TenuredVulture wrote:Someone should write a book on the popularity of authoritarianism among New York City voters. Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg all fit that mold quite nicely.

Roger Dorn wrote:
That's funny coming from a Mayor who has banned trans-fats, would like to ban consumption of large quantities of soda in specific cases, has enacted a highly controversial "search and frisk" policy, and has the Muslim communities in NYC under near constant surveillance.

TenuredVulture wrote:Someone should write a book on the popularity of authoritarianism among New York City voters. Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg all fit that mold quite nicely.

Paul said that the question of an "imminent threat" was the pivotal one when considering drone policy.
“Here’s the distinction — I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat an act of crime going on," Paul said. "If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it’s different if they want to come fly over your hot tub, or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities."


Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... z2RKPAKcVp

pacino wrote:Rand Paul is making no sense with his new statements on drones:

Paul said that the question of an "imminent threat" was the pivotal one when considering drone policy.
“Here’s the distinction — I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat an act of crime going on," Paul said. "If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him, but it’s different if they want to come fly over your hot tub, or your yard just because they want to do surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities."


Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... z2RKPAKcVp

huh

dajafi wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Someone should write a book on the popularity of authoritarianism among New York City voters. Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg all fit that mold quite nicely.

I guess I'll do my usual defense of Bloomberg thing.

1) He's been among the stronger free speech advocates in recent memory, including the "Ground Zero Mosque."

2) The smoking, trans fat and large soda "bans" (scare quotes mean nothing is actually banned) are all grounded in public finance.

3) Even with stop-and-frisk, race relations here have been better under Bloomberg than probably at any time in NYC history. He's also advocated for easing marijuana laws (though his PD sure has made a lot of busts).

I find it funny when libertarians get up on their high horses about Bloomberg. His social liberalism is at the far left end of the American norm (and thus in the dead middle here), and he's almost Koch-like in his disdain for economic regulation and sympathy for the economic predator class. That he--an actual entrepreneur who really did create something of value--seems to buy their self-aggrandizing line of bullshit is the only thing that's led me to doubt his brilliance.

At the same time, he's a manager at heart and mindful of impositions on public space (smoking in bars) and finance (the strain on public hospitals from countless low income NYers smoking and quaffing 64 ounce sodas over their lifetimes).

I can think of two public fights Sarah Palin picked with Bloomberg: the "Ground Zero Mosque" and the size restriction on sodas. He was for both. She was against both. Not a tough call for me.

I'm not an across the board fan. I think he's made some dumb mistakes and shown shocking arrogance. But when I look at the collection of clowns, hacks and half-wits bidding to succeed him, I kind of wish he'd stay in forever.

Roger Dorn wrote:If I hear one more politician state that terrorists want to take away our freedoms...its an insult to the basic intelligence of the American constituent. Does anyone buy that crap anymore?

(Reuters) - When Texas farmer Donald Adair bought the floundering West Fertilizer Co in 2004, his neighbors in the rolling countryside near West were grateful he had saved them from driving extra miles to Waco or Hillsboro to buy fertilizer, feed and tools.

After the plant exploded last week, flattening homes, damaging schools, killing 14 people and leaving some 200 others with injuries including burns, lacerations and broken bones, they still described the 83-year-old owner as honest and good.

"I like him very well, he's helped me out," said William Supak, a retired farmer who lives a few hundred yards (meters) from a farm house owned by the Adairs, and recalled a time when his neighbor helped save his hay by putting out a fire.

West Fertilizer disclosed to a Texas state agency that, as of the end of 2012, the company was storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, mixed with other compounds to produce a dry fertilizer. The same type of solid fertilizer was mixed with fuel and used by Timothy McVeigh to raze the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people.

West Fertilizer had been fined occasionally for regulatory violations since Adair bought it, but a Texas state environmental official described its safety record as "average."

A search of federal and state legal records did not turn up any lawsuits against Adair personally or any of his companies.

Cernosek, the local insurance agent, was quick to defend Adair's reputation even though his home 500 yards from the plant is likely a total loss.

"Hell no," he said when asked if he held Adair responsible for what happened at the plant. "I in no way will ever file a lawsuit due to any of this."

The days following the explosion, though, have been revealing: the site had 270 tons of ammonium nitrate in 2012—Timothy McVeigh used about 2.4 tons when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. And as State Impact reports, the site had no sprinklers or fire barriers in place
And while the EPA doesn't require plants to report their possession of ammonium nitrate, the Department of Homeland Security does, according to NBC News. The plant in West had made no such disclosure--in fact, DHS didn't even know the plant existed until it exploded last week. Congressman Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), referred to the plant as being "willfully off the grid."

It gets worse, as more and more instances of agency fines and regulatory malpractice continue to be culled from records.

In 2006, the plant was investigated, almost two weeks after complaints of smelling of ammonia, by the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, which discovered that the site had been operating without the necessary air quality permit for two years.
The plant was also fined in 2006 by the EPA for not having a risk management plan in place. Those plans are also designed to inform local emergency responders of the type of explosive chemicals that might be on site. But it might not have even mattered if local responders knew about the potential explosives—volunteer fire departments like the one in West and other smaller towns are frequently undertrained for handling industrial accidents.

And because of fuzzy zoning laws, schools and apartment buildings were built nearby after the plant had already been constructed.
Whether this accident will affect Texas' booming drilling industry (read: fracking) or result in future legislation is unclear. Governor Rick Perry did tell reporters: “Listen, if there’s a better way to do this, we want to know about it. If there’s a better way to deal with these events, we want to have that discussion, whatever that might be.”

But UT-Austin journalism professor Bill Minutaglio—who wrote about the devastating 1947 Texas City industrial explosion (which also involved ammonium nitrate) in his book City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle—offers a weary outlook in his op-ed for The New York Times:

As before, there will be demands that Texas be willing to scrutinize companies so tragedies like the one in West never occur again. But if history is any guide, lawmakers and officials will still err on the side of industry and less so on the side of public safety. And there will be another West in the years to come.

But it wasn’t until six decades later, in 2011, that the United States Department of Homeland Security announced proposals to oversee the sale of ammonium nitrate and require anyone selling, buying or transporting 25 pounds of the fertilizer to officially register with the agency. This move came 16 years after Timothy J. McVeigh, a disgruntled Army veteran, used ammonium nitrate to take down a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

Whether this would have been enough to prevent the Texas City Disaster is impossible to say. It would not have done what many of the people who survived the explosion said they wanted most: simply to have been warned by state and federal officials that dangerous chemicals, explosive fertilizers, were near their homes, schools and churches.

It’s a situation similar to West — where news is emerging that Texas officials were well aware that schools and homes were close to the big fertilizer tanks. Citizens of West of course knew about the plant, too — as one man told The Wall Street Journal: "It was always just there. You never thought about it."

Sixty-six years after the Texas City Disaster, it is finally time for this pathological avoidance of oversight to end in Texas. To understand how deep the state’s regulatory resistance runs, one need only to listen to the state’s attorney general, Greg Abbott, who often spearheads the Lone Star state’s rebuffs to federal imperatives. Earlier this year he was asked what his job entailed. “I go into the office in the morning,” he replied. “I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”

Long ago in Texas City, many of the residents were men and women with callused hands. They were patriots with enduring faith that America was, really, the safest place on earth. That the men in charge had put every safeguard in place. Perhaps in West, there were some who still had unblinking faith in the muscled-up industrial soul of Texas, that it had been scrutinized to the right degree, and that the lawmakers in Austin had made sure of it. It is time for Texas to invite the deep scrutiny, the careful oversight, that those people deserve.

“President Obama does not want an immigration bill to pass,” he stated confidently. “I think the president wants to campaign on immigration reform in 2014 and 2016. And I think the reason the White House is insisting on a path to citizenship for those who are here illegally is because the White House knows that insisting on that is very likely to scuttle the bill.”

Crawford pressed Cruz one what he would do with the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who were already living in the United States.

“I think there could probably could be a compromise on that if a path to citizenship was taken off the table,” he insisted.