New Testingstan

Oxymoron wrote:zing


Unrelated:

something I said regarding the US and the Sequestration wrote:By the way, given how this hurt the US interests, economic, social, and also military (these armies aren't going to finance themselves),

wouldn't it be legitimate to charge the Republican and other filibusters with Treason for continually delaying the budget and forcing a sequestration ?

(semi-troll, but yeah...)

Thoughts ?

Haha yes
but seriously no, parliamentary privilege (or whatever the US version is called) is there for the same reason that lawyers can't be punished for defending the 'obviously guilty'; preserving democracy trumps most other considerations (unless you're talking about full-on stuff). The correct response would be to vote them out of office, but of course in the US you run into the problem of lacking a strong, independent, state-owned, balanced-by-law broadcaster, so the partisan news (on both sides; having watched a selection of American news broadcasts I'm comfortable in saying that they're all worthless) muddies all the issues.

That said yeah, the Republicans seem pretty insane. I hear the Statue of Liberty has been shut down which seems symbolic somehow.

lol. The Health Insurance Marketplace already has glitches. I;m trying to create security questions and there aren't any to choose from!

There's also the issue of gerrymandering leading to the majority of votes being cast to Democratic candidates in 2012 but Republicans getting a significantly higher number of seats.

Ok, guys. Looks like we need to do the regime change thing to the Americans, now. Guys?

...Guys?

you'll notice that they kept military pay going while the rest shut down

the regime fears a coup

lol I just imagined what a Canadian invasion would be like

they'd be constantly apologizing for getting in our way and offering us donuts

.....speaking of which rumor has it a tim hortons is coming to watertown

adr wrote:lol I just imagined what a Canadian invasion would be like

they'd be constantly apologizing for getting in our way and offering us donuts

Before burning down the White House. Again. While apologizing for it.

@ Soup : the President of the United States can be impeached by the Parliament if the procedure gets enough votes, or even IIRC brought down if he's found guilty of High Treason. I don't see why the President couldn't in turn do what the French President can and dissolve the Parliament, calling for new elections.

I mean, the President has that constitutional right, no ?

It would be a clear message sent to the Republicans : "No more Mr. Nice Guy"

Just checked : the President cannot dissolve congress. What the fuck ?

The US constitution is one big bag of crazy
their President & Senate appoints their Supreme Court judges, and they think to lecture the rest of the world on 'checks and balances' and 'separation of powers'

..of course in my country our 'supreme court' was a part of the legislature until 2009, and I don't recall any mainstream US political party wanting to get rid of the Bill of Rights in the way that the tories want to get rid of the Human Rights Act so...

Oxymoron wrote:Just checked : the President cannot dissolve congress. What the fuck ?

The American system is purposefully dysfunctional (this is called "being a deliberative body") and was created by people who thought they could prevent political parties from forming. Also, they wanted to give the English the finger.

Edit: I don't know how many Americans and non-Americans have learned this, but this isn't over the budget, this is over an interim budget to fund the government for 6-8 weeks. The actual budget for 2014 is unlikely to pass until 2014 itself. Interim budgets have become a common measure as the US government self-destructs over the question of whether it should function or not. Meanwhile, in two weeks, we get the debt ceiling redux and a constitutional crisis if Boehner plays chicken again. Then in November the interim budget would have run out anyways, and meanwhile nobody in the federal government (apart from soldiers, USPS and Federal Reserve Employees, and Congress) is getting paid, and Congress will have to approve a bill to give them back pay, giving us a third fight to come.

So I was talking with my dad about politics the other day, and we both agreed that the Republican party has become too crazy and obstructive to be an effective force in government anymore. The best possible outcome of this shutdown and all the other shit that they pull would be for the republican party to self-destruct and become a political non-entity like other third parties, and for the democratic party to split into it's actual liberals and conservatives who are still sane enough to let the government function.

lol the new York state obamacare website is down due to overwhelming demand

Bakustra wrote:Interim budgets have become a common measure as the US government self-destructs over the question of whether it should function or not.

It's scary that such tupping stupid people are in charge of the world's largest economy.

The people in charge aren't the stupid ones, ok they're kind of stupid, but their main problem is that they're goddamn fanatics with no grasp of reality.


The people who elected them are the stupid ones. To take a group who's policy of government boils down to "I don't like government and wish it would go away," and put those people in government is complete stupidity. America's problems won't end until the "government never does everything right" constituency has either died off, or is reduced to a laughingstock. I honestly don't think you're going to see a real effort to fix American government for another generation.

The thing is

with that kind of shit, the people who argue that the Government can't do anything right gets more and more credibility.

It's in that kind of climate that the political extremes have room to grow.

umm the rich are still getting richer, right?

I think the initial "wrong" decision was made when the country chose to go with the people that was saying "Government is inefficient so let's minimize it and privatize as much as possible," instead of the people who were saying "government is inefficient, so lets fix it so that it runs better."

Every major modern problem with the American government comes down to the fact that you have people running it who either hate government or have to kowtow to those people because the idea of the government as worthless has become so prevalent in the public consciousness. The debt crisis would be solved by now if we actually had the ability to raise taxes to any significant extent in this country, but because people have been bombarded with the idea that their taxes are already too high for 20 years and were stupid enough to believe it, you can't talk about raising taxes at all. Period. People have been told for so long that the government is an inefficient piece of shit that takes their money and wastes it on 20,000$ toilet seats that they don't want a government anymore. No real progress is going to be made on America's issues until the public has been properly educated about what the government does for them and why it is necessary.

I think it's an easy and harmful assumption to run with the "this will be fixed when the old people die" argument for most stuff. It assumes a direct linear move towards progress that just happens as a direct function of time, and it seems to me to have no effect but to encourage complacency.

It's not so much that I think it's going to be "fixed" when the old people die off, as I think that it can't really start to be fixed until they do. The "Boomer" generation overwhelmingly supports the view of government as useless and obstructive, and they have a disproportionate amount of political power. Whether the next generation to assume political power will hold the same views, I can't really say. There are people in my social circle that believe that the government should be fixed, that Obamacare is a step in the right direction, and that we should have universal health care, but there are also people who think that taxes shouldn't exist, that the government is going to take their guns away, and that Obama is a Kenyan. If the next generation assumes political responsibility with the belief that government can be a force for good, things will change.

we prolly could outvote them tho

Democracy. The true Dictatorship of the Masses.*


*when the system isn't rigged

adr wrote:lol the new York state obamacare website is down due to overwhelming demand

It's a joke. I still can't choose security questions to proceed to see how I'll be scammed even further.

yeah i couldn't even get that far

i think right now i'll qualify for medicaid, my income has been way down this year and am current uninsured. but regardless i'd like to at least see what their website offers


a technical annoyance btw: healthcare.gov has a gratuitous javascript requirement. there's no good reason for it but they require it. stupid stupid stupid.


edit:
actually i just tried again and i already have a NYS.gov id i use to pay my quarterly income tax

but even so the login doesn't work. not even sure if this is the same anyway.

server still overloaded.

Should just pay Amazon or Google to implement core infrastructure and data for the exchanges.