smackeddog wrote:

holfresh wrote:Trump will begin rolling back environmental gains from the Obama Administration today...They don't believe in science or care about the future of our children...

This what I don't get- I don't have any kids but I do have a niece. Why would anybody risk their kids or grandkids having to grow up in a ravaged world just because we couldn't be bothered to cut carbon emissions? Even if you're not convinced 100% by all the science, Why even take the risk?! Trump has kids and grandkids, why so little regard for them, why risk ruining their lives just to cut costs for businesses?

In other (Fake) news the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Killed by increase in water temperature (Alt fact). Dinosaurs couldn't have existed more than 6000 yeasts ago because that's when God created the earth (Truth).

If you really dont get why, check above. Stoopid is as stoopid does.

Climate change denial is a joke as many have you mentioned. China will take the lead and profit from it. We need a youthier leadership structure that understands. Not a Carrot Cake Cheeto head illiterate!

Nalod wrote:We need to grow GDP or make some severe cuts to many things otherwise debt service in rising interest rate environment will take us to the point of no return.
I hate Trump, really despise the SOB! But, roll back on regulations is a way to increase business and grow it out. Tax cuts and deficit is a tough one to handle. Shrinking Government is not smart. ONe can effectively do the same thing by growing out the private sector in contrast. Deregulation is a way to do this.
Trump is about short term results. We need leadership to ask citizens to sacrifice for the greater good. Congress is full of lightweights and Senete won't commit yet.
So basically you have a population that thinks Trump is ok because elections usually is an effective vetting process and thus faith in his insanity. The man has no mind for business, or anything for that matter. He is a miserable human being. Sociopaths with Narcissistic tenancies are not fun to be with.

Climate change denial is a joke as many have you mentioned. China will take the lead and profit from it. We need a youthier leadership structure that understands. Not a Carrot Cake Cheeto head illiterate!

I agree wholeheartedly but growing GDP today isn't like when Reagan was in office...We are currently running a 18+ trillion dollar economy...The debt is obscene and they are talking about cutting taxes further, insanity...We need vision to lead us into the future..We need a massive smart infrastructure overhaul geared towards rewards and dividends 30-50 years into the future...That means efficient high speed trains, a new mode of transportation, embrace electric cars fueled by home solar panel that one can recharge overnight...We really need forward thinkers but these guys are just thinking about lining their pockets and looking at old world ways to tackle our large problems...

I agree that growth is the only way out of the current debt. But it has to be seismic and tackling global issues like climate change at the same time...Tackling efficient transportation/efficient cities, the biggest energy consumers may be the only way...But the fossil fuel industry owns our politicians...

djsunyc wrote:we are too far down a very bad road. imho, nothing outside of a plague-like epidemic will shift direction.

it's far easier to promote fear - trying to galvanize and give hope may work at a symbolic level but would be opposed strongly at a policy level (i.e. the last 8 years).

when you don't invest in the education and health of your citizens, then you are just continuing along the same path.

I agree and the election just shows we are still far away from reaching critical mass for full bore panic followed by overcompensation in the opposite direction.

But society is poised to suffer colossal losses by turning bck edcation programs, health insurance, medicaid etc. The environment will also suffer a huge set back. We have a few really brutal years ahead. During which the morons that voted for these losers will reap the rewards of their idiocy by seeing their savings and wealth get decimated by inflation, their standard of living fall and the country descend into complete chaos as more alt right extremism takes hold.

They own both houses of government and the executive branch and all they are doing is proving their impotence.

meloshouldgo wrote:

Nalod wrote:We need to grow GDP or make some severe cuts to many things otherwise debt service in rising interest rate environment will take us to the point of no return.
I hate Trump, really despise the SOB! But, roll back on regulations is a way to increase business and grow it out. Tax cuts and deficit is a tough one to handle. Shrinking Government is not smart. ONe can effectively do the same thing by growing out the private sector in contrast. Deregulation is a way to do this.
Trump is about short term results. We need leadership to ask citizens to sacrifice for the greater good. Congress is full of lightweights and Senete won't commit yet.
So basically you have a population that thinks Trump is ok because elections usually is an effective vetting process and thus faith in his insanity. The man has no mind for business, or anything for that matter. He is a miserable human being. Sociopaths with Narcissistic tenancies are not fun to be with.

Climate change denial is a joke as many have you mentioned. China will take the lead and profit from it. We need a youthier leadership structure that understands. Not a Carrot Cake Cheeto head illiterate!

Carrot cake cheeto head illiterate? Dont stop now, tell us how you really feel.
I completely disagree with the first part of your post though, deregulation is NOT the way to grow the economy unless by growth you mean creating the next 100 Enrons and inflating the next 25 finance sector bubbles. This serves no purpose other than making the rich even richer. You need a better plan than that.
Inflation doesn't necessarily hurt debt, it makes debt chepaer. Ever heard of the phrase "inflating your way out of debt"? It won't happen here but it's an idea worth understanding.

If we don't loosen the regulations on the banks we don't get the money out, and part reinflating the system is "Too many dollars chasing......" but the dollars are not able to active!
If we "Shrink" government, we also cause damage.
Your not giving any solutions, just "we need" type suggestions.
Making the "Rich" richer is not terrible if other things are net positive.
I think we are over regulated in some areas. I like the concept and prefer we don't roll things back. We have choices. Me, despite my profession employed by a wall street bank, I like flat tax reform, universal health care and infrastructure/education build outs. Problem is we are not all in on some of these concepts.
clean coal is stupid and won't work, yet solar investment would. Carrot Cake Cheeto Hitler is so bad as he is ignorant and easily manipulated by his people. A sociopath narcissist is not a good trait for a leader unless your losing a war and genocide of your race is enviable. Stalin was awful and his defense of the motherland was inept but since he was who he was he was able to lead them out of world war 2 at a great cost. Few men could live with what he did. Trump is about Trump and "Making america great" is about him, not us.

The previous contender for the title of least forthcoming was Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016 and whom Judge Gorsuch would replace. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and confirmed unanimously, then-Judge Scalia wouldn’t even tell the Judiciary Committee whether he supported Marbury v. Madison, the landmark 1803 decision in which the court under Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle that federal courts can invalidate unconstitutional statutes.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, then a Republican and later a Democrat, was so irritated by the nominee’s performance that four years later, when President George H. W. Bush nominated David H. Souter to the court, Senator Specter announced in advance that he expected an answer to the Marbury question.

“That was one of 2,000 questions that Justice Scalia refused to answer,” the senator explained, his annoyance still simmering, as he ushered Judge Souter into his inner office for a private meeting. The Marbury v. Madison answer must have been satisfactory, because the two emerged shortly thereafter with Senator Specter praising the nominee’s “first-rate legal mind.”

I’ve described this episode, which I witnessed, at some length because I’m tired of hearing that the refusal to answer the Judiciary Committee’s substantive questions began with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s hearing in 1993. In fact, then-Judge Ginsburg was forthright in her support of the right to abortion, calling it “essential to woman’s equality,” and she praised the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey as having strengthened the right in some respects. So it remains a mystery to me why Justice Ginsburg is singled out as the model of a say-nothing stance toward a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. (Just as it was a mystery to me why liberals during the past several years persisted in calling on her, and not the male justices who are her near age-mates, to retire and open a spot for President Barack Obama to fill. Nothing to do with her sex, I’m sure.)

In any event, all Judge Gorsuch had to say about the right to abortion — as well as about the 51-year-old constitutional right to use birth control — was that it was supported by precedent. In answer to a question from Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s chairman, about what he had to say about Roe v. Wade, the nominee answered: “I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, was a precedent of the United States Supreme Court.” Elaborating ever so slightly, he went on to observe that the decision had been reaffirmed and that people relied on it. “So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the United States Supreme Court, worthy of treatment as precedent like any other.” Precedents, of course, receive all kinds of “treatment” at the hands of future courts, from a warm embrace to being whittled away to outright overruling. What kind of “treatment” Judge Gorsuch thinks the court’s abortion precedents deserve was left neatly unspecified.

Judge Gorsuch had so thoroughly absorbed his handlers’ instruction to answer every question about a precedent by acknowledging that it was, indeed, a precedent that he actually slipped up in answering a question about Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election. “As a judge, it is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court, and it deserves the same respect as other precedents of the United States Supreme Court when you come to it as a judge. And it is to be analyzed under the law of precedent.”

Well, not exactly. As Judge Gorsuch would undoubtedly have been able to recall had he not spent the preceding days and weeks in nonstop nominee training, the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore actually said something else: “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.” While the meaning of that odd sentence isn’t completely self-evident, it has generally been understood to limit the decision to the facts of the case, depriving its contorted equal-protection rationale of weight as a precedent. The senators were on automatic pilot along with the nominee, and no one called him on it.

Judge Gorsuch discussed every precedent thrown at him as if it were a grenade with the pin pulled. He never embraced even the most universally acclaimed landmarks, not even Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 decision that gave indigent criminal defendants the right to a free lawyer. Gideon was, the nominee conceded generously, a “seminal precedent.” He added: “I’m not in a position to tell you whether I personally like or dislike any precedent.” That actually wasn’t the question, not even from softball-throwing Senator Grassley, who purported to want to know not whether the nominee loved a particular precedent, but how he might apply it in future cases.

Unlike Senator Grassley, the Democratic senators tried to penetrate the armor, but their questions bounced off without a trace. Judge Gorsuch insisted that it would be “unfair” to litigants before the Supreme Court to “tip his hand” on how he regarded prior cases — any prior case, no matter how ancient or uncontested. That is actually a fatuous position. Once judges take their seats and rule on an issue, the world knows what they think and how they are likely to rule the next time the issue comes up. Justice Scalia, for example, was explicit in calling on his colleagues to overrule Roe v. Wade. There was not a chance that he would change his mind the next time an abortion case came along. So how would Judge Gorsuch’s commenting on past cases be any different? No one would have suggested that Justice Scalia had unfairly “tipped his hand” or that he should have recused himself from future abortion cases.

I’ll give credit, though, to Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who questioned Judge Gorsuch about an episode from the nominee’s pre-judicial career. For a year in the administration of President George W. Bush, Mr. Gorsuch held a senior position in the Justice Department and was deeply involved in issues concerning the hundreds of men held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Dozens of the country’s major law firms were providing free legal assistance to the prisoners, a fact that was beginning to draw attention in conservative media, especially as efforts on behalf of the detainees began to bear fruit at the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 23, 2006, from his Justice Department email account, Mr. Gorsuch forwarded an article from the blog of the right-wing American Spectator. The identity of the email’s recipient was blacked out in the copy the Trump administration made available to the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Gorsuch’s subject line was “Elite Law Firm Pro Bono Work for Terrorists” and his message read: “I thought you mind [sic] find this of interest. It seems odd to me that more hasn’t been made of this. See esp. list of firms below from Spectator blog.” His recipient replied: “The great fallacy here, of course, is that this work helps to protect the rights of Americans. By definition, the only rights at issue here are those of suspected alien terrorist enemies during time of war.” Mr. Gorsuch’s response? “Exactly.”

Asking Judge Gorsuch about this exchange, Senator Durbin recalled that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had represented unpopular clients during his legal career and had spoken proudly about it during his Senate confirmation hearing in 2005. The principle “that you don’t identify the lawyer with the particular view of the client, or the views that the lawyer advances on behalf of a client, is critical to the fair administration of justice,” John Roberts said then.

“So for the record,” Senator Durbin asked Judge Gorsuch, “would you put in perspective any comments that you made about people representing Guantánamo detainees?”

The question marked one of the only times during the hearing that a Democrat dented the carefully polished armor. “The email you’re referring to is not my finest moment, blowing off steam with a friend, privately,” Judge Gorsuch replied. “The truth is, I think my career is better than that.”

Another Bush administration official, Cully Stimson, a Pentagon lawyer in charge of detainee affairs, was not so discreet as to limit himself to sharing his views only with a friend about the private bar and its Guantánamo involvement. Some months after the Gorsuch email exchange, Mr. Stimson suggested on a radio program that the corporate clients of law firms representing detainees should ask their lawyers to “choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” The ensuing uproar cost Mr. Stimson his job. He is now a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The revelation of Judge Gorsuch’s long-ago email grabbed my attention more than it otherwise might have because of a remark President Trump made this month. Addressing a rally in Nashville hours after a federal judge in Hawaii blocked the latest version of his administration’s Muslim travel ban, the president denounced the decision as “terrible” and said, “This ruling makes us look weak.”