I know it is a problem for most of you on the left when the constitution gets in your way, but constitutionally, he is obligated to honor the debts before any spending by law. that means even if congress passed a law saying all money appropriated either by entitlement law or whatever must be spent on anything other then the debt, it would be unconstitutional to do so.

Hey, look, it's the complete dumbass who has no reading comprehension but constantly pops up to defend whatever fucking stupid thing the right believes.

You just repeated exactly what I said...that the president must pay any currently outstanding debt. I just additionally pointed out that if there's an outstanding debt, he has to pay it, period, he can't save the money for a more important debt that's going to happen later.

And, despite what is going on in your fevered imagination, he is, in fact, required by law to pay social security, for example. If the president could just decide not to pay social security, I have a feeling some Republican president would have actually tried that at some point, don't you?

You did notice I used the word 'obligations' in my post, right? What the hell do you think that means? The government owes that money to people on social security. The government owes defense contractors. The government owes its employees their wages. Those are debts. They must be paid, on the schedule laid out in law. (Only if the executive has money, presumably.)

You, along with the right, have decided that the only 'debts' are 'issued bonds'. Or, rather, you idiots have spent absolutely no time thinking about this.

If someone comes and works on your house for an agreed on amount, and you haven't paid them yet, you are in debt to them. Um, duh. If you are a company, and pay employees your wages on Friday, and it's Thursday, the wages you owe for the week so far are debts and will be reflected as such on your balance sheet. Um, double-duh.

Bonds, are, rather obviously, just one of the many ways to be in debt...if they were the only way, uh, no human being would be personally in debt, because human beings usually don't issue bonds. We should try that with banks. 'No, I don't owe you any money. To owe money is to be in debt, and according to the Republicans the only sort of debt that exists is bonds. I have never issued you or anyone else any bonds, thus I am not in debt.'(1)

Now, you say we must pay debts because of the 14th amendment, and I don't think the 14th is that relevant, and assert that's just basic law, but whatever, that's rather moot. The point is, 95% of money that exits the Federal government is to pay obligations, aka debts, created by the law. (And the other 5% is to pay obligations created by entities under the executive's control that he could stop, but are still obligations once created...but he could stop making more obligations.)

The President is required, by law (And possibly by the constitution, whatever.), to pay all those debts, not to just the ones to bondholders.

1) Hilariously, this logic makes the entire debt ceiling rather pointless, because if 'bonds' are the only 'debt', the president could just get loans some other way, like via credit cards and other unsecured bank loans. Heh. Actually, money owed to the social security trust isn't 'real' bonds (We call them bonds, but they are not, really.), so we're already a good deal under the debt ceiling if you only count 'bonds'.

And that post should not be read to imply that no government spending is under control of the executive. Grants, for example, could stop being issued, and certain projects where the executive has discretion could be delayed.

However, social security couldn't possibly be stopped by the executive, and neither could 90% of military spending. Hell, 60% of the budget is 'mandatory', meaning it is money we have to pay under standing law, not under the year-to-year budget process. And probably 90% of the remaining money is allocated, by law, under the budget process.

I'd be amazed if the amount of money legally under the control of the president, to the extent he can legally choose not to spend it, was more than 5% of the budget.

(And this entire stupid argument, ignoring the fact it's illegal for the president, is under the rather dubious logic that people would continue buying government bonds simply because that is the one part of the government still working, while we're failing to make payments on everything else. Uh, no. That's not how loans and bond markets work.)

The problem with not raising the debt limit is that we spend roughly 1/3 more then we take in so spending over that limit would be absolutely required to stop. This is easy to do but it would mean that entitlements stop and other things until either the debt can get under control or the limit is raised.

So a default for not raising the debt limit is only a default if the president insists on not servicing our debt and keeping entitlements and/or other government not subject to a shutdown active.

*BZZZZZT* Wrong.

Government spending is required by law. That mean each time a government obligation comes due, the President is required to pay it by law. (Well, presumably he only to pay it if he has the money on hand. This has never been tested in court, but he can't do things that are physically impossible.).

There is no legal justification, and it would be criminal, for him to refuse to pay an obligation on Monday just because on Tuesday he has some debt to service. Even if that obligation on Monday is completely trivial that the government could easily not pay at the moment, he is REQUIRED BY LAW to pay it, right then and there, no matter what consequences happen on Tuesday due to lack of money.

(There are some circumstances where he can possibly make a judgement, like if he had to make two payments in the same day but could only afford one, but that's not actually important here.)

People who assert otherwise are either a) morons who don't understand that the executive branch operates under the law, including _when_ and to _whom_ payments are made, and cannot diverge from this, or b) Republicans who do understand them but are rather suspiciously suggesting that President Obama decide to break the law...they all pinky swear they won't impeach him, of course.

Forbes Magazine actually published an article asserting (and providing some evidence) that the healthcare.gov site works poorly on purpose, because the government doesn't want you to know how high the actual rates are.

Then Forbes Magazine has idiots working for it. We actually knew the prices well in advance of Oct 1, and they aren't that high.

That is not a snuff film. 'Snuff film' is not any random recording that happens to catch an actual death on film. A snuff film is a murder made for the express purpose of filming it.

And they do not, as far as anyone can tell, exist. Murderers are, for some inexplicably reason, reluctant to film themselves murdering people and then sell the film.

I don't see how that would help. The problem is that if you rig the system where the Democrats cannot win a specific district, than you operate a system where the real election is the primary. Which breaks everything.

Let's look at a non-Geryymandered normal district, in, let's say, a Republican state. 45% Republicans, 20% independents, and 35% Democrats. (Yes, even in the most 'biased' parts of the country, the 'majority' party rarely has an actual _majority_ registered voters.)

What happens in that district? The Democrat runs as a conservative Democrat, and the Republican runs as slightly right of center Republican. This is because the Democrat needs Republican votes, and the Republican needs to not completely lose the independents to the Democrat so can't go too far right. This produces, on average, reasonable electoral results. If either party strays too far in their direction, the other party will leap in and win.

But in a gerrymandered district, it has 55% Republicans (rigged to be exactly that, remember) and 35% Democrats and 10% moderates. Now Republicans don't need the votes of anyone but Republicans. So the points of the election are happening entirely within the Republican party, so the center has moved...

...but that's not the only problem.

Each party has a set of issues and they best talk about those issues from their direction. The 'center' of the Republican party might be at one point, but put two Republican equal-distance from the Republican center and the right-most one wins a debate, because the Republican party _speaks in those terms_. It is very hard for a Republican to fight from the left and still sound like a Republican..

And, on top of that, primary attract the most partisan voters. Someone who is barely a Republican is probably not going to vote in them.

So, in races where the other party cannot win, you get, on average, people who are much more extremist than the average of the party, or the average of the elected officials, would indicate they should be. It's just how the system works. (And everything I just said about Republicans applies to Democrats also. It's just they do less gerrymandering so end up in this stupid situation less.)

And then they win.

Having a runoff or transferable vote in the primary wouldn't help at all with this. The primary is electing the 'correct' people. The winner is the person that the vast majority of people _voting in the primary_ want elected. If anything, a runoff might make it worse, because in a few cases we've had moderatism Republicans win a Gerrymandered primary because the batshit crazy Republicans stole votes from each other. Making the election better reflect the will of the primary voters might well make things _worse_.

If you mean a runoff in the general...well, at that point you're talking about either the centerist Republican not running as a Republican, or the fringe Republican not running as a Republican...either of which they can already do. And neither of which they will do because their district is so heavily gerrymandered that whoever has a (R) after their name will win.

No, I don't see how transfering votes will help this at all. The obvious solution is to stop gerrymandering so, but, as I said, without gerrymandering, the Republicans don't end up with a majority in the House, so they clearly won't do that.

Now, what might help might be removing the primary altogether, like the California system, and just having the election between whoever gets the two highest sets of votes in a primary. But that is a very strange system to set up, and a good deal of the cause of the Gerrymandering is very partisan Republicans at the state level, and it seems unlikely they would go along with such a plan.

Of course, they might go along with it once their extremist candidates state losing elections, even in the carefully gerrymandered districts, because 10% of the Republican looked at the guy their side picked and said 'WTF? I'm not voting for that.'. That is bound to happen sooner or later....but who knows how the state Republicans will deal with it. They'll probably just start redistricting so that almost everywhere has 60% Republicans....make their extremism problem even worse.

I don't actually see a way out for the Republicans that they would actually do besides complete collapse.

And as for how this happened?

Well, it was a series of mistake the Republicans made over the decades. Mistakes that made it harder and harder for the Republicans to shift their positions, and harder and harder to attract new people.

And demographics continued to happen. And then they elected George W. Bush, which sped things up by about half a decade. And it because clear, about 2000 or so, they'd either have to shift their positions or cheat.

They couldn't shift their positions. (In fact, the one policy failure of the Bush administration was the attempt to shift positions on immigration.) Their position had calcified. They had let too many people in their party based on attacking those societal shifts, and couldn't change those things now.

So...they 'cheated'. (Note I'm not saying there was any lawbreaking. I mean cheating in the sense of not playing by commonly accepted rules.)

1) They rigged things so that they'd stay in power with less and less people, via gerrymandering. (They've sorta been doing this for a while, but 2000 is where it took off.)
2) They started inventing completely amazing attacks on Democrats. The much-vaulted 'civility' completely disappeared at the hands of the Republicans. (This arguable started under Clinton.)

But this backfired horribly. Either of those alone might have been okay, but when you put them together, when you create Republican-safe districts and Republicans and Fox News yammers on and on about how evil anything to do with the Democrats are...

...you're going to end up getting challenges from the right.

And thus the Tea Party was born. In 2009, just in time to get elected to local government for the census, for more redistricting, making each district even more extreme.

The problem is...these victories just made the Republican's problems worse. Now they were even more extreme and had more of a problem. So, to keep power, we see stuff like reducing access to the ballot box, and nonsense like that.

And now you get a government shutdown to try to appease the extremists. Which will, of course, just makes things even worse electorally. To remain viable, the party must moderate itself, and it cannot moderate itself thanks to the system it set up to stay in power.

People think political parties die because they're no longer 'relevant'. But that's not really it. A political party die because instead of choosing to stay relevant, it tries (And succeeds for a short time) to rig the game to stay in power while continuing to be irrelevant, so it keep attracting less and less relevant people. Until the entire thing implodes.

The fact is...the Republican party is dead. It's thrashing around and can do massive harm as it goes down, but it really has no exit from where it is. I'm not entirely sure whether what's going on right now are the final death throes, but at this point, it's going to see its power reduced at basically every election. (Remember, it didn't even win a majority of votes cast for the House.)

What people haven't noticed is the total votes and how Boehner's behavior wouldn't make sense in a functioning political party.

Here are, roughly, the totals:
A) About 30-40 Republicans want a shutdown for some undefined reason.
B) About 150 Republicans do not want a shutdown, but will take whatever position Boehner takes, and will not be rebels.
C ) About 20 Republicans assert they will be rebels to stop the shutdown.

Now, look carefully at that. Remember the 'Hastert Rule', which was a way to enforce party discipline? Where bills only got to the floor the majority of Republicans liked them? Notice anything wrong here?

The vast majority, groups B and C, of Republicans want to fund the government. They would have voted for a CR at any point if Boehner had put it forward. (In fact, we'd probably had a little fight over the House wanting to continue the sequester and thus some Democrats would vote against it, but that's in an alternate universe where this isn't going on.) I mean, now there might be problems getting it to pass, now that some B-group Republicans have stuck their necks out trying to follow the party-line, but all Boehner had to do was put it up for a vote three weeks ago, tada, it passes, and we continue onward.

And it's not like Boehner was in group A. He's a perfectly reasonable person. There was no reason, in a functioning political party, for him not to put that bill forward. So why didn't it happen?

Because the Republican party is completely and utterly broken.

I don't mean broken in the sense of a 'pushing policies no one likes', although that is possibly true. It is broken because, thanks to gerrymandering, a large portion of this country has competing _Republican_ races, and that's it.

And that gerrymandering seemed liked a clever plan back when it was set up, but this is what we get. A party in a civil war, and Boehner picked the side with the biggest guns. (Although the least amount of people.)

Now, admittedly, there's not actually a way out of this. Republicans have to gerrymander like that. Without that, they wouldn't even control the House! So they're not going to stop that.

Basically, folks, this is how a political party fails. How it unravels.

In fact, there have been signs of that for a while. The Hastert Rule is something only a weak party would need to start with. The Republicans going full-bore anti-ACA instead of saying 'Hey, you finally agreed to _our_ health care plan.' All the incredibly weird bullshit getting spewed by the right.

So what magical new technologist do you mysteriously think it requires?

Can we build pylons? Check, we build bridges quite some distance.

Can we build metal tubes? Subways systems say check.

Can we build air turbines? Why, yes we can.

What exactly do you feel is the technologically implausible part of this proposal?

Indeed. It's just damn high-speed rail, except in the air and put in a tube. Anyone who thinks we can't do that seems unaware we build bridges and subway tunnels, and it's not exactly rocket science to put a subway tunnel on a bridge.

Seems to me like it would be more expensive than HSR, but there do appear to be a lot of savings to offset the added costs. (I.e., being in a tube allows it to be propelled in a novel manner with a lot less air friction.)

And anyone who thinks this is somehow more at risk of earthquakes is an idiot. It's a tube. We can cheaply put sensors on it to detect damage...unlike HSR, where stuff could fall on the track and not be noticed. And putting structures in the air makes them more resistant to earthquakes, assuming they aren't built by idiots. It's the stuff directly on the ground that gets thrown around during an earthquake.

The only actual objection would be something like 'Musk can't do it that cheaply', and t would be more expensive in the long run. Maybe that's valid, maybe not, I don't know...but all other objections are stupid.

God in all his almighty powers and omnipresence and so probably just created the world some 6000 years ago, together with the whole universe and its history, making us believe it's much older than it really is.

No, he created it next Thursday, and once created, it will only _look like_ it's existed for billions of years.

I think the actual fact is God is up there laughing his ass off at idiots who have been wandering around claiming that a two random creation stories that ended up in the Bible are true. He's like "Guys, I was there, I set off this multi-billion year explosion thing, although I wasn't really paying attention for most of it because I had invented Angry Birds. Then I found a planet with some life on it, started screwing around, made people. (I made dinosaurs first, but couldn't figure out how to get them smart enough to talk to me, so I killed them and started over with the smartest creature, little lemur things.) The creation story things is just because all cultures had one, and whenever people asked me, I didn't want to confuse them so I was a little vague. I never expected anyone to write it down, much less write down _two_ versions of it, and then assert they are true over scientific evidence."

Actually, there's an even better example of 'all the world' as a problem. It's when Satan tempts Jesus by taking him to a mountain and Jesus can see 'all the nations of the world' below.

Now, that does say 'nations', not 'people' or 'land', so it can be argued Jesus doesn't need to see everywhere. But the Mayans, for example, had a perfectly functional 'nation' at the time, as did the Chinese, and there is nowhere on the planet or even in space that you can see Central America, China, and Israel at the same time.

And you think that God wrote the Bible because you've only be exposed to loud-mouth idiots on TV claiming to speak for Christians and idiotically claiming that everything in there is the literal truth.

Not only is that not the only opinion, it's not actually even the majority Christian opinion.

To seriously answer the question: God did not filled his book with logic traps to trick the people who want to believe in him because God did not write the Bible.

Human beings wrote the Bible, managing various degrees of accuracy for the stuff intended to be factual. Along with a lot of stuff that at no point was actually intended to be taken seriously. (Like the creation stories, or the Flood.) And, in fact, some stuff that is an outright fraud, like 1 Timothy.

They have no reason to be here... perhaps they where on exercise or got sent to the wrong address.

The police have no reason to be where? All I've seen a picture of police. An actual photograph, taken from human height not security camera height, not any sort of security camera still. Please note that during this raid they claim to have been asleep, so who the fuck was out there taking pictures?

Ah, yes, there was a 'reporter'. It's interesting how the only picture that the reporter got was a completely context-less photograph instead of them attempting to take down the door. And God only knows how CyberBunker is supposed to have gotten hold of this picture.

Incidentally, armed police do not sneak onto someone's property without a warrant, especially not by breaking through fences. And police officers with warrants do not just randomly walk away when they cannot get in.