StrangeSox

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:53 AM) After wasting more of my time than I want to admit tallying them up myself from legal settlement reports, the California EPA has collected ~$450,000 in fines for air pollution in 2011 so far. No wonder businesses are fleeing Fascifornia More funny/sad when you combine this with the negative effective tax rate in the uber-repressive, highest-rate-in-the-developed-world US!

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:42 AM) House Speaker Boehner has offered a sidelining resolution that he hopes he can use to keep an actual War Powers resolution from ever coming to the floor. The Speaker's proposed resolution would essentially express disapproval coming from the House and ask the White House to better explain what they are doing there, however, it would not have the form of a legitimate War Powers Act challenge of the sort that could actually force the White House to withdraw from Libya. Greenwald is melting down over this. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_gr...ibya/index.html

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:42 AM) LOL at that being nationalizing. Its business. Scrape up cheap assets to re-sell later, grant some to private or public use which takes surplus out of circulation... its much more stimulative with better multipliers than the other garbage we did, not to mention that like TARP, the government could make some of the money back and be out of the business over a period of like a decade. It was a joke mocking both Socialist sloganeers and right-wing "ZOMG OBAMMA IS A SOCIALIST COMMIE-NAZI!" reactionaries, I wasn't trying to make fun of your point or what you said.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:44 AM) Yes, plus US EPA... not sure of any others that would be significant. Balta already cited that negligible figure.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:36 AM) I still think that, if we were going to use taxpayer dollars at all to stimulate the housing market... that instead of using those tax credits and temporary construction jobs, the government should have just flat out bought property directly in a targeted way, nationalizing housing for the proles.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:37 AM) Depressing thread is depressing. Can a mod please add this as the sub-headline for this thread?

State EPA's?

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:28 AM) No! They are doing the public a service by letting them know that Sony has bad security. What if someone hacks them!??! Oh wait. Yeah, this case appears to be a little more malicious than, say, Anoymous taking down an "internet security expert" firm using default backdoor passwords.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 09:25 AM) Looks more like 2015 to me, to get back to a 2007-ish or early 2008-ish level, which is what I'd consider "normal" levels. But yeah, its a few years off to get to that point. Just keep in mind that they don't necessarily need to be all the way back to normal for my predicted events to occur. With the huge drops in new homes being built, and continued population increase, the level at which the surplus becomes very low can come pretty quickly, and the demand side will increase as I noted earlier. The uptick I mentioned likely won't happen this year or next, but some time in the couple years after that I think the likelihood starts to go up pretty quickly. This is more or less what the realtor we were working with late last year said.

My [soon-to-be] in-laws have zero prospect of selling their relatively cheap condo soon. Thanks to all of the foreclosures, they'd have to take probably a $50k hit on a condo they paid $80k for. So instead it sits empty because the HOA won't let you rent.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 07:49 AM) I still love the Discovery Planet Earth movies. Every single one of them It was a BBC program first, and longer! Agreed, though, some of the best television I've ever seen. Their "When We Left Earth" series was fantastic as well.

More proof of how the US has the toughest corporate tax structure in the world!

Tex's argument for why Perry has a good shot at being the GOP nominee parallels my argument for why he's a terrible person, lol.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 3, 2011 -> 08:03 AM) How else can a conclusion regarding no new Hispanic districts? The map protects GOP districts. All people living in those districts, regardless of race, will have a rep. The rep will in all likelihood be a GOP. And that's somehow a problem. Why? The argument is that, the way the districts are drawn, hispanics are underrepresnted i.e. there's 10,000 hispanics for every rep vs. 5,000 caucasions.

I don't have to find things conservatives don't like, I'm stating why he's a terrible person.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2011 -> 08:28 PM) I think lecturing the country about your balanced budget and the evils of deficit spending when your budget is only balanced because of the stimulus is a pretty good policy point for starters. As I noted previously, I think opposig government regulation when regulation saved Texas from a housing bubble is missing the point. There's also the whole "refused to review the conviction of a man sentenced to death despite a whole bunch of expert opinion that it was bulls*** because it would make Perry look bad" And cutting education when your state already is pretty horrible in education.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Apr 26, 2011 -> 12:18 PM) The proposed Department of Education rule change for student loans, which has faced heavy industry opposition: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/prop...d-debt-earnings So, the new regulations are out. Surprise, they're heavily compromised thanks to industry lobbyists.

Why bother messing around with that?

10-year real wage gains worse than during Depression

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2011 -> 03:12 PM) I would have thought a $100 million ad campaign 2 weeks ago would have pushed that higher. I'm sure a higher percentage believe in the Rapture in general, but that's millions of people who believe the world will literally end within a few decades.

18% of GOP primary voters believe the Rapture will happen within their lifetimes.

I can't ever tell when you're being sincere or sarcastic.

Huh, apparently Dallas-FW led the nation in job growth recently. http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/05/31/31...gain-leads.html

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2011 -> 11:36 AM) Occasionally you'll find something interesting, but not usually in their ghosts of dead alaskan truckers shows. Usually it's just a repackaged awesome BBC documentary but they've stripped out Attenborough.