posit a conspiracy aimed at helping Clinton and making Trump look bad.
And of course you can't claim you're not defending Trump when you are pushing the narrative that the Russia charges are Democratic inventions, and that the intelligence agencies are lying about it because...because...because "Deep State" and "Clinton favouritism" once again.
Don't want to be mistaken for an alt-right troll? Stop parroting their conspiracy theories. Don't want to be accused of defending Trump? Then stop defending him. It's really very simple.
You pulled some unfounded, made up horseshit out of the air and tried to push it as part of an argument. You do not get to hide behind "speculation" claims. You want to do that go to Info Wars or World Net Daily.
There were many, many articles on this during the election. I find it hard to believe that you missed them. Here are three
of
them
. You can search the rest yourself.
edited 8th Apr '17 11:23:35 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar