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SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

washingtonmonthly.com

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Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#91

Post by dantheman »

jbooth wrote: post #83
dantheman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama originally objected to the NDAA because it limited his powers too much, not because of the indefinite detention clause. The Administration strongly objects to the military custody provision of section 1032, which would appear to mandate military custody for a certain class of terrorism suspects. This unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President's authority to defend the Nation f…

What? Break it down for me here, in what way is he arguing for more quote "powers"? The power to not indefinitely detain people? That's a really brutal one, favorite of dictators everywhere. I shudder at the thought of someday being not-detained. I mean, I really don't want to carry Obama's water on this one given that he did sign the bill, but you're just engaged in some sort of silly deliberate misinterpretation of…

My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that the military detention provision would stop the rendition program because "terrorists" would be in military custody instead of allowing the flexibility that they currently have:

"Specifically, the provision would limit the flexibility of our national security professionals to choose, based on the evidence and the facts and circumstances of each case, which tool for incapacitating dangerous terrorists best serves our national security interests. "

I think this entire law is bad, but I'd prefer a well defined bad law than one that allows lots of discretion.

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#92

Post by darasen »

Congress will simply throw SOPA in as an amendment to some completely unrelated bill that people will have a hard time saying no to such as such as funding for puppies. Then if somebody opposes they can say "what about the puppies!"

Certainly my example is silly yet unrelated amendments are made to bills all the time to push one agenda or another.

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#93

Post by camiller »

neilparikh wrote: post #90
stiletto wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been meaning to ask someone this: do you mean that your return (if you receive a return) would be an additional $20, or that you are taxed as though you made $20 less? Sorry if this is elementary or too off-topic.

I'm pretty sure that $20 is not taxed. So, you're taxed as through you made $20 less.

Correct, it is an "above the line" deduction from your gross income, not a "below the line" tax credit. The net effect is that if you are in the 25% marginal tax bracket it reduced your tax liability by $5.

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#94

Post by camiller »

ctdonath wrote: post #39

Caution is warranted: "shelved" bills all too often are left there untouched until circumstances warrant slipping them, or a palatable functional equivalent, through unnoticed. It's not dead, it's resting.

As they say ... "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" - Wendell Phillips

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#95

Post by camiller »

ctdonath wrote: post #39

Caution is warranted: "shelved" bills all too often are left there untouched until circumstances warrant slipping them, or a palatable functional equivalent, through unnoticed. It's not dead, it's resting.

As they say ... "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" - Wendell Phillips

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#96

Post by espeed »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #29

I would urge extreme caution about reading too much into this article. I (I'm a political junkie) saw Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) on TV yesterday. The message I got from his body language, nuance, and phrasing was something like "Obviously people who are elected from heavy technology areas are feeling a lot of heat. There's still a lot of support, though. Let's see if we can tweak this in such a way as to p…

This "sneak it into some other bill that is a 'must-pass'" is BS too. What efforts have been made to reform the bill system?

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#97

Post by derekp7 »

camiller wrote: post #93
neilparikh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that $20 is not taxed. So, you're taxed as through you made $20 less.

Correct, it is an "above the line" deduction from your gross income, not a "below the line" tax credit. The net effect is that if you are in the 25% marginal tax bracket it reduced your tax liability by $5.

But only if you have enough other deductions that you itemize your tax return. Basically everyone gets a standard deduction (i.e., 5,800 if you are single). You can either take that, or you can deduct a list of qualified expenses (for most people, this is mortgage income, property tax, and state tax). If that puts you over the standard deduction, then you deduct this amount instead. Then you can start adding on things like charitable contributions. Otherwise, if you don't have enough deductions, and you take the standard one, then you can't add anything else to it. (Some exceptions apply, consult your tax professional for advice, the above is personal commentary only and not intended to be legal tax advice).

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#98

Post by Kroem3r »

brandall10 wrote: post #63
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #29

I would urge extreme caution about reading too much into this article. I (I'm a political junkie) saw Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) on TV yesterday. The message I got from his body language, nuance, and phrasing was something like "Obviously people who are elected from heavy technology areas are feeling a lot of heat. There's still a lot of support, though. Let's see if we can tweak this in such a way as to p…

Someone on HN posted a link to "Century of the Self" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self Basic takeaway for me was dictatorships control by abject force, democracies keep things in check by pandering to irrationalism (ie. consumerism and mass media). My take on this whole matter is perhaps framing this as a desire to protect Hollywood is a bit of a ruse. Wikileaks, the Middle East uprisings, Occupy W…

I don't know why you'd apologize for putting this in a larger context; not doing that risks making the win Pyrrhic.

SOPA and PIPA aren't end-game plays, they're simply tactics in the ongoing culture war. Recent events, from Wikileaks to Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street, have put the spot-light on the internet crowd. Now, SOPA has flushed them out into the open.

If you win the battle, look to lose the backlash. Imagine how successful they'll be portraying the 'net crowd as disrespectful of property, lawless, elitist, anti-American and all that. This will become yet another one of these issues that shave off and mobilize some fraction of the electorate and get them to vote against their own best interests. Not only that, it will marginalize movements coming out of the internet; even if they just start that trend, this will all have been a huge success.

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#99

Post by danssig »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #61
mattwdelong wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scares me most is the fact that everyone knows this tactic. Write an absurd policy, debate it, offer an alternative and jam it down citizens throats. We know this, yet there is not much that can be done about it. Aside from the obvious, running for Senate and using your vote, what can be done to stop it? Someone with the right amount of money and enough motivation can pass just about anything, given enough time.…

If the president were to have the line-item veto, where he could approve of certain parts of a bill and veto others, we could hold him personally responsible whenever bills get loaded up like this. As it is, they can pass what they want and nobody is responsible. That's clearly not the way the system was designed to work. The entire purpose of representative democracies is that while representatives can freely vote a…

You're making the assumption that the president is against this legislation aren't you?

Re: SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

#100

Post by dhimes »

nitrogen wrote: post #87
dhimes wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write an absurd policy, debate it, offer an alternative and jam it down citizens throats I don't think that was their tactic. I believe they intended to get the bills passed pretty much the way they wrote them (with, of course, the canonical juggling that goes on in these things). "Screaming from the sideline" was, in fact, effective. I'm just not comfortable using it as a long-term strategy. We do need strong organi…

I don't think that was their tactic. Sure, they (Hollywood) would be happy if SOPA passed unaltered, but that's always the tactic: propose a door-in-the-face bill, shift the Overton window a bit, pass a foot-in-the-door law. It happens over and over. Example: Do you think they could have passed a 40 year copyright extension in the 1970s? Instead, they passed two ~20 year extensions, one in 1976, one in 1998. Example…

I suspect in many cases it's a "Plan B" rather than a first-shot strategy. It is, of course, hard to know for sure, but as a counter-example, look how they de-fanged the FDA for regulating nutritional supplements (this goes back to the '90s). The first thing the industry did was to get every sympathetic (or buyable) politician and talking head to start talking about how Americans were hurt by the stupid FDA, using the usual hyperbole and emotion-stirring anecdotes, so that people had the FDA, out of the blue, on the tip of their tongues and "knowing" it was bad. Newt Gingrich was a point-man for this effort. (Once it was passed people started dying from ephedra-based nutritional supplements.)

Then when the legislation was produced a support-base had already been formed. They expected a very public fight and prepared for it.

In this case they were very quiet. The first thing I heard at all in the normal media was on the radio driving to work this morning. The news guy on the Boston station mentioned Wikipedia's blackout tomorrow and mentioned SOPA as the reason. The who bit was about 3 sentences. As I said, I'm not privy to insider strategy, but it was definitely a different tack.

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