President Donald Trump’s support has put Congress within reach of passing the most sweeping set of changes to the federal criminal justice system since the 1990s, when fear of crime drove the enactment of draconian sentencing practices that shipped hundreds of thousands of drug offenders to prison.
Friday, November 16, 2018
We don't need any more immigrants: Population increases have outpaced labor force increases for a decade
Before the Great Recession the growth rate of the labor force easily exceeded the growth rate of population for decade after decade, but since then the situation has reversed dramatically.
Population has been increasing at a rate 75% higher than the labor force over the last decade. The increased population is not assimilating to work.
THERE IS NO LABOR SHORTAGE.
THERE IS NO LABOR SHORTAGE.
Increasing the population of the non-working has been the number one drag on the economy, causing GDP to fall and debt to rise, negatively impacting every standard measure.
Liberal math: In ME-2 the Democrat came in second but wins the seat anyway
This is how the National Popular Vote will work in the case of president if states adopt the kind of legerdemain citizens of Maine adopted in 2016.
I say legerdemain advisedly, because it is not reasoning but simple trickery. In the case of the National Popular Vote, you will think X won your state but because Y got more votes nationally your state agrees to switch its electoral college votes to Y. In Maine because of an equally arbitrary decision to deprive the top vote getter from winning (the winner must get 50% even though Bill Clinton never did), the winner ends up losing because of "ranking". The last place finisher's votes, person D's, get reallocated to A, B, and C using math reflecting the voters' rankings of all the candidates until someone reaches 50%.
The voters collectively decide how your vote will go, not you, based on their ranking of the candidates, not yours.
In other words, if you happened to vote for D, and probably also for C in this case, your vote was changed to B, not the original winner A.
They say every vote must count, and call it democracy.
I seem to recall the Germans voted for Hitler, too. They gave up their freedom willingly, you see, so it must have been OK.
Poliquin narrowly got the most votes on Election Day – with 46.1 percent to Golden's 45.9 – but because he didn't get more than 50 percent of the vote, Maine's new law kicked in. Independent candidates Tiffany Bond and William Hoar combined received about another 8 percent of the vote.
In the new system, approved by Maine voters in 2016, a person votes for their favorite candidate and ranks the other candidates by their order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the last-place candidate gets knocked out and the ballots cast for them are reallocated based on an algorithm that factors the voters' preferences. That process continues until one candidate has a majority.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
At 4:40pm today with 100% of the vote reported, CA-39 was won by the Republican, at 8:53pm by the Democrat, in between which 8,185 extra votes suddenly materialize to push the Democrat over the top
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| screen shot 4.40.38pm 11/15/18 |
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| screen shot 8.53.09pm 11/15/18 |
It's not the votes that count, but who counts the votes.
DeSantis elected Florida governor a 2nd time in machine recount, US Senator and agriculture commissioner races forced into hand recount
DeSantis' lead held Thursday as the counties reported their tallies, keeping him above the quarter-point threshold and making him Florida's governor-elect barring a legal challenge from Andrew Gillum. But, as expected, the margins in the U.S. Senate and agriculture commissioner races remained under the threshold, requiring hand recounts of overvotes and undervotes.
Florida, laughstock of the world
“We have been the laughing stock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said in court, where he is at the center of the legal battle over the election recount.
One term president: Trump's m/o is to dupe, trick and snooker, whether it's Saudi Arabia over oil or Americans over immigration
"They're pretty much snookered by Trump," Ross said. "I mean, Trump led them to believe that the Iranian exports would be zero. It turned out they're going to be 1.2 to 1.5 million barrels a day, way higher than people thought."
13 million young adults 18-29 use marijuana but the FDA's Scott Gottlieb is shocked, shocked I tell you, by 3.6 million young vapers
This administration, like the rest of this country, is completely effed up.
Tampa (AFP) - US regulators Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on sales of e-cigarettes, as national data showed a 78 percent single-year surge in vaping among young people, with two-thirds using fruit and candy-flavored products. ...
"These data shock my conscience," said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, referring to the latest data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey. ...
A total of 3.6 million US youths reported vaping at least once in the past month, the data showed.
"These increases must stop. And the bottom line is this: I will not allow a generation of children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes," said Gottlieb.
Meanwhile Gallup reported in August that 24% of the 54 million Americans aged 18-29 regularly or occasionally use marijuana, over three and half times as many as vape, but the FDA's Gottlieb isn't in the headlines over that.
How to lose in 2020: Trump reportedly trying to please Turkey by pushing Fethullah Gulen out of the US
Trump doesn't give a damn about the criminality of Turkey's Erdogan. Trump should be pushing Turkey out of NATO, not Gulen out of the US. Instead it's all about a peace deal with the Joos. I smell Javanka. I smell a one term president.
The requests on Gulen in mid-October mark at least the second time the Trump administration has re-examined Turkey's extradition request since taking office. In the weeks after Trump's inauguration, the White House asked the Justice Department to review Gulen's case, NBC has reported.
Some officials have described the first request as a routine part of a new administration reviewing its relationship with a key ally. The request, however, took place under Trump's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose ties to Turkey came under scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling. Flynn, who resigned in February 2017, entered into a plea agreement with Mueller last December and has been cooperating with the investigation.
Libertarian Senator Mike Lee talks grandly about "conservative" criminal justice reform when all he's after is throwing out federal mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses
Mike Lee thinks selling drugs (even while armed with a gun!) doesn't hurt anyone when the evidence is pouring in that marijuana is bad for the health of those who use it.
And he obviously hasn't lived with a user. If he had he'd know they make lousy family members and lousy Americans.
Did the young father of two let his children play with his gun, Senator?
Thanks for nothing, Utah!
For example, when I served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Salt Lake City, Weldon Angelos -- a young father of two with no criminal record -- was convicted of selling three dime bags of marijuana to a paid informant over a short period of time.
These were not violent crimes. No one was hurt. But because Angelos had been in possession of a gun at the time he sold the drugs (a gun which was neither brandished nor discharged in connection with the offense), the judge was forced by federal law to give him a 55-year prison sentence. The average federal sentence for assault is just two years. The average murderer only gets 15 years. While acknowledging the obvious excessiveness of the sentence, the judge explained that the applicable federal statutes gave him no authority to impose a less-severe prison term, noting that “only Congress can fix this problem.”
If only Donald Trump knew that he was president
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told then-President Barack Obama in the summer of 2014 that he could use "very broad power" to limit immigration as he saw fit, according to a letter obtained by Fox News.
In the July 29 letter, Feinstein cites Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act -- the same federal legislation cited by the Trump administration Thursday in unveiling a rule denying asylum claims to migrants who enter the country illegally.
"Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States," the legislation states, "he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."
Feinstein's letter initially notes that the senator has discussed possible legislation with then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. Feinstein then writes: "there is also an argument that there is sufficient flexibility in current law for the government to respond to the current crisis and that further legislation is not needed." She adds that the authority vested in the presidency by Section 212 (f) means that "no legislation is necessary to give your administration the tools it needs to respond to this crisis, and that any needed temporary measures can be implemented through presidential action."
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
The peers must be incompetent: Peer-reviewed ocean warming paper in premier journal found to have big math boo-boo
From the story here:
However, the conclusion came under scrutiny after mathematician Nic Lewis, a critic of the scientific consensus around human-induced warming, posted a critique of the paper on the blog of Judith Curry, another well-known critic.
“The findings of the ... paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”
Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame and thanked Lewis for alerting him to the mistake. ...
“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling said. “We really muffed the error margins.”
A correction has been submitted to the journal Nature.
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