201–210 of 598 posts
I'm happy this reversal occurred, but I am exhausted by the continuous flip-flopping of legislation depending on which party is in charge. Feels like we're stagnating as a nation by going in a circle rather than finding commonality to go forward. Maybe it's always been this way though and I'm just getting old enough to be bothered by it?
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> ... I am exhausted by the continuous flip-flopping of legislation depending on which party is in charge. By design, Congress is unable to do anything. It's either one party (always the same party) being completely obstructionist, even other presidential appointments, or if a rotating villain who defects and stops any meaningful legislation. Power has moved to the courts and to the states. Again, entirely by design.…
> The real question here is why did this take 3 years into Biden's regime for the FCC to act? The FCC is an appointed position. This could've been done in 2021. FCC commissioners must be approved by the Senate. Biden nominated Gigi Sohn in 2021. Republicans blocked her. Biden nominated Sohn again. I don't think he said why. But other Democrats believed Republicans would block anyone who would restore net neutrality.…
Democrats controlled the Senate in 2021. Republicans didn't block the nomination. Democrats allowed the Republicans to block the nomination. The process by which that block happened could easily have been eliminated by a Senate rules change. There were attempts to do this on other issues (eg voting rights) but the rotating villains of the Democratic Party at the time (ie Sinema, Manchin) blocked it.
Joe Liebermann was previously the rotating villain. He is singlehandedly the only reason why 55 year olds can't buy into Medicare to get health insurance coverage.
This flip-flopping happens because there is no commonality to find. One of the only (effectively) two major political parties of the United States is completely uninterested in governing. They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. Their only goal is the piecemeal selloff of government powers to the highest bidder, and they convince their stalwart followers of this by making sure…
> They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. This is an unfair analysis, and is either naive at best or disingenuous at worst. I'm not a registered Republican, but I AM strongly against an all-powerful centralized body of government that continues to expand exponentially. I would rather focus powers in a more decentralized direction closer to the individuals and the States themse…
As an example, the cost of natgas on the east coast after California's rules limiting coal for power generation. People in nearby states with different COL pick up part of the tab.
This flip-flopping happens because there is no commonality to find. One of the only (effectively) two major political parties of the United States is completely uninterested in governing. They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. Their only goal is the piecemeal selloff of government powers to the highest bidder, and they convince their stalwart followers of this by making sure…
1. Since the opposition seeks progress in many forms, blindly obstruct them in all cases.
2. Legislate the country back to 1953. When that is accomplished, legislate the country back to 1853.
The only part I'm unsure about is whether they're interested in renaming the nation "Gilead."
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Unfortunately, if you have a contentious issue which is decided by fiat of one of the sides being in power and not by mutual compromise, there's no reason for the other side, coming in power, to not change it back. Since, fortunately, we still have a functioning democracy in the US, the sides in power change. Since, unfortunately, there seems to be not enough will to reach a workable compromise satisfactory to both s…
> Unfortunately, if you have a contentious issue At it's core, it is a technical issue - primarily network management. Under NN framework, ISPs would adhere to minimal straightforward rules that would disallowed them from prioritizing, throttling, capping, purposefully degrading, etc wireline networks. For most of 2 decades, this is where NN lived. In apparent response to NN becoming reality, ISP funded representativ…
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Manmohan Singh was seen as exceptionally spineless (because he pretty much cowtowed to whatever the Gandhi family said). That’s not how Biden is perceived. At all. Biden has installed more justices than Obama and Trump combined. He has done it without the right freaking out about it. He has been incredibly effective if you delve past the surface.
In right wing circles Biden is often perceived as a puppet for 'elites', too old and senile to make his own decisions. Every other tweet about him seems to get people joking about how he had to go to bed early or how they had to drag him out to make a speech. I was a bit young to carefully follow Manmohan's term, but I recall that one of the comments I often heard from adults were that he was clearly too old for offi…
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> [1] I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.
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All of the new "rules" being proposed by executive agencies will be subject to court challenge, and some of them (like the FTC's non-compete "rule") will likely be subject to a preliminary injunction. The goal is to get people to think "Yeah! Taking action on non-competes is great! Darn politicized courts!", when in reality this is not something an executive agency should be doing without an act of congress, or it ma…
>This is much more democratic than attempting to craft law by executive fiat What exactly "more democratic" means is a bit unclear to me. Is an act of Congress more democratic than agency policy because more reps voted on it? Is it more democratic because the reps who voted on it were elected rather than appointed by people who were elected like over at those agencies? Or is a policy democratic based on its alignment…
The presidency is not an elected autocracy. The extent of his powers are strictly limited to those granted by a) the constitution, and b) acts of congress.
Attempts to circumvent these limitations through clever legal theories are undemocratic, doubly so when that circumvention bypasses duly elected state governments. No act of congress has ever explicitly banned non-compete agreements or authorized the FTC to do so, and the plethora of employment law at the state level strongly supports the notion that it wasn't even a federal matter to begin with.
Would you argue that it's more democratic or less democratic when powers previously belonging to states are subsumed by the executive in this way? What if the people of Texas believe non-compete agreements are important? Why not just federalize all laws and tell state legislatures to pound sand?
This flip-flopping happens because there is no commonality to find. One of the only (effectively) two major political parties of the United States is completely uninterested in governing. They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. Their only goal is the piecemeal selloff of government powers to the highest bidder, and they convince their stalwart followers of this by making sure…
> They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. This is an unfair analysis, and is either naive at best or disingenuous at worst. I'm not a registered Republican, but I AM strongly against an all-powerful centralized body of government that continues to expand exponentially. I would rather focus powers in a more decentralized direction closer to the individuals and the States themse…
I wish more people had this perspective.
The topic of packing the Supreme Court comes to mind. There are people who want Biden to do this, but if does it, what’s stopping the next Republican from doing it too… back and forth until the court is so big it can’t function. These easily won “victories” can just as easily work against a group as they can work for them. It’s very short-sighted.
The only reason the courts are getting involved as much as they are, is because Congress can’t get anything done. They make the law, the court interprets it. We need a functioning Congress to avoid the courts needing to give their best guess on what the law currently is for issues that aren’t well defined, or not defined at all. Packing the court as a solution is solving the wrong problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. This is an unfair analysis, and is either naive at best or disingenuous at worst. I'm not a registered Republican, but I AM strongly against an all-powerful centralized body of government that continues to expand exponentially. I would rather focus powers in a more decentralized direction closer to the individuals and the States themse…
> They have no policy. They have no plan for governing; they don't like governing. > This is an unfair analysis, and is either naive at best or disingenuous at worst. It's fair given that the party literally produced no platform ahead of the last presidential election.
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There are plenty of dysfunctional/autocratic/kleptocratic governments based on constitutions that are somewhat democratic in nature. The US is just a high profile example of government structure slowly sliding into one of these failed states (faster if Trump gets another term).
> (faster if Trump gets another term). I didn't keep track and don't have a good list, but a guess is that Trump did push through a lot of regulatory changes. If the media would publish a well documented list ...!! From all I've seen, I like Trump, but apparently a lot of people don't. I wonder where am I going wrong. Why do some people not like him? A guess is the now old collection of video clips from the MSM (main…
Are you being sarcastic? Did you miss the part where he waged an attempted coup against the US government to remain in power?
I mean... he was just found by a court to have committed rape. You don't see why people don't like him? Be for real.