Because Obama has spent the last year studiously doing nothing to upset conservative talk radio, in the desperate hope that Republicans might not make every campaign and anti-Obama campaign. This strategy failed miserably, and they ended up with nothing they could point to as a positive accomplishment.

And the existing last-mile networks: what do you do with them? Maybe you expect your non-profit to buy them from Comcast, AT&T, and Quest. How exactly do you plan to figure pricing when you nationalize those networks? Or to compensate the companies when you dig up their wires and throw them away. I guarantee you will do it wrong. Taxpayers will overpay by 5-fold and the companies will be lucky to realize half of their fair value.

You proposal would be fine if internet were a blank slate, but any change you impose now will amount to nationalization of private enterprise, and there is no way people will stand for that.

It hardly seems like it should come from Netflix. If your usage rarely exceeds 1 Mbps, you should consider not paying for 50 Mbps service. If your neighbor wants to stream 3 simultaneous 1080p videos, he's going to suffer with anything less than 50 Mbps. That's pretty clearly a last-mile problem and resolvable by last-mile pricing. It has nothing to do with net neutrality.

The Republicans have always had much better and more ruthless party discipline. It's an authoritarian culture, so you should expect much more "unanimous" opinion.

"We oppose the other party," is the basis of partisan politics and has nothing to do with good governance. "We think [x] is good policy" is a position from which compromise and progress are possible. In a country of 300 million people, no choices are dichotomous, and the job of government is to compromise among the disparate, competing interests to do the least harm. Unfortunately, the differences among those interests are often more subtle and complex than will fit into a 10 second soundbite or a 140 character tweet. They all sound like "I support education," by the time the media get done with them.

The problem is that "rich people" don't spend an appreciable portion of their income. They spend a larger number of dollars than their poor counterparts, but they save/invest a lot more. If you accept the notion of progressive taxation, where those with the greatest margin above subsistence should contribute most to support of society, then a sales tax is a terrible system for extracting money from people who invest or save the vast majority of their income. Now, if you're one of those people who thinks that investing a dollar in Target has the same economic effect as spending a dollar at Target, then maybe you don't care if "the rich" are loaning their income to the government as opposed to directly supporting community functions, but I disagree

By this logic, a blanket tax on consumption seems like it would reduce demand for all products. Who's going to make cigarettes if no one buys them?

Because the way to 'get away with' petty theft is to dive through the window of a car, assault a cop, steal his gun and murder him? Someone's been playing too much GTA.

It's all terrible. Every last bit.

Except for the "pre-existing conditions" ban. And keeping kids on their parents' insurance until age 27. The new transparency of equivalent policies isn't really that bad. And you know, even Mitch McConnell likes the exchanges - he'd keep the web sites.

But everything else: the making people buy insurance, limiting the profit companies can make, forcing companies to care for their employees...bad, bad, bad. We've got to remove all of these bits that pay for the features that are actually kind of not terrible.

The 84% success rate is for Minotaur and Pegasus rockets (old US ICBMs and a fancy cruise missile) The 50-75% success rate is for Antares (surplus Soviet space rockets). To get all the way down to 50%, you have to include events where the surplus engines failed during testing without destroying a payload. But honestly, given sample sizes of 20 and 4, I don't think anyone would claim that 84% and 75% are actually different.

This is the single worst notion that ever wormed its way into a decision-making process. It is the foundation of authoritarianism. It justifies any excess. It provides a cover of legitimacy for any surveillance or intrusion. It is the cancer that is killing freedom in the US.

Why on earth would you make 200 people sit on the tarmac for even half an hour? This kind of event requires absolutely no response. Any acknowledgement of goofy AP name, even out of "an abundance of caution," amounts to hysteria.

It seems we've forgotten, but it is actually possible to have no official response to trivial events. It is possible for law enforcement not to "do something." Picking on the methods used in tracking down the offending wifi is like criticizing the validity of polygraph testimony at a witch trial.

Women tend to vote against the wrong lizard. 75% of candidates are men. Candidates are chosen by the existing political structure - I don't mean primaries - I mean the party structure and establishment that supports fundraising by the candidates in those primaries. This bias is acknowledged by leadership in both parties. It's harder for a woman to get on the ballot than it is for a Libertarian. (Once she gets there, she has a higher chance of being elected than the Libertarian - women make up almost the same proportion of elected officials as they do of candidates.)

Because, in this case, it seems like social pressures may be pushing a group out of lucrative, high-benefit career paths. We, as a society, may consequently be excluding a large number of highly talented people from those jobs and making [CS or other male-dominated field] less productive. Remember how blacks were excluded from professional football because they lacked strategic thinking skills? Does anyone think football was better back in the segregation days?

More importantly, "the establishment" has a long history of justifying their position with generally unsupported claims that [group] is just not naturally suited or inclined to [leadership position]. The aristocracy knew that their magical blood entitled them to rule. The Europeans knew that Africans were unsuited to proper education. Men know that women are unsuited to rigorous logic. Historically, these claims have frequently been found untrue, and it's appropriate to be skeptical with the party in power claims that an identifiably different group "just doesn't want" some path to success or power.

Now, certainly there are differences between the sexes. I don't think anyone is questioning that. What I think we need to do is figure out to what extent extraordinarily subtle social pressures (the very forces that men claim to be insensitive to) might be skewing the data. Maybe girls play with dolls and boys play with trains because of built-in genetic programming. I only know that, when my friends' daughters go for the dolls, my friends coo just a little louder and say things like 'We didn't encourage that at all - she just naturally prefers the dolls." When their sons go for the dolls, they don't make any special noises of approval and say things like, "You know, he's got an uncle who's gay, and we're totally cool with that."

No, that answer will almost certainly still be zero. The answer to "Do you know how many terrorists want to kill a generic Westerner?" would not be zero, but who fucking cares? There's a few white people who would be happy to see a generic black person dead (and vice versa); there's a few Irish who would be happy to see a generic Englishman dead.

The relevant question is not whether there exist some people willing to kill your countrymen, because that will never be an empty set. The relevant question is whether those people are likely to actually kill more of your countrymen than moose, sharks, or bed sheets. The answer is that you should be much more frightened of bed sheets than either terrorists or sharks.

Taxes are about degree: too much and you strangle the economy; too little and your country decays into anarchy. The "tax the rich" crowd see the government spending 50% more than it takes in, sees a bunch of people who save or invest 80% of their income (or loan it to the government), and thinks that's a bunch of money not circulating in the economy. Hoarding doesn't really create jobs, and discouraging hoarding isn't going to strangle anything.

Hungary is talking about imposing a $0.63/GB tax on internet traffic that currently costs something like $0.0002. That's like raising the (US) tax on gasoline to $9000/gallon. Not even the most aggressive sin-taxer would suggest that, because it would absolutely destroy the economy. Hungary is proposing to assess this tax on ISPs while denying them the power to raise their own prices. To sell bandwidth at $0.003/GB, or even $0.20/GB, and get taxed $0.60/GB, is not a viable business model.

To raise the tax rate on income over $500,000 to 50%, or even 90%, like it was in the 1960s, still lets people take home more dollars when they earn more dollars. To raise the tax rate on income over $500,000 to 5000% would be ridiculous, and no one has ever suggested it.