Funny story about that. The IRS planned to implement the sequester cuts by furloughing, without pay, for five days during 2013. (Each of the 5 days would have been immediately preceding or immediately following a holiday weekend.) By mid July, the IRS "came up with some emergency funding" that they could use to offset the sequester cuts, meaning IRS staff only had to take 3 days without pay.

The sequester cuts were long over by the time you submitted your form in October. The government shutdown is also long over. The IRS is not "being forced to cut service" by the sequester or anything else.

It's worse than that. The largest of the "subsidies" that you have to include to get to the $1.3T figure they throw around is "negative externalities." Essentially, the environmentalists are making the argument that they want to create a "carbon tax" that they charge to energy companies, which the guy quoted in the article says would collect a total of $550 billion per year.

The carbon tax he's talking about isn't a law that's on the books. It's a proposal for a law that he wants the government to pass. And he's counting the failure of the government to pass that law as a subsidy.

60 Minutes is a CBS thing. Maddow and Mathews work for NBC, and Olbermann used to work there as well. (He currently hosts a sports show on Disney/ABC-owned ESPN.)

Your larger point (about how all the networks openly support the Democrats) is spot on, but a better example of CBS's malpractice was Rather using forged documents to claim that George W. Bush didn't really serve in the National Guard.

The reason the NFL is in on this is because they have an exclusive deal with DirectTV; DirectTV is the only company allowed to broadcast non-nationally televised games outside the local broadcast area. DirectTV's deal costs $300, and you need to have satellite service. In exchange, you get EVERY out of market game. There's no option to just get a specific team's games.

I went to school in Rochester NY, where the local team is the Buffalo Bills. I grew up in New Jersey as a fan of the New York Jets. In order to legally get every Jets game, I would have had to get DirectTV service for $300 a year, and pay for 12 games a week I wasn't going to watch. Had Aereo been around, I would have subscribed to Aereo from my legal address (NJ) and watched the games in "my market" at a savings of $200.

The NFL doesn't want this, because it makes the deal they have with DirectTV less valuable. (Note that the other three American sports leagues have deals where you can pay the league directly to watch every one of your team's games over the Internet, so this IS technically feasible.) It doesn't make it right, but that's why they do it.

By the way, the NFL is a trade organization who promotes the interests of its members, the 32 teams. The teams pay dues to the league, which is where "the NFL" makes its money. This is a cost that teams pay out of their revenue. Another cost that teams pay out of their revenue is taxes. You have to tax where the money is, and the teams are the ones who have the money.

I think their business model relies on a loose definition of "live in the same metro area." If you're out of the area where you live for an extended period of time (e.g. on an extended business trip), you can watch the stations which would be local to you at home rather than the stations which are local to your current location.

In practice, on American network television, this pretty much affects two categories of programming, local news and football.

So the Germans wiped an entire city off the map withe their bombing too? Maybe because their bombs weren't accurate to hit anything larger than a city?

Keep in mind, when I wrote my comment, I was thinking of the bombing of London, which is about 100 miles away from Coventry. London, of course, is another city full of civilians that the Germans bombed.

Which brings up my point. The GGP called the British bombing of Dredsden "particularly bad" because the British were bombing cities rather than picking out specific targets. Obviously it wasn't "particularly bad" because nobody ELSE in the European theater could hit anything more accurately either. It seems like reason someone would call the British campaigns worse that the German campaigns from the same time period is as a criticism of the modern day British government (which is still around, unlike the German government from that era.) Think about why someone would make that comparison.

How accurate was German bombing during the Battle of Britain?

Well, you don't get much more prominent as a politician than US Senator, so let's look* at Senator Tim Scott, R-SC. He certainly looks like he's descended from slaveowners rather than slaves, right?

Also, Senator Scott took office after his predecessor resigned to take a different job; in South Carolina the Governor appoints a new Senator in this instance. Governor Nikki Haley, R-SC, who appointed Scott, is also a fairly prominent South Carolina politician. (After all, she's the governor.) Haley's parents immigrated from India; she isn't descended from slaveowners either.

You're talking out you ass about descendants of slaveowners. It's an easy rhetorical trick, but it's very clearly false.

*For those that aren't going to click the link, it goes to a Google Image Search showing pictures of Senator Scott, who is an African American.

Also, Reagan EMBRACED the term "Star Wars" (which was originally a slur) and the term was popular among the public.

Just like when the Obama administration embraced the phrase Obamacare.

Of course, the Obama administration and its allies in the media have been going back and forth between embracing the term Obamacare and calling anyone who uses it a racist.

It's not a Republican plan. ABSOLUTELY ZERO Republicans voted for this monstrosity in the House, and ABSOLUTELY ZERO voted for it in the Senate.

The fact that two guys who worked at the Heritage Foundation 20 years ago wrote a white paper saying "Hillarycare won't work without an individual mandate" doesn't make Obamacare a Republican plan. You guys screwed this up on your own.

YEAH! girlintraining is a traitor to her sex/gender! Everyone knows that REAL Women and REAL Transgendered People HAVE TO BE radical leftists. Only radical leftists are allowed to speak for Women and the Transgendered. Everyone else, even women/transgender people who disagree with the radical left, hate women and hate the transgendered.

Fucking idiot.

Intel isn't providing the optimizations for free to their competitors.* Intel provides the compiler, along with all its optimizations, to its customers in exchange for payment.

*Except the academic, evaluation and Linux-only non-commercial use versions, which could theoretically be downloaded by AMD employees, I guess.

The problem I am addressing is that teachers are advocating to students on behalf of the union, rather than teaching what they are ostensibly there to teach.

This is unethical because they are being paid to teach a specific subject, and they aren't because they are agitating on behalf of the union instead. (Note that the taxpayer is probably OK with paying a teacher to teach kids English, but if the taxpayer doesn't support the union, they would probably object to paying someone to propagandize on its behalf.)

It is immoral because teachers are the authority figure in the classroom. They can punish students for not having the same political views as the teacher, or for their parents not having the same political views as the teacher. The reason we have a secret ballot in this country is to make it harder for your boss to fire you for your political beliefs.

Because it is unethical and immoral for teachers to propagandize to students on behalf of the union instead of teaching, there are laws to make that illegal. In NJ, it is illegal for teachers to advocate for or advocate against a particular candidate for a school board, or to advocate for the passage or defeat of a school budget while they are acting in their capacity as teachers.

The problem is that there is no enforcement of this law.

The school board can't fire teachers for advocating on behalf of the union during class time. They union would never allow it. (By the way, if you run against the union, the thugs in the NJEA are going to retaliate against your child.)

Huh? You can't sue teachers for malpractice. The court can't punish teachers for violating ethics laws unless the teacher is charged with it, and nobody enforces that law. If it's not a crime, and it's not a tort, what the hell do you want the courts to do?

Is the district you graduated from held captive by the NJEA? Do NJEA members berate students who disagree with them on politics in the classroom?

I made reference to moving, and I meant Pennsylvania, but it would be easier to get to my job from Essex county than PA. What district are we talking about?

The biggest problem with the teachers' union is that they advocate for pro-union policies on the taxpayer dime. Obviously, public school teachers are paid with tax money. Obviously, they're supposed to be the authority figures in their classroom. However, there are teachers who abuse their authority figure status to berate students who have/whose parents have different political beliefs, and everyone is forced to pay them to do it. This is already illegal, but students, parents, and taxpayers have NO RECOURSE WHATSOEVER.

If teachers were accountable to PTAs in the way students are accountable to teachers, you'd have a point. But they aren't, and I think you know that. Your argument about PTAs is a meaningless red herring.