Random Politics & Religion #00

I'm surprised that they expected the governor to answer such a loaded question coming from a 7 year old in a way that is beyond the 7 year old's comprehension.

I would think it's pretty simple. Answer honestly right?

In any case they're trying to put a ridiculous spin on it so yeah.

Now I don't know what to believe so I'll just drink instead.

Ok, I'll remember to not dumb down my next response to your question and expect you to understand it fully and completely.

The Aaron Schock thing is a real issue and an ethics investigation has been going on for awhile now as well as new allegations popping up.

The governor walker thing is just silly.

I've talked to 7 yr olds in my day and they can tell the difference between butter and I can't believe it's not butter !

Declaring their staunch opposition to “corporate ***-wipes”, local punkhouse The Stargate has banned all toilet paper and will now be using a communal towel instead. Stargate representative Taksy Kab said the new situation regarding their one-and-a-half bathrooms was rooted in a concern for the environment.

“We’re all just real sick of all the waste we see becoming even more waste. I mean, have you seen those pictures of the birds? The ones covered in ***? That is seriously ***, man,” Taksy Kab said, adding that he would never again use one of “the Man’s paper slave-napkins”.

“From now on, we’ll be doing it ourselves with a hand towel Bent shoplifted from the dollar store down the street. They’re *** to us, so whatever,” Taksy Kab explained.

The Hard Times tracked down Bent for further clarification on the hygienic aspects of the new arrangement. “There are actually three towels. They came in a pack, so we have a rotation going – and there’s a rinse bucket next to the busted shower. Dip the towel in the bucket, ring it out, hang it back up. Hygiene is of the utmost importance. We’re not animals.”

When asked about how things would work for their scene-staple weekly shows, Bent told us, “We’ll be hiding the towels in Jonni’s room. Unless people bring their own towel, they’re gonna be ***out of luck. One thing is for sure, we won’t let anybody through these doors carrying toilet paper and if they have wet wipes, they are banned for life.”

Taksy Kab explained the origins of the new house policy. “It actually came about because, one day, Liam K — not Liam from New Hampshire who lived here for awhile too, Liam the bassist of Neckropist — had explosive diarrhea and not only was there zero TP in the house, we had even run out of our emergency stash of old issues of HeartattaCk that we used in a pinch. So Liam grabbed Maxi’s make-up cloth off the hook and wiped his *** with it. That’s when we knew towels were the future.”

Anyone I've ever talked to in either education or politics has told me the biggest hurdle to getting anything done is policies and paperwork that seems to get in the way rather than help.

I believe procedures and policy are tools, not an answer.

I believe that you can't fix bad people with good policies and paperwork, and that it's a Goldilox issue of having it just right because if you have too much it gets in the way and causes inefficiency and if you have too little people can get away with anything.

You need the right amount of accountability with people that make moralistic choices for the common good for government to be good because right now we fix a lack of moralistic common good choice by turning the dial to 11 on bureaucracy, procedure and paperwork and that results in a government that is ineffective.

U.S. House Republicans on Tuesday proposed higher defense spending and deep cuts to social services including healthcare for the poor in an aggressive new budget plan that seeks to eliminate deficits by 2024.

The blueprint from House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, which has almost no chance of becoming law, prescribes $5.468 trillion in spending cuts and interest savings over 10 years compared to current policies.

Like the budgets of Price's predecessor, Representative Paul Ryan, the document assumes $2 trillion in 10-year savings from full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the signature healthcare reform law that President Barack Obama has vowed to defend.

Price's plan also recycles Ryan's prescription for controversial changes to the Medicare health program for seniors, turning it into a system of subsidies for private insurance, affecting those born in 1959 or later.

The non-binding resolution reasserts the Republican Party's long-standing vision of a smaller federal government, less national debt, lower taxes and a stronger economy, all likely themes in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi plans to unveil his version of the Republican budget on Wednesday but it is expected to be more cautious, excluding the Ryan-style Medicare reforms in favor of savings similar to those proposed by Obama.

Price's plan could struggle to gain the support of deeply divided House Republicans. It seeks to skirt "sequester" spending caps, nominally keeping them in place to please deficit hawks while boosting military spending by adding nearly $40 billion to an off-budget war funding account.

Pro-military Republicans greeted the plan with skepticism. "I'm not convinced this budget does it," said Representative Ryan Zinke, a former Navy Seal commander.

The plan contrasts with Obama's 2016 budget request, which would raise taxes on the wealthy by about $1 trillion through 2025 to help pay for infrastructure and education spending while running annual deficits from $400 billion to $800 billion.

Democrats said the House Republican budget was full of "gimmicks" and would shred programs that aid the poor, the elderly and working families.

"It's not a budget that reflects the future. It's not a budget that reflects growth," Obama said at the White House, where he called for more investment in research and education.

Obama will travel to Cleveland on Wednesday where he is expected to give a speech drawing a sharp contrast between the Republican plan and his spending proposals.

Price's plan would cut $913 billion in Medicaid spending by shifting it to a grant program to allow states to tailor the healthcare program for the poor. It would devolve other programs to states through grants, including food stamps and transportation funding. Pell grants for college tuition would also shrink.

"The $5.5 trillion in decreased spending and the end to annual deficits will mean we can begin to pay down the national debt and stave off a severe and completely avoidable fiscal crisis in the future," Price's proposal says.

Like previous Republican budgets, Price's plan contains no tax increases. It assumes Congress will enact revenue-neutral reforms to the tax code to reduce rates while ending many tax breaks. But it leaves the details for later.

Price said tax reform and other proposals, including a roll-back of financial regulations enacted in 2010 [ID:nL2N0WJ0ZC], would unleash stronger economic growth that will help slash deficits by more than $1 trillion through 2025.

While these growth assumptions are baked into Price's budget numbers, they have not been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office.

A U.S. Air Force veteran has been charged with trying to provide support for the Islamic State militant group, U.S. prosecutors said on Tuesday.

A federal grand jury in New York City indicted Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh for attempting to provide material support to the group and attempted obstruction of justice.

Pugh, 47, of Neptune, N.J., is to be arraigned Wednesday morning in federal court in Brooklyn. Michael Schneider, a court-appointed lawyer for Pugh, said his client would plead not guilty.

Prosecutors allege that Pugh, once an avionics instrument system specialist in the U.S. Air Force, attempted to join Islamic State in January by traveling from Egypt to Turkey and trying to cross the border into Syria.

Turkish authorities sent him back to Egypt, which detained him and subsequently deported him to the United States, prosecutors said. Upon his arrival in Egypt, Pugh was carrying several electronic devices, including a mobile phone that had a photograph of a machine gun, authorities said.

In the United States, federal agents searched his laptop computer and other devices and found recent Internet searches for "borders controlled by Islamic State" and a propaganda video by the group.

Although Pugh was arrested in January, the case had been sealed until Tuesday.

Prosecutors said that in the weeks prior to traveling to Egypt, Pugh had been fired from his job as an airplane mechanic for an unidentified company in the Middle East and had lived abroad for a year.

Pugh appeared to have been on U.S. authorities’ radar for some time.

A criminal complaint filed at the time of his arrest said that while he was working as a mechanic for American Airlines, a co-worker tipped the FBI that Pugh "sympathized with Osama bin Laden, felt that the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies were justified and expressed anti-American sentiment."

In 2002, an associate told the FBI that Pugh expressed interest in going to Chechnya to fight, the complaint said.

Despite that background, from October 2009 to March 2010, Pugh worked on aircraft avionics as an Army contractor for DynCorp International in Iraq, prosecutors said. A company spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

The complaint said from 1986 to 1990, Pugh served in the U.S. Air Force. He converted to Islam after moving to San Antonio, Texas, in 1998 and “became increasingly radical in his beliefs,” it said.

"It's not a budget that reflects the future. It's not a budget that reflects growth," Obama said at the White House, where he called for more investment in research and education.

I highly doubt he even read it.

Gotta pass it to read it.

There are people who would called it treasonous to vote for a candidate they didn't like, but for some reason showing an ID to vote would be too much. Makes sense.

How could they prove I voted for said candidate if there is no official record of who I voted for?

Lol Milamber you're not going to get me to define good and bad to you, what I wrote is an opinion. Take it as such. If you really have to have something to latch onto here, good would mean better more efficient government, which would be good. And bad would be less efficient less capable government which would be bad.

I mean either morality or ethics because the way I used it, they're synonyms. Don't believe me?
Scale can contribute to paperwork and such but it doesn't have to.

The statement was to point out that policies are used as solutions to the problem of moralistic behavior when it is only a tool.

General statements are vague yes that's what makes them general.

I just feel you're trying to pick apart my opinion and if you want to fine, but if you're going to do that at least make your own arguments hold up to the same scrutiny that you're putting mine to, I feel you're trying to manufacture an issue here because yes good and bad are subjective. Morality (and ethics) are subjective. And I told you from the start that was an opinion. So I don't know what the issue is but if you disagree fine. I just don't wanna manufacture arguments life has enough of them.

Hundreds of anti-austerity protesters clashed with police and set fire to at least seven squad cars in the German city of Frankfurt early Wednesday, officials told NBC News. The skirmishes broke out during demonstrations organized by the pan-European anti-austerity Blockupy movement protesting the inauguration ceremony of the new offices of the European Central Bank.

Eight officers were injured in the clashes, with 80 officers more receiving medical treatment for exposure to an unidentified "irritant," police told NBC News.

"The atmosphere is highly aggressive," police spokeswoman Tessa Koscheg said, adding that there were "several hundreds" of protesters.

Frankfurt Police posted pictures to its Twitter account of an armored vehicle and a water cannon being used in the streets. Barriers and barbed wire cordoned off the new ECB headquarters.

Some protesters spilled over into the city center and police said they were engaging with several smaller groups of demonstrators along the city's river Main and one of its shopping districts. "We are recommending to the public to avoid the city center at the moment," Koscheg said.

The ECB, whose new Frankfurt headquarters were due to open Wednesday, has been involved in implementing budget cuts in Europe's financially troubled countries, such as Spain and Greece.

Iraqi troops and militia looted and burned homes and destroyed villages after breaking the Islamic State group's months-long siege of a Turkmen town last August, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday.

"Following the operations to end the Amerli siege, pro-government militias and volunteer fighters as well as Iraqi security forces raided Sunni villages and neighbourhoods around Amerli in Salaheddin and Kirkuk provinces," the New York-based group said in a report.

"During the raids, militiamen, volunteer fighters and Iraqi security forces looted possessions of civilians who fled fighting during the onslaught on Amerli, burned homes and businesses of the villages' Sunni residents," HRW said.

They also "used explosives and heavy equipment to destroy individual buildings or entire villages," it added.

HRW said that many of the villages targeted in the raids were ones that IS jihadists had either passed through or used as bases to attack Amerli.

"Iraq can't win the fight against (IS) atrocities with attacks on civilians that violate the laws of war and fly in the face of human decency," its deputy Middle East and North Africa director, Joe Stork, said.

"Militia abuses are wreaking havoc among some of Iraq’s most vulnerable people and exacerbating sectarian hostilities."

IS spearheaded an offensive last June that overran large areas north and west of Baghdad, sweeping security forces aside.

Reeling from the assault, Baghdad turned to Popular Mobilisation units -- paramilitary forces that are dominated by pre-existing Shiite militias.

The units have played a key role in the fight to drive IS back, but relying on such groups further entrenches them in Iraq, giving them an expanded power base that will be difficult to dislodge.

I signed Pleebo up.

There is no way that pathetic budget proposal is going to be accepted by the Senate GOP, I doubt it even makes it out of the House.