All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Dalak]

"Yes, a homophobic, Latino-hating, Muslim-hating, racist, sexist pg won the US presidency, but for a beautiful moment I got to stamp my feet and help push through one of the most hated and unappealing political candidates of all time who was going through a political scandal that resonated with the American people and was virtually the only person in the world who could of lost to Trump all while feeling superior for calling supporters of her primary rivals "Bernie Bros" and implying they were misogynists right before I begged them to ignore all that and act like it never happened to vote for her too. You'd understand if you saw how many people on twitter liked and retweeted all my #WithHer hastags.

Strangely enough I didn't do any of those things, as I voted for Bernie in the primary, never used the phrase Bernie Bros, and I don't tweet more than once in a blue moon.

People like #30 on the other hand just might not have facebook.

[Kevinroc]

"Yes, a homophobic, Latino-hating, Muslim-hating, racist, sexist pg won the US presidency, but for a beautiful moment I got to stamp my feet and help push through one of the most hated and unappealing political candidates of all time who was going through a political scandal that resonated with the American people and was virtually the only person in the world who could of lost to Trump all while feeling superior for calling supporters of her primary rivals "Bernie Bros" and implying they were misogynists right before I begged them to ignore all that and act like it never happened to vote for her too. You'd understand if you saw how many people on twitter liked and retweeted all my #WithHer hastags.

It's 2018 and some people are still trying to refight the 2016 Democratic Primary.

Don't be that guy.

[Mister Mets]

Chelsea Manning is running for Senate in Maryland with a Hunger Games style ad.



She is challenging the incumbent Ben Cardin. My guess is she's going to get stomped. Being tied to Russia-friendly figures like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is not going to play well in a Democratic primary post-2016.

In other news, Republican Senators are looking forward to Romney joining their ranks.

GOP senators eager for Romney to join them
© Getty
Senate Republicans are eager for Mitt Romney to succeed retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), with some hoping he will emerge as an independent counterweight to President Trump.

The midterm election is shaping up as a referendum on Trump’s first two years in office — a dynamic that could endanger GOP control of the Senate, given that the president’s approval rating has hovered around 35 percent.

Some Senate Republicans worry that Trump is coloring the GOP brand in a way that could hurt their party’s future prospects, even though they largely support his agenda and are thrilled about his role in helping to pass a major tax bill.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), the most outspoken of Trump’s critics in the Senate GOP conference, said Romney would “offer a different vision, a more traditional Republican vision” if he came to the Senate.

He’s one of several Republican senators who has spoken to Romney personally and urged him to run.

Romney, if elected, “will be an independent voice in the caucus,” Flake said.

During Trump’s presidency, the “independent voice” in the GOP has mainly been Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a war hero who beat Romney for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

But McCain is battling brain cancer and has been less outspoken in recent weeks.

Flake and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), two of the Trump’s other prominent Senate Republican critics, will retire at the end of this year.

John Weaver, a GOP strategist who is a vocal critic of Trump, said Romney “has both the stature and the strength and the courage to stand up to this president and speak truth to power, which is severely lacking in the Senate, absent John McCain.”

[TheInvisibleMan]

ICE deported a 39 year old father with no criminal record today

guess that whole 'bad hombres' thing was trash

[Mister Mets]

Kerry Jackson notes that according to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty measure, California has the highest poverty rate in the country, despite prodigious spending. This definitely isn't a neutral argument, looking at spending from a conservative perspective.

Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That's according to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income.

Given robust job growth and the prosperity generated by several industries, it's worth asking why California has fallen behind, especially when the state's per-capita GDP increased approximately twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5%, compared with 6.27%).

It's not as though California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause. Several state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200% above the poverty line receive benefits. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments and "other public welfare," according to the Census Bureau. California, with 12% of the American population, is home today to about one in three of the nation's welfare recipients.

The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some states — principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia — initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under President Clinton and a Republican Congress. Tied together by a common thread of strong work requirements, these overhauls were a big success: Welfare rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the labor force.

The state and local bureaucracies that implement California's antipoverty programs, however, resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It's as though welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into it: 55% of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30% of natives.

Self-interest in the social-services community may be at fault. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort and security. To keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its "customer" base. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, California has an enormous bureaucracy. Many work in social services, and many would lose their jobs if the typical welfare client were to move off the welfare rolls.

Further contributing to the poverty problem is California's housing crisis. More than four in 10 households spent more than 30% of their income on housing in 2015. A shortage of available units has driven prices ever higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of misguided policies.

"Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings," explains analyst Wendell Cox. "Middle-income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing." The California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to shut down entire homebuilding projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing supply, but there's no real movement to change the law.

Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, "Less Carbon, Higher Prices," found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced … energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15% of all households." A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17% of median income in some areas.

The Census Bureau has been using the Supplemental Poverty Measure since 2011.

Since the publication of the first official U.S. poverty estimates, researchers and policymakers have continued to discuss the best approach to measure income and poverty in the United States. Beginning in 2011, the Census Bureau began publishing the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which extends the official poverty measure by taking account of many of the government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals that are not included in the official poverty measure. This is the seventh report describing the SPM, released by the U.S. Census Bureau, with support from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This report presents updated estimates of the prevalence of poverty in the United States using the official measure and the SPM based on information collected in 2017 and earlier Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements (CPS ASEC).

The standard's been around since the first term of the Obama administration.

In 2010, an interagency technical working group asked the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to develop a new measure that would improve our understanding of the economic well-being of American families and enhance our ability to measure the effect of federal policies on those living in poverty. The technical design of the supplemental poverty measure draws on the recommendations of a 1995 National Academy of Sciences report and the extensive research on poverty measurement conducted over the past 20 years. See the history of poverty measures in the United States infographic.

President Johnson’s 1964 declaration of his “War on Poverty” generated a new interest in measuring just how many people were in poverty and how that changed over time.

On September 12, 2017, the Census Bureau will release the seventh report on the supplemental poverty measure, containing estimates for the 2016 calendar year. The report presents estimates for the official and supplemental poverty measures and discusses differences between the two measures. A comparison of the major concepts is detailed in the table below and in this infographic.

We measure poverty two ways every year. The official poverty measure is based on cash resources. The supplemental poverty measure uses cash resources and also includes noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses).

The official poverty measure compares an individual’s or family’s pretax cash income to a set of thresholds that vary by the size of the family and the ages of the family members. These official poverty calculations do not take into account the value of in-kind benefits, such as those provided by nutrition assistance or housing and energy programs. Nor do they take into account regional differences in living costs or expenses, such as housing.

The supplemental poverty measure takes into account family resources and expenses not included in the official measure as well as geographic variation. First, it adds the value of in-kind benefits that are available to buy basic goods to cash income. In-kind benefits include nutritional assistance, subsidized housing and home energy assistance. Then it subtracts necessary expenses for critical goods and services not included in the thresholds from resources. Necessary expenses that are subtracted include income taxes, Social Security payroll taxes, child care and other work-related expenses, child support payments to another household, and contributions toward the cost of medical care and health insurance premiums.

Thresholds used in the supplemental poverty measure are produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Division of Price and Index Number Research using Consumer Expenditure Survey data that show how much people spend on basic necessities (food, clothing, shelter and utilities) and are adjusted for geographic differences in the cost of housing. The supplemental poverty measure thresholds are not intended to assess eligibility for government assistance.

[Jackmando7]

I was watching the news last night, is eating tide pods really a thing?

I bet they taste so good!

[mojotastic]

I was watching the news last night, is eating tide pods really a thing?

I bet they taste so good!

Is a meme, a deadly one since i think 3 kids have died, i blame popular blog youtbers for this.

[Mister Mets]

Is a meme, a deadly one since i think 3 kids have died, i blame popular blog youtbers for this.

There have been casualties, but it's not meme-related.

Those brightly colored laundry detergent pods actually pose more of a danger to adults with dementia than they do to kids, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

A total of two children and six adults with cognitive impairment died over the past five years as a result of ingesting the pods, the CPSC reported. The deaths were first revealed by independent non-profit consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports after it filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the CPSC.

Of the six, the CPSC told NBC News it was aware of five such deaths in the U.S. and one in Canada.

Since the products' launch, Consumer Reports and other safety advocates have argued that the colorful, squishy packets too closely resemble sweet confections — and should be redesigned.

"Manufacturers of liquid laundry detergent packets are fully committed to reducing accidental access to these products, which are used safely by millions of consumers every day," said the American Cleaning Institute in a statement emailed to NBC News.

The group says that in 2015 it participated in the setting of voluntary safety standards for laundry packets which include requiring safety latches on packages, opaque packaging (instead of clear), and adding a bitter film to the outside of packets.

One brand of laundry detergent packets, Tide Pods, was initially sold in clear, plastic, round containers. Their manufacturer, Procter & Gamble, is currently developing harder-to-open packaging and enhanced warning labels.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of life among people living with dementia," P&G said in a statement to NBC News, noting that it has been "formally collaborating" with the Alzheimer’s Association for the past year to prevent such accidents.

[Gray Lensman]

Kerry Jackson notes that according to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty measure, California has the highest poverty rate in the country, despite prodigious spending. This definitely isn't a neutral argument, looking at spending from a conservative perspective.



The Census Bureau has been using the Supplemental Poverty Measure since 2011.



The standard's been around since the first term of the Obama administration.

Two things would help California immensely. One - doing something about the housing crisis (some legislators are trying - but are opposed by NIMBYism and those who profit from the lack of housing)

Two - not being perpetually in the bottom 5 for how much federal money comes in per tax dollar paid out.

[Tazirai]

Along this line(and obviously assuming they are running against the current President), I cannot stress enough that I would hope that The Democratic Party and it's base have learned to think "Bigger Picture" about who they choose to nominate.

While they are obviously free to nominate folks who will run on that they just need their base to win, that is a plan where you need the equivalent of a Straight at the very least to have a chance at leaving the table with the pot.

That will be hard to do if you nominate someone who throws cards they need away or reduces the chances of winding up with that straight.

Should they do so, realize only part of that blame is the voter's fault.

Democrats haven't seen an election they could toss to Republicans. They NEED hat word Bi-Partisan to feel like they are being diffeent. Dems are weak sauce at least 50% of the party needs new blood.

I protest. He's more like Nero.

Maybe Nerogula?

[Tazirai]

Chelsea Manning is running for Senate in Maryland with a Hunger Games style ad.



She is challenging the incumbent Ben Cardin. My guess is she's going to get stomped. Being tied to Russia-friendly figures like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is not going to play well in a Democratic primary post-2016.

In other news, Republican Senators are looking forward to Romney joining their ranks.

Well maybe if we give her a fighting chance. The only people I can see against her would be scared of their own shadows against criticism at all establishment Democrats and MSM. MSM and mainline Democrats will use Russia for anything. If Trump can win and be a monster WITH literal ties, why can't she, an American hero?

Oh Yeah, because Democrats can have 90%of the public on their side and still bow their heads to the GOP.
This isn't the old days, at least Liberal and Progressive voters tend to be a bit smarter than that Politically. Now when it comes to GMO's and drinking Fru Fru drinks, Dems can be a bit moronic lol.

[Tazirai]

Hey, Democrats DOn'T help Trump fund the wall morons. They're gonna call you every name under the Sun anyway, let them do it for you being on the RIGHT side of History.

#CleanDACA

[mojotastic]

Spooky:



http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-426970...alflow_twitter

Want something spookier? One of the opposition leaders in Venezuela ended was assasinated and his last words are on camera.

In this video you hear him and other screaming to the government forces that they are surrendering
https://twitter.com/YourAnonVzla/sta...98294769909763

In this one you see him saying that the goverment forces wont take alive and that they are going to be assasinate.
https://twitter.com/IndignadosVezla/...16903764381696
https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/952927866303500288

Later today the goverment will say that they captured 5 "terrorist" and killed another one, the one killed was the leader
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-v...KBN1F41SO?il=0

[mojotastic]

There have been casualties, but it's not meme-related.

When i say meme is that for some reason this became trending in 2018 along with a bear yelling who touched their spaguetti and the Uganda knuckles.

[mojotastic]

Chelsea Manning is running for Senate in Maryland with a Hunger Games style ad.



She is challenging the incumbent Ben Cardin. My guess is she's going to get stomped. Being tied to Russia-friendly figures like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is not going to play well in a Democratic primary post-2016.

In other news, Republican Senators are looking forward to Romney joining their ranks.

As someone who doesnt know about Manning controversy and has no opinion about her, when i see her tweets or this video with all those emojis, they look silly, sometimes dumb but she is really positive and happy that i dont maybe i could end up liking her for her personality.