The only way I can see to level the playing field against China is to revoke their most favored trading partner status that Bush Jr. Gave them.

China has had MFN status since the mid-to-late 90s, largely at the behest of export-driven industries like aerospace. China was granted permanent MFN status in October of 2000. That's a month before the 2000 elections, and 3 months before W. took office. It's nice to see that Bush Derangement Syndrome is still flowering after nearly a full term by his replacement.

Solyndra was betting on higher prices for silicon and lower prices for copper, gallium, and iridium. Regardless of anything the Chinese did, they were going to get hosed big time.

The Russians certainly felt that ABM was technically possible. They deployed, what, 3 generations of ABM systems around Moscow and even went so far as to enshrine their ability to do so into the ABM treaty.

Why not? A publicly traded company's only duty is to make money for its shareholders...

Can we stop already with the incorrect summary of Ford vs. Dodge Brothers?

Most state codes permit, or even require, incorporators to
include a statement in the corporate charter that defines and limits the
purpose for which the corporation is being formed. If the corporation's
founders so desire, they can easily include in the corporate charter a recitation
of the Dodge v. Ford view that the corporation in question "is organized and
carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders."
  In reality, corporate
charters virtually never contain this sort of language. Instead, the typical
corporate charter defines the corporate purpose as anything "lawful."
What about state corporation codes? Do they perhaps limit the corporate
purpose to shareholder wealth maximization? To employ the common saying,
the answer is "not just 'no,' but 'hell no.'"

http://www.virginialawbusrev.org/VLBR3-1pdfs/Stout.pdf

I fail to see anything innovative about this. The Palo Verde Nuclear power plant uses reclaimed water for cooling as there's no nearby river of the correct size.

From Wikipedia:

Located in the Arizona desert, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not situated adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs

The CIA didn't like that and installed a puppet regime, everything went to hell after that.
It wasn't that the CIA didn't like it. The British didn't like the idea of Mosaddegh nationalizing oil resources out from under BP. They convinced the Americans to help them overthrow the government and install a puppet. Without that particular bit of work, I doubt the American CIA would have ever jumped in.

International law holds that an embassy is essentially the sovereign territory of that country. It may be before your time, but there was a little dust up where some "students" invaded a US embassy and held ~ 50 US citizens hostage for more than a year. You might want to check Wikipedia or something...

As signers of the non-proliferation treaty, Iran is entitled to the assistance of all other signatories in developing the full nuclear cycle, including enrichment and reactors.

You conveniently left out that the NPT also requires them to allow the IAEA unfettered access to their program to confirm that it's civilian in nature. That is not happening and is used as justification for the sanctions.

I can never remember the decision's name, but the TL;DR is that the US Supreme Court decided that the union fails in it's duty to represent if they don't go to bat for everyone in the union. There are exceptions for criminal activity, but essentially this results in an extremely adversarial relationship between unions and management. It would be far better if the law allowed unions the ability to clean their own house. Not saying they would, but it could go a long way towards moving to the German model of union-management relations.

Even with socialized medicine, it's still more expensive to hire 2 30 hour/week people. First off, there's a non-zero overhead for each worker. Two computer accounts, two home directories, two desks, two phones, etc. etc. If you go the European route and grant each worker 25 days off, there's 50 days of vacation being paid for a given amount of hours. I'm down with the argument that some people are getting the short end, but you don't do anyone any favors by saying things that aren't true.

That's a pretty stunning display of cognitive dissonance you've got going there.

doesn't jive with

The Sierra Club is a corporation. The ACLU is a corporation. The NRA is a corporation.

A corporation is nothing more than one or more people pooling resources to establish a common goal.

Remember, folks, Iran's apparently nuclear weapon program, while not illegal in any sense

Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Under that treaty, they are legally restricted from developing nuclear weapons and legally required to allow the IAEA to monitor any nuclear program that they did have.

If they're pursuing nuclear weaponry, it's clearly illegal.

One of the problems that we have to face is that CAFE moved people out of relatively efficient cars and into inefficient trucks. GM and Ford drastically cut back large car production and directed those resources into trucks due to some quirks* of CAFE. The upshot is that if you need a car that holds more than 2 adults and 2 kids, it's easier (and cheaper) to find what you want on the SUV side of the house. I'm totally behind increasing the gas tax. At the same time, we should repeal CAFE and let GM and Ford build what they can build where they can build it. *I can elaborate, but I'll abstain unless asked.

I thought HughesNet used the satellite for the download side and POTS for the upload side. If that's the case, you're still screwed when the phone line is down.

Yes. The trite summary is that a blind moron with a Celsius room temperature IQ could have seen that the US federal government was going to helicopter cash out to states to pay for voting "upgrades" following the fiasco in Florida during the 2000 election.

Diebold had a (small) division in South America that did voting machines, but they felt it was better to buy a local company. That company is the fucked up one, with the Microsoft Access, and the antivirus* and the glavens.

*Yes, Randall is a smart guy, but the antivirus in question wasn't running on the voting machines, it was running on the central server. ISTR that in that particular instance, the votes had actually been cast on Scantron style paper ballots.