The "Tea party" is dead and has been for better than 6 years now. The "tea party" was taken over by the Koch brothers tentacles (tea party express was their creation) and subsumed into the larger Koch brothers machinery. The tea party as originally founded had almost nothing to do with religion, abortion or any of the other far right social conservative causes. It was formed in opposition to the ACA (Obamacare) and "stimulus" as a grass roots rejection of the deficit spending that had spiraled out as part of the recession.

This guided the republican caucus for a few years and still has lingering effects but because of the Koch brothers tireless spending the cause has now been subsumed away from concern about spending to being used against the typical causes of the Koch brothers organizations. This includes mobilizing the social conservatives. You see this in bills going through the republican house that restore deficit spending on the military without any counter reduction in spending elsewhere. Something that would have never happened while the real tea party groups still had say.

The tea party died a long time ago. What remains, Tea Party 2.0 is an arm of the Koch groups.

Unelected senators were the reason the senate was a bastion of corruption and pay for play politics. Returning the senate to such a state would NOT be an improvement. It would be just about the only action you could take right now that would make it worse.

A better question would be "why isn't he saying he didn't?"

So you advocate for that police state where anyone arrested is obviously guilty unless they prove otherwise.

It doesn't matter why Roberts said what he said because he's not guilty of anything until he's convicted of it. He could be a blow hard, he could be a braggart, or quite simply the FBI could be taking statements out of context as Roberts has already claimed. None of it is relevant until he's charged and tried for the crime and I don't see him being tried. I see the FBI trying to strong arm him, something they are very very good at.

What I do see is a lot of people in the airline industry, the people in the know, rolling their eyes and saying he's a blowhard. And they are a people with the knowledge, not the FBI and not Roberts. From what I've seen of the description of events I also see a lot of strong arming by the FBI. According to Roberts they basically tried to force him to reveal his research to Boeing under threat of imprisonment. None of that is cool.

When the FBI is on TV claiming you are refusing to be interviewed you can answer that question.

You head that off be offering to be interviewed in your lawyers office with a recording device running. This is against FBI policy so they will automatically refuse. Now they can't claim you are refusing to be interviewed.

The FBI is notorious for taking statements out of context and using them against you, including charging you with lying when your out of context statement isn't correct. You should NEVER talk to the FBI without a lawyer and without a recording device running that records the entire conversation. The ironic thing is the FBI will actually refuse to interview you with a recording device running because they then can't use out of context statements against you.

Never ever talk to the FBI unless it's in YOUR lawyers office with a recording device running. There are plenty of videos on youtube that explain how the FBI uses these conversations against people and why you should never talk to them.

It's not a sideline, it's entirely the point. The German citizenry isn't willing to see their taxes go up again to pay Greek debt that was incurred buying votes. The again in that sentence is the important bit. Germany has already raised the taxes on their people to pay the original Greek bailout. They will NOT allow their government to do it again. And it infuriates them to no end that this happened because the Greek government lied about their spending and borrowing and used much of the proceeds to "buy votes" by raising minimum wages, increases pension plans and other electorate appeasing measures that require cash.

For example, the current Greek government refuses to lower the minimum wage. Most people don't even realize that the minimum wage in Greece is almost 50% higher than in Germany! This goes for almost all the items of the bailout under attack. The most galling thing to most Europeans is that the troika didn't even require the Greeks to cut their higher wage rates, higher pension payments and such to match their European neighbors, they only required that they reduce them partially and this is how the Greeks react?

Coming down to reality is hard, they built up a system with purchased votes that wasn't sustainable and it's a big impact to lower down to reasonable values. I personally don't agree with the austerity push, I think it's catastrophic policy with no historical backing and heavy counter demonstrations that it doesn't even work. But, I do agree with the rest of the Europeans that the EU and IMF have been extremely lenient with Greece and to have it thrown back in their face as asking too much is frankly stupid.

But that's the problem with Greece's current government. They should have attacked austerity, not the measures they are expected to undertake to re-balance their economy with the rest of Europe. Many of the Torika's requirements were real improvements that would have been long term very positive for the Greeks economy and some of those are the ones the Greeks are attacking the hardest, rather than attacking the real problem, which is this Austerity idea that you can succeed by cutting spending during a recession. The Greek economy was heavily damaged by the Austerity drive where the measures should have been more targeted towards competition and divestiture of state assets because it was those very state assets and the salaries they included that bankrupted the Greek government to begin with. And this dragging of the feet on everything and inexperience has just created an environment where everyone in the economy is running for cover. The cuts to the pensions and minimum wage levels should have been done with a permanent freeze to increases until inflation balanced them with the rest of Europe because of the direct and immediate damage a large cut would do. The biggest problem the greeks face is a general disrespect for tax collection, that's what government should be spending their time fixing.

Considering they are two completely different things you shouldn't be struggling with it.

The first, apple colluding with others, was a violation of the law. Market collusion between competitors is illegal, in this case in particular it cost hundereds of people thousands of dollars apiece.

The second, was a civil suit between companies likely for unfair competition. Apple's settlement of suit, rather than just going to court and winning indicates that Apple might have engaged in some improper behavior in acquiring those employees.

The only the first was illegal, the second very well could have opened Apple up to a civil lawsuit or they could have just settled to avoid the legal fees. Here's a tip for you, anyone can sue anyone (including themselves) for any reason. It's not till you get to court that you have to actually justify that suit and present evidence.

Except as noted 10000 times in the thread the article does not match the account within the court filing the article is based on. Apparently the journalist is a moron and you believe everything you read on the internet.

The court filing says explicitly that it was HER personal phone.

It also opens you up to some pretty massive civil liability.

Considering the quality of journalism today I wouldn't trust a reporter for anything.

With an economy 97% based on carbon energy when the rest of the world does something about climate change (and it's not that far off, it's already started with solar power becoming cheaper than coal power) Russia will be left high and dry in a economy worse than the 90's. This will be entirely Putin's fault because he's prioritized carbon based energy above everything else.

Like all things Russian this attempt at self production will fail because the corruption and governance problem (the true hallmark of Putin's Russia) will destroy all Russian competitiveness internationally and locally. As with all things it will be cheaper to buy smuggled in western products at near 50% black market markup rather than purchase a Russian produced item that's paid a 10% bribe at every step of production, transport and distribution.

Putin's Russia cut it's own throat when he based on the economy entirely on carbon and allowed the sickness of corruption and bribery to flourish.

You might not like Congress, hell you might not even like your representative but most people do. Individual senators and rep's have approval ratings in the 60-90% (very high) range with their constituency. The overall congressional approval rating is so low because everyone doesn't like the people everyone else picked, not because they hate their own.

This is something pretty scary. The CIA basically violated the separation of powers and ignored and actively opposed congressional oversight. These are prime tenets of our system. Throwing those checks and balances and oversight out and we are one step away from a dictator running things out the CIA office. Government leaders can't just decide they are going to stop worrying about those constitutional limits on power and doing whatever they want.

The most infuriating part of this is that Congress already has the power to punish him. They CAN hold him in contempt and refer him for prosecution for lying under oath. The problem is they won't, because that could endanger national security or some such bullshit. So they write a stupid letter and ask him to admit he broke the law while they wag their finger at him when they should be voting to hold him in contempt.

In summary, though this is a huge concern I have a hard time getting worked up about it when Congress won't use the power it already has to punish him for lying and breaching the separation of powers. Hell, they could de-fund his position and bar the government from paying him a salary if they wanted to be real dicks. They have numerous ways to punish him but they won't and that's the scariest thing of all. Someone breached a basic tenet of our government, lies to Congress and invalidates congressional oversight and the people with the power to punish him won't do it.

ALL the climate models predict irreversible changes. Every single one of them. We have no realistic way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere other than waiting for plants to do it AND sequester it (the plant material can't rot), and it's very hard to sequester carbon now that bacteria can eat plant matter.

The only difference between the models and predictions is the total atmospheric concentration of CO2 when it finally levels off. There is very little difference in the models about what various concentrations of CO2 will mean temperature wise. It's literally a grade school formula to figure out how much heat the additional CO2 will trap. There are only slight differences in the mitigating factors such as increases or decreases in atmospheric moisture and cloud cover that will affect the heat uptake.

The only thing that really differentiates the models is the calculations of actual emissions. No one really knows how much CO2 is being emitted so scientists have to guess based on various outputs like the amount of oil sold, etc. So they pick an emission level, then they apply their factors for cloud cover and atmospheric moisture and a few other minor factors and in a nutshell you've captured the bulk of the differences between the models. The predictions of emissions are tweaked as they get semi-annual measurements of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

But the models have been remarkably accurate (remarkable given the complexity of the climate) at predicting year to year concentrations and the temperature increase that has caused.

The exaggeration is lumping everyone into the same category. If you can't understand that you are beyond help.

What is clear is that atmospheric carbon has been much higher than today and the oceans and life were doing well.

Completely true. What you fail to mention is that humans didn't exist as a species the last time the earth saw carbon levels this high. And if we keep going at the rate we are in no time at all we will have restored the atmosphere of the dinosaurs, when mammals were no bigger than small rodents. The sun was also at the time putting out significantly less heat, as much as 70% lower than current emission rates. Not only that but as the sun ages emission rates will continue to increase.

Most people won't find any of that very reassuring, that's probably the reason you didn't say WHEN the planet last saw CO2 levels that high or under what conditions. But don't let silly little facts get in your way!