Jill Stein Pledges To Pardon Snowden and Appoint Him To Her Cabinet (zerohedge.com) 177
Iamthecheese writes: Trump hates him. Clinton misrepresented him. Most mainstream media outlets call him a traitor and worse. But if you vote Stein, Snowden will be in the presidential Cabinet. "The presumptive Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein promises to grant NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden -- who many describe as a true American hero -- not just a full pardon, but a promotion to the upper echelons of government should she win the White House," reports Zero Hedge. "[Snowden] has done an incredible service to our country at great cost to himself for having to live away from his family, his friends, his job, his network, to basically live as an expatriate," Stein asserted during a town hall live-streamed to supporters on her Facebook page, US Uncut reported. "I would say not only bring Snowden back, but bring him into my administration as a member of the Cabinet," she continued, "because we need people who are part of our national security administration who are really, very patriotic. If we're really going to protect our American security, we also have to protect our Constitutional rights, and that includes our right to privacy." Her pardons would also extend to CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning. Kiriakou first revealed proof of waterboarding and various other torture tactics employed by the government, while Manning leaked the Afghan War Diary and Iraq War Logs, which included footage of U.S. helicopter airmen deliberately gunning down journalists, to Wikileaks. Reddit co-founder and MIT student, Aaron Swartz, who leaked academic research to the public, would also receive a pardon under her presidency. "[Swartz] was a proponent of free and liberated internet and for sharing our resources on that internet, who was basically hounded into suicide by a very oppressive Department of Justice. So, he -- in my mind -- is another one of these heroes that we need to remember and be very thankful for."
No (Score:2)
Don't we have enough apparatchiks in high positions already?
Oh dear (Score:5, Interesting)
Jill Stein Pledges To Pardon Snowden
Yeah, I can see how that might actually be a worthy thing to od.
and Appoint Him To Her Cabinet
Ah, she ruined it. She's obviously just whoring for votes.
Re:Oh dear (Score:4, Interesting)
So a person that gave up all his power and salary to protect the citizens he felt he should represent is a bad person for cabinet? So based upon you claim, seriously you hugely stupid claim as an American, the founding fathers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution) should all have been hung, drawn and quartered and absolutely never have gained positions in government and anyone who said they should is a whore.
Dr Jill Stein has shown the same courage as the founding fathers in making a profound policy decision that goes against the oligarchy and the current power institution in the military industrial complex. Would Edward Snowden do a good job in cleaning up the corruption of the self serving and hugely over powered intelligence services, probably, if he survived long enough.
Reality is the next US election is a complete fuck up. With the least hated individual to be elected by a minority that bothered to show up, the only enthusiasm will be in the Libertarian and Green party. With many from the Republicans and Democrats intending to stay how because they have nothing but shit to vote for, apart from those who will protest vote Libertarian and Green, they will be out in droves as well as party die hards.
The next election is the one, that who ever wins will wish they didn't and due to deep social reach of primaries getting many unstable fringe elements involved in politics and then being betrayed yet again, well, the Secret Service and the FBI will really have their work cut out for them keeping that talking head chuppa chup alive. Making millions our of the white house corporate media channel. What a mess it will be.
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Yes, it's a poor choice. Snowden has no known qualifications for any cabinet position. Perhaps you expect Jill to create new position just for him?
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The cabinet of the president consists of the following positions:
Vice President
Secretary of State
Secretary of the Treasury
Secretary of Defense
Attorney General
Secretary of the Interior
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Secretary of Transportation
Secretary of Energy
Secretary of Education
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Secretary of Homeland Security
Each of these positions, except Vice President, is also res
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So a person that gave up all his power and salary to protect the citizens he felt he should represent is a bad person for cabinet?
That's not what I said. My point is that he is not automatically the right person for the job just because he did something newsworthy. It's stunt-appointing.
He might be good at it in the same sense that I might be good at open heart surgery - but no-one should let me have a go on the off-chance.
So based upon you claim, seriously you hugely stupid claim as an American
I'm not an American.
the founding fathers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution) should all have been hung, drawn and quartered and absolutely never have gained positions in government and anyone who said they should is a whore.
Wow. You've read a lot into about 20 mildly facetious words. I didn't say she was a whore; I said she was whoring. It's a metaphor. And where the hell did I say anything about bloody executions?
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Jill Stein Pledges To Pardon Snowden
Yeah, I can see how that might actually be a worthy thing to od.
and Appoint Him To Her Cabinet
Ah, she ruined it. She's obviously just whoring for votes.
This Canadian sees Snowdon as a hero.
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Which Canadian?
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That would be the first President to pardon more people than Bill Clinton. Except this time it'd be free.
Re: Oh dear (Score:2)
I'm in favor of pardoning Snowden, but Manning and Schwartz?
Manning leaked stuff that served no useful benefit to the public, other than being edited to improve Julian Assange's ego (who by the way, essentially admitted that he lied about the military targeting civilians, but claimed it was for a good cause.) And by the way, the guy who turned him in felt the same way.
And Aaron Schwartz legitimately broke the law and had no noble intentions at all. The only useful thing to come out of that was to point the
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Just curious, but by what authority does Congress get to pass laws denying speech? I've read the American Constitution, good document if unpractical. It was amended very early to stop the government, or at least Congress, from outlawing any form of speech. Perhaps there is an amendment I'm unaware of, namely giving the government the right to deny speech in certain circumstances such as national security and child porn. Probably was passed along with the amendment allowing the government to deny certain peo
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Aaron Schwartz legitimately broke the law and had no noble intentions at all.
Duh Law was a badlaw in this case.
Is free universal access to knowledge not a worthy goal?
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The Schwartz bit is not true at all. The majority of research would have already been funded by at least one taxpayer funding source, only to be swept up and locked away. That is not right. For that alone, Schwartz's actions were just.
If all taxpayer funded research belonged to the public domain, then our military would be at a huge tactical disadvantage, among a ton of other problems.
Pardon Hillary (Score:1)
Obligatory (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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http://1un1ba2fg8v82k48vu4by3q... [netdna-cdn.com]
So much for rule of law (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't dispute that Snowden did a public service in the end. However, he also broke the law and for that there should be consequences. I worked in the US government for a long time and 99.99% of the people working there take their obligations under the law very seriously. As with any large organization, there are bad apples. I'm sorry to say, but Snowden made himself part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
He could have reported the problem to his corporate managers, to his government manag
Re:So much for rule of law (Score:5, Insightful)
He could have reported the problem to his corporate managers,
That worked so well for Thomas Drake. [theguardian.com]
the process for intelligence oversight mostly works really well
Citation Needed
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Yes, he can decide to bypass the hierarchy he signed to respect in first place. But he cannot claim he shouldn't be served the treatment for such a decision. The administration, on the other side, has no choice other than enforce the respect of the hierachy otherwise the whole administration will become unmanageable. You cannot tell civil servants, contractual workers, etc, they can do whatever they want. Everyone is accountable. Snowden is accountable for what he did, as well as any of his boss who covered
Re:So much for rule of law (Score:5, Insightful)
Morally right trumps lawful every time. That's why we have jury nullification. He exposed criminal activity by the administration.
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Because we destroyed it when it didn't give us the results we wanted in the civil rights era.
Re:So much for rule of law (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, yes, demanding whisteblowers face the law, while flatly ignoring the lawbreaking revealed by those whisteblowers. The penalty for violating FISA is punishable by up to 5 years and prison, and a $10,000 fine. Given the length and scale of NSA wiretapping, that probably means billions of years in collective prison time, and hundreds of trillions in fines, if FISA was enforced. Funny how you fascists are never demanding those laws be applied to the executive branch and the sort of contractor Snowden worked for.
No, he couldn't. Just ask John Kiriakou, [salon.com] who was investigating the CIA for torture and had his investigation shut down by "appropriate channels".
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One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
-- MLK, from his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" [upenn.edu]
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We were orally told (so there is no written record) that we would be immediately fired if we talked with government inspectors.
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Of course, I have no idea where someone working in government might get this ridiculous notion that "the rules apply to others but not to me"
Yeah, okay, we get the joke...
All three candidates are making the libertarian guy look pretty good.
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Nobody's [nobodyforpresident.org] perfect
Re:So much for rule of law (Score:4, Insightful)
Repeat after me, if the bad apples remain after being found, it is not just a few bad apples. Everyone is complicit.
You do realize the saying is not, "Feel free to leave the bad apples there, so long as only a few of them are moldy and oozing juices all over the others it doesn't matter because the rest remain good." You're only allowed to call them "a few bad apples" without looking like a moron, if they are treated like bad apples are treated.
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A presidential pardon is also rule of law if the congress passed it. And further I think your post shows the same "befehl ist befehl" mentality that didn't work as an excuse in the Nurenberg trials.
Re:So much for rule of law (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Believe it or not, the process for intelligence oversight mostly works really well."
Oh really. So secretive oversight by government officials of secretive things done by government officials "mostly works really well"? And how are we to know this?
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The answer is classified.
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The American Revolution was illegal; every one of its leaders broke the law (violently).
Should they have been punished for this, once America was established?
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They broke British laws, and when some of those leaders were caught in British territory, they were indeed made to face the punishments for their crimes.
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If laws need to be broken to serve the greater good, they need to be broken. The person in question needs to be ready to face the consequences, but pardons exist to ensure they do not have to, if they did indeed serve the greater good. Being sentenced to live in Russia for years is a punishment on its own. He should be pardoned with time served. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening, too many people approve of our insane government and want it to be crazier.
So much for critical thought (Score:5, Interesting)
And the lawbreaking Snowden reported on? Why aren't you guys demanding every employee of the NSA be hauled into court, right on up through the executive branch to the president himself? Why aren't you demanding Obama be charged with 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each instance of illegal warrantless wiretapping?
And why don't you authoritarians give two shits about the Constitution? If you did work for the government, you took the same Oath of Office that Snowden, Manning, Drake, and Kirkarou did. The only way for those men to uphold their oaths was to violate the laws protecting obscenely unconstitutional actions, like the NSA's warrantless wiretapping and the CIA's torture program.
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They certainly could have investigated, exercised oversight, and put a stop to anything untoward.
Post should be modded 5 Funny!
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I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon.
Candidate Who Won't Win a Single Precinct (Score:2)
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...makes campaign promise she will never have to fulfill.
A very common practice in the business. Makes the front page though. And in this case it's a small reminder that we do have have more than two choices. And also the democrats can try to pull their guilt trip again and scapegoat Stein if Hillary were to lose.
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Things are getting exciting. The next President will be one of those:
1) a failed business person with bad hair and a name tarnished by sex scandals who doesn't like Arabs and Mexicans
2) a failed business person with bad hair and a name tarnished by sex scandals who thinks giving US citizenship to 20 millions Arabs and Mexicans is a one-shot deal that won't bring 50 millions more knocking at the door to get their share of the American Dream
3) a feminazi who thinks women bathrooms are only for "womyn-born wom
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You're simply lying about Stein's bathroom position. She very clearly states that she believes transgender people should be able to choose which restroom to use. A position which she shares with nearly all feminists.
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Please provide a quote from Jill Stein herself to support that.
While you scour the internets to dig up this non-existing quote, you will see that while she tweeted against the NC bathroom bill, she never actually took position, she simply swept that under "discrimination". Even when asked directly by a sycophant reporter, she refused to answer, saying that there were more important issues and deflected the question over and over.
This is at the opposite end of the spectrum of Mitt Romney and gay marriage, wh
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Tweeting against the NC bathroom bill is blatantly taking a position, and she "swept that under discrimination" because it is discrimination and that's the point. There is no way to be clearer than that, and it's quite amusing that someone could seriously believe that she or other feminists are against transgender bathroom choice. Are you really so incapable of believing that women don't have an issue with transwomen that you have to invent this tortured fantasy that they suffer the same paranoia as you?
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Ok so you found no actual quote, as expected.
And just like her, you hide behind "the real point" because now you realize that she never "clearly stated" her position (your own words), all she did was let people draw their own conclusions based on a vague message rejecting a bill so stupid that even Trump didn't support it. That's called figure skating and politicians have done that since the dawn of time, but for some reason you're just too biased or self-deluded to notice it when it comes to that feminazi.
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makes campaign promise she will never have to fulfill. Film at 11. :rolleyes:
Snowden should be pardoned, but this would only be credible coming from one of the two mainstream candidates.
The government in the USA has been carefully crafted and evolved into a two party system. Both the Democrats and Republicans like it that way, and have no reason to change that.
Hell, 10% of the country could vote Green, and what representation would they get? Nothing.
Even Bernie just sold out to Clinton. When she gets elected, all assurances she made to Bernie will get flushed down the toilet.
Can we somehow bring in Dave Cameron as a "dark horse" candidate? I know, he wasn't born as a USA citizen, bu
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If 5% of the country votes Green, they get federal funding in the next election. Perhaps they'd use that money to push their advocacy for ranked choice and proportional representation.
There's no perfect system, though. Proportional representation gives you party-controlled lists and takes away the power of local people to directly decide who represents their community.
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Jill Stein, sorry, Dr. Jill Stein, did an "Ask Me Anything" on reddit some time ago, under the title "I am running for presidency". Which country, she didn't consider necessary to add. That's some delusional thinking, if you ask me.
Well, I _wanted_ to like her. (Score:5, Informative)
Pardon Snowden... Stein got off on the right foot there. Sounds good so far...
Unfortunately, she shoved the other one in her mouth. She's in favor of "homeopathic medicine [wikipedia.org]", and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite. Furthermore, she wants "a moratorium on GMOs", which wikipedia states, "There is a scientific consensus[147][148][149][150] that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food".
I REALLY want to vote third party, but we need some third party candidates who are not anti-science crackpots. I thought she might be pro-science, but apparently not.
It's really too bad. I'd be totally on the side of a pro-environment and pro-civil rights party, something akin to a blend of green and libertarian. Bring Snowden back, stop spying on everyone, and don't trash the environment. Could be so good! However, they keep putting up unelectable nutcases :-/. This election could be THE golden opportunity for third parties, because the D and R candidates are both strongly disliked across the political spectrum. It's not that they would be likely to win, but they could become a force to be reckoned with and position themselves to gain mindshare in the future. But not by being "pro homeopathy" and generally come across like crackpots.
Sigh. We need some real alternatives to Republicans and Democrats. "Real" being the key word.
Re:Well, I _wanted_ to like her. (Score:4, Informative)
There is a fourth candidate, you know. And he is relatively "normal" with some time in the trenches. He's on the ballot in all 50 states, and he tracks a bit higher than Stein. He makes a damn good alternative to Trump. Let's turn the election into a battle between Clinton and Johnson.
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Clinton could not bother to attend any debate or buy a single ad and would still be our next president. Attempting to split the vote into a third part would only further cement that.
There is too much division around Trump for him to get enough votes. If someone else comes out of the convention most of those that actually wanted him and voted for him will not vote. The elected nominee cannot win because of who he is and any replacement cannot win because "that's not who we put on the ballot you cheats."
Co
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*cough* [washingtonpost.com]
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A few years before the State Democrats didnt think Lieberman was liberal enough for them, the State Republicans decided that Weicker wasn't conservative enough for them. In both of these cases they ran independent and won.
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Connecticut is special
Aren't we all?
Lieberman always needed republican voters to win. He was a true republicrat in every sense.
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There is too much division around Trump for him to get enough votes.
The trend in the polls is moving in Trump's favor, with some polls showing Trump even with Clinton, or outright ahead. CBS/NYT is a tie [cbsnews.com], Rasmussen is Trump with a clear lead [rasmussenreports.com], Economist/Yougov within a margin of error [cloudfront.net].
Of course, Clinton had a bad couple weeks, so that may a temporary thing, but it could also be part of a longer trend. I really think things will start to crystallize once the debates happen, because that will push people into their animalistic "us against them" mode.
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Kind of. It's more moving away from Clinton than it is towards Trump. Clinton's numbers have gone down, but Trump's have remained flat. Frankly, I think a good chunk of the Clinton support just shifted over to Gary Johnson (whose numbers have climbed a good deal over the same period).
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Unfortunately, he's a Libertarian.
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And Clinton is a democrat, what's yer point? Running as a libertarian is what got him on the ballot. You do what you gotta do. And look at the bright side, he "steals" votes from Trump.
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I do appreciate that. :)
Re:Well, I _wanted_ to like her. (Score:4, Insightful)
Its nice to live in this dream world where there are other alternatives than the two major party candidates, but its not real. If he did well, Jonson would make 5% of the vote. Those 5% are more likely to come from Clinton than from trump. Clinton would miss the 5%, meaning that Trump would win more likely. So voting for any candidate than the "lesser evil" doesn't bring you anything, but in fact has a negative effect.
The only way to fix this is to change the system. Give voters papers where they can fill in priorities, with priority one two three etc. The system is called STV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. The voters then will be free to support any candidate they want, regardless of strategy.
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STV is not the only want to fix the system. Just about any type of ranked/preferential voting would be 1,000 times better than what we use now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Another such example is instant runoff voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Then we could truly vote the way we want, rather than voting against who we don't want because we are always afraid of a worse outcome. Unfortunately, the RepubliCrats (the collective term I use for Democrats and Republicans) will never allow this to h
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Yes, first-past-the-post is the worst form of voting, including all the others (modulo coercion).
But really, you can't fix the electoral process without also fixing how legislation is tabled (death to the omnibus bill), otherwise a truly representative congress becomes gridlocked on process.
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congress becomes gridlocked on process.
Which is what we need right now until we significantly reduce reelection rates from 95%.
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>"But really, you can't fix the electoral process without also fixing how legislation is tabled (death to the omnibus bill), otherwise a truly representative congress becomes gridlocked on process."
Yes, that is a danger. But perhaps that is exactly what we need more of right now. The government (most especially the Fed) is just too large, too expensive, too imposing, and too corrupt. Maybe having far fewer laws but better ones (those that really can pass muster through lots of bickering and fighting)
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Only in a swing-state. On the other hand, if you live in a state that will absolutely go D or R, you can vote for whomever the heck you want. You would not effectively be robbing votes from anyone. But you would be going on record as giving a big "F U" to the D's
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I don't think your vote can be considered a big anything, much less an FU, if no one even notices you voted.
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1. They certainly are not going to notice if I vote R or D. My vote is proportionally more noticeable if I add it to the third-party segment.
2. The more people that do this, the bigger the FU. I'm happy to contribute.
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I've always voted Republican (always). But I'll be voting for Johnson.
Don't underestimate the number of moderate republicans who are disgusted with the things coming out of Trump and Hillary's mouths...
Are we enough to get Johnson elected? Hell no! But if we make a good showing it could finally be the start of a moderate party that believes in a limited government and progressive social views.
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Voting for people is a really small contribution, and as lots of people are voting for the most various reasons, your vote won't matter much. If you really want your voice to matter more, try to apply simple lobbying tactics. Calling your representatives is a good first step. Then build a charity, go on search for donors etc. Believing in totally foreign candidates is a nice thing, but it won't happen soon.
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That's true. If you can collect enough money from other people, you will be noticed.
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Calling your representatives is a good first step.
Have you ever actually tried this? I have. Just about as effective as shaking my fist and shouting at the sky.
Then build a charity, go on search for donors etc.
There we go, that's more like it. Start soliciting bigmoney bribes from oligarchs and become part of the managed "opposition".
Re: Well, I _wanted_ to like her. (Score:1)
Re:Well, I _wanted_ to like her. (Score:5, Insightful)
But not by being "pro homeopathy" and generally come across like crackpots. Sigh. We need some real alternatives to Republicans and Democrats. "Real" being the key word.
The more I read about US politics, the more I realize that what would ordinarily be normal parties here in Norway are the factions within the democrats and republicans, while the fringe crackpots are the same. Imagine a system with:
Democratic Party
Liberal Party
Socialist Party
Republican Party
Tea Party
Christian Party
Libertarian Party
Green Party
Constitution Party
It would be not entirely unlike our parliament. Anything above 4% nationally gets proportional representation (19/169 representatives are held in a pool for this purpose), under 4% you'd have to get a direct vote from your area (the other 150/169). Coalitions are common and usually center around the main "left" or "right" party but who is in and who is out varies. In the US you have the same factions but first they make a red and blue coalition that they call a party, then they put it to a vote.
As long as you got a "first past the post" system, nothing matters unless you get a majority so first you must become part of something that could get a majority, then you can try pulling it in the direction you want. That's why we see candidates like Sanders, Trump, Ron Paul etc. join the main parties even if they're way on the fringes. Nobody's going to be able to change that without changing the electorate system and the keys to that is firmly locked up by the two parties that like their pseudo-monopoly on being the red and blue pill.
Re:Well, I _wanted_ to like her. (Score:5, Interesting)
She's in favor of "homeopathic medicine [wikipedia.org]",
That seems to be a little simplistic, given that she apparently even got the Green Party to remove all mentions [patheos.com] of homeopathy from their platform. That said, pure placebo's (such as homeopathy, VR [slashdot.org] and even the colour of pills [wired.com]) can have their use either separately from (in case of e.g. a hypochondriac) or in combination with regular treatment.
and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
Furthermore, she wants "a moratorium on GMOs", which wikipedia states, "There is a scientific consensus[147][148][149][150] that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food".
While she indeed argues against it because of safety arguments, there are plenty of other reasons why many people are against GMOs. Just look at the majority of comments on the Slashdot story [slashdot.org] regarding one of the "GMOs are safe" studies.
I REALLY want to vote third party, but we need some third party candidates who are not anti-science crackpots.
Bashing using arguments that are either easily refuted, or at the very least less clear cut than presented, is anti-science. Name-calling while posting as AC is just silly.
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and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
You forgot that it's the only form of energy that's currently regulated to include all of externalities in its cost. For a fair comparison, you'd need to require coal to catch everything (CO2, sulphur, other toxins, more radioactive isotopes than a nuclear plant, etc) from all chimneys, transport and store that securely for hundreds of years. And despite that, nuclear is still competitive and causes many orders of magnitude less deaths.
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and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
You forgot that it's the only form of energy that's currently regulated to include all of externalities in its cost.
No, since for nuclear a bunch of externalities are covered by the government at a rate that is below what the market is willing to offer (since the market doesn't want to cover them at all).
For a fair comparison, you'd need to require coal to catch everything (CO2, sulphur, other toxins, more radioactive isotopes than a nuclear plant, etc)
from all chimneys, transport and store that securely for hundreds of years.
I doubt Jill Stein is very much in favour of coal fired plants.
And despite that, nuclear is still competitive and causes many orders of magnitude less deaths.
Competitive with massive government [sourcewatch.org] subsidies [taxpayer.net], yes. Of course, coal also gets lots of subsidies [sourcewatch.org].
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and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
If you take into account all of the government subsidies, including covering the industry's uninsurable risks, I'm not sure whether at least the cost argument holds.
If plant operators had to buy liability insurance on the commercial market, all nuclear power stations would be uneconomic.
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Sure, but by the same token, there are large swaths of the continental US of A that, if residents had to buy home insurance on the commercial market, would be utterly uninhabitable.
There is also thirty or forty years of technological advancement in nuclear safety to take into account.
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You're comparing apples to oranges.
It's very easy and cheap to purchase homeowner's liability insurance anywhere in America. Liability insurance pays for harm to others caused by the home, for example someone falling down the stairs. What is difficult to buy in some places is insurance against natural disaster. For instance in California, one can buy affordable earthquake insurance only because of state legal mandates.
The reason nuclear station operators cannot buy liability insurance on the commercial m
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I REALLY want to vote third party, but we need some third party candidates who are not anti-science crackpots.
You can always write someone in.
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Pardon Snowden... Stein got off on the right foot there. Sounds good so far...
Unfortunately, she shoved the other one in her mouth. She's in favor of "homeopathic medicine [wikipedia.org]", and says that nuclear energy is, "dirty, dangerous and expensive, and should be precluded on all of those counts", when the actual data shows just the opposite.
She's running with the Green Party. What else would you expect from someone on a platform with a bunch of naturalists?
Canada (Score:2)
Yeah, we had/have the same problem with the Green Party up here. They have some good ideas, but then start spouting ideology just as bad as any other party on certain topics regardless of science.
Additionally, they wanted to be seen as a legitimate party, so they tried to run a candidate in every riding in Canada. Which I think was a real mistake, as you really start scraping the bottom of the barrel at a certain point, and the types of candidate they attract are basically crackpots and hippies neither of w
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The plants that are already built are the problem. There are many passive-safety measures that have been devised since these plants were constructed, but since the old reactor designs are already there, people keep using them to be cheap. The difference is in when something goes wrong you can either have a reaction that halts right away or a situation like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima.
Thorium reactors are pretty interesting in concept. I'd rather have a few of those around over the 35+ year ol
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Hillary is a DINO that doesn't represent what at bare minimum half liberal voters want, much less many independent voters who are disgusted with both parties. We have two Republican parties running against each other this election, and as a result of the lack of representation, there will be record turnouts for third parties this time around. If it wasn't for Johnson rising on the scene and Hillary's connections putting their thumbs on the scale, the impending "#DemExit" would be a slam dunk for the Republ
Carl Malmud for head of the printing office! (Score:2)
I honestly don't know if he has all of the qualifications as a cabinet member (but then again, I don't know our main two presidential candidates have qualifications for being president) ... but so long as we're on the 'appoint people with different points of views than what we've had for decades', I'd recommend Carl Malamud [wikipedia.org] for the head of the Government Printing Office
(he's the guy who's been buying government documents, scanning 'em, and putting them up for free at resource.org)
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Every Cabinet position, except the Vice President, is also the head of a US department. Snowden only has the knowledge and experience relevant to two of these positions but he lacks the experience to manage an organization of that size. He'd basically have to function like George C. Marshall did as Secretary of State and rely heavily on direct reports to manage the department and take care of most of it. Also, he's not get confirmed anyway.
The statement of suggesting Snowden for a Cabinet position basically
Very Biased Article (Score:1)
"...while Manning leaked the Afghan War Diary and Iraq War Logs, which included footage of U.S. helicopter airmen deliberately gunning down journalists, to Wikileaks."
This quote would lead a person to believe the helo pilot went gunning for the journalists, which is not the case. A battle had been ongoing in the area and the pilot saw what looked to him (and me) like a group of fighters with RPG's and small arms. What looked like an RPG on the gun sight footage was actually a camera with a really long lens.
Why Such Limited Coverage for Other Parties? (Score:3)
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The media is going to be in a pinch. Johnson is polling at 12%. If he gets up to 15% they'll have to invite him to the debates. If this was any other year, they could have ignored Johnson at the debates, but Hillary and Trump are both posting negative favorability ratings. If the media is seen as biased against Johnson in favor of Trump/Hillary then that could push more support towards Johnson. If they give him questions then it could and would expose Hillary/Trump's ideas and stances in contrast to Johnson
Well she an afford to (Score:2)
Ike or Vlad (Score:2)
I'm still debating whether I will write-in vote for Ike Eisenhower or Vladimir Putin. The election is just theater so might as well have fun with it.
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Re:Unfortunately..... (Score:5, Funny)
EVERYBODY hates Jill Stein...
I doubt most people know enough about her to hate her. Maybe you were thinking of Ben Stein? Or Frankenstein?
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What do you have against Frankenstein [youtube.com]?
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Frankenstein's monster was also Frankenstein (he regarded the doctor as his father, so he would have taken the same surname).
Re: Unfortunately..... (Score:4, Funny)
Actually the last name would probably be "Normal", first name "Abby"
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The XKCD comic's version: https://xkcd.com/1589/ [xkcd.com]
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Troll much?
Yes. Yes, you do.