Random Politics & Religion #00

Good luck, Laconic. It's been fun talking with almost every member of the hive mind today, but I need to sleep. I expect a fun backread tomorrow, folks. Don't let me down!

Sorry, going to bed as well the deflection and underhanded post editing going on around here has reached peck levels, can only take so much trolling.

I've done none of the above, good job trying to spin that though.

Yes I'd rather shoot down things that are untrue or just plain crazy, we've covered why before, but if you insist on why AGAIN then so be it.

It's boring, we'll make a few posts about it, +1 eachother, nod, chuckle and shake our heads about the state of things and then move on, as the beast is literally too big.

Mmmhmm. There's a reason a lot of posters don't feel like bothering with these topics anymore. And it's definitely not because the argumentative prowess of our special visitors became too sharp to handle.

Mmmhmm. There's a reason a lot of posters don't feel like bothering with these topics anymore. And it's definitely not because the argumentative prowess of our special visitors became too sharp to handle.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Republicans and business interests Wednesday of turning a blind eye to unequal pay and advancement opportunities for working women and said she isn’t “afraid to take them on.”

In a folksy address to Democratic women here, Clinton told anecdotes from her own working life and political career, sometimes inflected with a bit of the Southern twang she picked up as a young lawyer in Arkansas three decades ago.

“I don’t think I’m letting you in on a secret when I say too many women still earn less than men on the job, and women of color often make even less,” Clinton said to nods and knowing murmurs of agreement.

The friendly crowd of black and white legislators and activists seemed eager to embrace Clinton as the party’s front-runner and paper over any lasting damage from Clinton’s bruising and racially charged 2008 loss to Barack Obama in South Carolina.

Clinton included grace notes to Obama and to her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who had angered leading black politicians here seven years ago by seeming to discount Obama’s candidacy.

“I have spent my adult life going to bat for children, families and our country and I do know how hard this job I’m seeking is,” she said. “I’ve seen it up close and personal.”

There was no mention of Republican candidate Carly Fiorina — the only woman in the crowded GOP field — who turned up here Wednesday and accused the Democrat of ducking hard questions.

Clinton is Fiorina’s foil and chief raison d’etre. The former Hewlett-Packard chief executive tells crowds that her business background makes her the more accomplished choice to become the first female president.

“The Republican Party needs a nominee who will ask these questions on a general debate stage” and answer them, Fiorina told reporters outside the hotel where Clinton was about to speak.

During Clinton’s speech, she told a story also recounted in her memoir last year about how Obama wouldn’t take no for an answer when he asked her to be his first-term secretary of state. Her husband noted that she had also initially refused to marry him, she said.

If there was a pattern, both decisions came out the right way, Clinton suggested to laughter.

She got a bigger laugh with a crack about how every president, no matter how youthful and vigorous they appear on Inauguration Day, goes gray with the stress of the job.

“Now let me tell you, I’m aware, I may not be the youngest candidate in this race,” Clinton said. “But I have one big advantage: I’ve been coloring my hair for years.”

That line, also a staple of her fundraising talks to big donors, got the loudest applause of the afternoon.

“Noooo. You’re not gonna see me turn white in the White House,” Clinton said. “And you’re also not gonna see me shrink from a fight.”

Clinton said Republicans in Congress are standing in the way of legislation that would “give women the legal tools we need to fight discrimination at work,” and that Republican candidates are discounting the issue of equal pay.

“What century are they living in?” Clinton asked.

But Allison Moore, national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, said in a statement that Clinton “has a habit of contradicting pro-women words with anti-women actions.” She pointed to allegations that Clinton paid women less than men in her Senate office.

“The reality is that Hillary Clinton will say anything to benefit herself politically,” Moore said.

South Carolina is the last of the four early-primary states Clinton is visiting at the outset of her second presidential attempt. It was her first campaign trip to the state since 2008, when she not only lost the state’s primary but saw the start of an exodus of black voters from her presidential campaign.

Weeks before the Jan. 26, 2008, South Carolina primary, Clinton held a commanding lead over Obama, who was still relatively unknown to black voters. She led Obama 52 percent to 39 percent among African Americans in a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in December 2007. But by the end of February, a Post-ABC News poll had Obama leading among black voters 62 percent to 30 percent.

“Some of you might remember we had a pretty vigorous campaign in 2008,” Clinton said Wednesday. “Both President Obama and I worked really hard, and he won and I lost. And then I went to work to make sure he’d win.”

Clinton also held a meeting with a group of minority small-business owners in Columbia, which is the state capital. Black voters made up about half of the registered Democrats in South Carolina.

This time, Clinton is hoping to keep together the coalition of young, female and minority voters that twice carried Obama to victory.

No one mentions the wounds of 2008 much these days, both black and white organizers of the Democratic women’s event said.

“You have to let things go,” said Joyce M. Rose-Harris, an African-American board member of the state Democratic Women’s Council.

Polls now suggest that Clinton remains popular among black voters. About three in four African Americans viewed Clinton favorably in a Washington Post-ABC news poll in early 2014.

I've mentioned this before but it seems this needs to be repeated

Bush negociated the Iraq treaty in 2008 to withdraw all troops by December 31, 2011.

This was a bipartisan decision.

As for Germany and South Korea, completely different situations. Bases were set-up and maintained there because of the cold war/communisim and the countries wanted the US there, unlike Iraq.

Many bases in Germany have been closing down since the 90's and more will be closed down soon. Some are there to support NATO operations and will continue under NATO funding.

Hillary Clinton is going the Jenny McCarthy route...

Not at all.

Not to even mention that you are entirely not understanding the board, which I do find kind of funny, but also rather sad.

Based on the past few pages -- well, the entire thread, really, but it's really picked up over the past week -- all I can imagine is that regardless of their political leanings, more and more folks around here view themselves as the gritty antihero of a noir novel that's cover looks something like this:

john kasich

In comes Kara to insist that we consider the facts rather then just groan like Frankenstein's monster...

OBAMA BAD!!!

So far it's kicking the *** off of our throw fifty candidates up against a wall to see if any of them stick approach...

I'm biased as hell but so far john kasich looks the least crazy of the field...

And just yesterday I had the biggest urge to buy a fedora.

obama could have totally gone against all our prior agreements. the congress, and the will of the people

The U.S. military mistakenly sent live anthrax bacteria to laboratories in nine U.S. states and a U.S. air base in South Korea, after apparently failing to properly inactivate the bacteria last year, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

The Pentagon said there was no known suspected infection or risk to the public. But four U.S. civilians have been started on preventive measures called post-exposure prophylaxis, which usually includes the anthrax vaccine, antibiotics or both.

Twenty-two personnel at the base in South Korea were also given precautionary medical measures although none have shown sign of exposure, the U.S. military said.

The four in the United States face "minimal" risk, said Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has begun an investigation of the incident. They had been "doing procedures that sent the agent into the air," he said.

When anthrax becomes airborne, it can cause a deadly illness called inhalation anthrax. That occurred in 2001, when anthrax sent through the U.S. mail to government and media targets killed five people.

The anthrax, which was initially sent from a Utah military lab, was meant to be shipped in an inactive state as part of efforts to develop a field-based test to identify biological threats, the Pentagon said.

"Out of an abundance of caution, (the Defense Department) has stopped the shipment of this material from its labs pending completion of the investigation," said Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren.

The CDC said it has launched an investigation of the mishap.

All samples involved in the investigation will be securely transferred to the CDC or affiliated labs for further testing, spokeswoman Kathy Harden said, adding that CDC has sent officials to the labs "to conduct on-site investigations."

The mishap comes 11 months after the CDC, one of the government's top civilian labs, similarly mishandled anthrax.

Researchers at a lab designed to handle extremely dangerous pathogens sent what they believed were killed samples of anthrax to another CDC lab, one with fewer safeguards and therefore not authorized to work with live anthrax.

Scores of CDC employees could have been exposed to the live anthrax, but none became ill.

That incident and a similar one last spring, in which CDC scientists shipped what they thought was a benign form of bird flu but which was actually a highly virulent strain, led U.S. lawmakers to fault a "dangerous pattern" of safety lapses at government labs.

In the latest case, the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah reported in March 2014 that gamma irradiation had inactivated the anthrax stock in question, and along with another Army facility, began shipments that continued through April 2015, a U.S. official said.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the suspected live anthrax samples were sent to U.S. federal, private and academic facilities.

The anthrax was sent to laboratories in Maryland, Texas, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia, officials said.

The Maryland laboratory alerted the CDC late on Friday that it had a live sample and by midday on Saturday, the laboratories were notified, the U.S. official said.

The four civilians receiving post-exposure prophylaxis are in Delaware, Texas and Wisconsin. "Workers who were not in the same area at the same time are not at risk," the CDC's McDonald said.

The sample sent to South Korea was subsequently destroyed, the Pentagon and the U.S. military there said.

A U.S. emergency team responded to destroy the sample on Wednesday at the U.S. base after what was expected to be an inactive training sample was thought to be live bacteria, the U.S. military in South Korea said.

Precautionary medical measures were given to 22 personnel who may have been exposed during the training at the base about 35 km (20 miles) south of Seoul and none of them have shown any sign of exposure, it said.

Experts in biosafety were astonished by the lapse.

"These events shouldn't happen," said Stephen Morse of Columbia University, a former program manager for biodefense at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Scientists working with the most dangerous pathogens follow a "two-person rule," never handling samples alone. The second pair of eyes is meant to insure scientists take proper precautions during experiments.

Two people should also vet shipments of supposedly killed anthrax. "We can put greater safeguards in place," Morse said.

Thats not as bad as when we flew with nukes.

For ***'s sake. How do you "accidentally not deactive" *** anthrax?

I mean, everyone makes errors, but that's the kind of thing you pay very, very close attention to. It's like, sure, a doctor may flick through their pager while a patient describes his back pain, but when they're doing lumbar surgery on the same patient they're paying the *** attention to what's being cut.

Did someone's wife go into labor on the "kill the anthrax" day and just happily forget about a potentially major biohazard risk?

Edit: And please don't break into the same, trite "lol government workers" thing. I can tell you that private science labs are (generally) far more lax with their procedures.

Scott Walker.

That's ironic, because I read an article recently about a surgeon who accidentally left his cellphone INSIDE a patient he'd just performed surgery on.