"I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored."

From a Republican even.

It doesn't matter what they're registered as. What matters is what they vote for and most will vote predictably.

You don't have to distribute the democratic votes in the major cities. You assign as many as you can to majority Republican districts and then fit the rest into a district that is as close to 100% Democrat as you can.

Imagine a state with 800 people. Let's ignore the geographical distribution for simplicity. 59% (470) of the people vote purple, 41% (330) will vote orange, and you are in charge of drawing 4 districts such that the orange politicians remain in power. How will you do it?

3 districts with 110 orange people and 90 purple people (that's a 10% lead in elections which is plenty).
1 district with 200 purple people.

Congratulations! The orange people get 3 seats and the purple people get 1 despite the purple voters being a clear majority of the total. Here is a good illustration on wikipedia that also illustrates drawing the borders around geographically distributed voters.

Yesterday's election was a message to Washington that America wants conservatives to represent them! Also, they want legalized pot, increased minimum wage, the right to have an abortion, insurance-provided contraception, and required paid time off at work!

Wait, what?

I guess this never happened. I quote:

In response to being modded FLAMEBAIT for simply recounting (relatively recent) history, I present to the mods a shit-ton of sources at this location: Tada and that quote by Grassley

Lets look at the history of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Back in 2008, then-presidential nominee Barack Obama ran a campaign with healthcare reform as one of its central issues. He advocated for universal healthcare but opposed an individual mandate. However, after input from experts that claimed that government-guaranteed healthcare would encourage too many free-riders, Obama decided to include an individual mandate as a central part of his healthcare reform efforts.

The individual mandate is largely credited as an idea by the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation as an alternative to a system in which the government pays for healthcare. It required each person to pay for their own healthcare and was proposed by Republicans during the Clinton era as a free-market solution that embodies the tenant of personal responsibility that Republicans claim to hold.

Once adopted by the Democrats and proposed in a bill on September 17, 2009, the Republicans staunchly opposed the measure. The Republicans, some of whom have been around long enough to have supported a similar bill during the Clinton administration, claimed that the individual mandate was an unconstitutional assault on freedom.

After 3 weeks of debate and town hall meetings, the bill passed through the House of Representatives and was sent to the Senate. The Democrats attempted to gain the support of moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Bob Bennet, Mike Enzi, and Chuck Grassley. However, the moderate Republicans found themselves subject to intense pressure by the party to fall in line and oppose any healthcare reform effots.

The bill continued to be opposed by conservatives in the Senate who claimed that the bill's "public option" was a deal-breaker. The public option was government-run healthcare insurance that would be available to people alongside private health insurance in the market. Conservatives claimed that the public option would put private insurance out of business because the government is under no pressure to compete or turn a profit. After over 3 months of debate, the public option was dropped from the bill. Senator Grassley was quoted as saying:

Despite this, it still took several last-minute concessions for conservatives to get the bill passed through the Senate on December 24, 2009, with support from independents and conservative Democrats to overcome the Republican threat of fillibuster.

The bill languished in the House of Representatives for 3 more months. In order to gets the admendments made to the bill back in the House, the Democrats had to win support from pro-life Representatives who worried that the bill would allow federal funds to be used to pay for abortions. To assuage anti-abortion politicians' fears, Barack Obama signed an executive order on March 21, 2010 to affirm that no federal funds could or would be used to fund abortions. The amendments were finally passed through the House and signed into law by Obama on March 23, 2010 (over 6 months after being proposed).

The link in the summary leads to "Sapphire manufacturer and Apple agree to part ways “amicably”" GJ Editors

I want to state, for the record, that I know that 10,000x is actually REALLY low for a gold and diamond encrusted watch....

Technically you're right but you miss the point. How many jobs does he support with his demand for a gold and diamond encrusted watch that costs 10,000x more than a normal watch? A whole lot fewer jobs than 10,000 normal watch buyers can support. Those normal people drive the economy with their demand, not the rich guy.

So the bank takes the money and... invests it. Refer back to my argument about investing in the previous post. Who's going to buy houses when there's no middle class? Who's going to start or expand their widget business when most people can barely afford their food and rent?

What businesses will be looking to expand in an economy where the wealth concentration is going in the direction it is now? Without a middle class to spend money, there is no demand. Business expansion is driven by demand and demand only. There is no other reason to expand, there is no other reason to hire new workers.

You're wrong. Income inequality is harmful. And not just because it hurts poor people's feelings.

Demand, people buying things, is what drives the economy. Person A that makes 100x the money that Person B does, doesn't add 100x the demand to the economy. One person can only buy so much. So, then, Person A's extra money is either going to go into savings (not good, that money is lost, as far as the rest of the world is concerned) or the money is going to go into investing. Investing plays an important role in the system but it cannot be the basis of the economy, no matter what anyone tries to tell you. Workers are hired and businesses are expanded for no other reason than to fulfill demand.

This is why income inequality is bad. Its growth strangles the economy by shifting money from the masses, who would use that money to drive the economy, to the few who will just put the money into savings when there is nothing worth investing in.

Demand, people buying things, is what drives the economy. Person A that makes 100x the money that Person B does, doesn't add 100x the demand to the economy. One person can only buy so much. So, then, Person A's extra money is either going to go into savings (not good, that money is lost, as far as the economy is concerned) or the money is going into investing. Investing plays an important role in the system but it cannot be the basis of the economy, no matter what anyone tries to tell you. Workers are hired and businesses are expanded for no other reason than to fulfill demand.

This is why income inequality is bad. Its growth strangles the economy by shifting money from the masses, who would use that money to drive the economy, to the few who will just put the money into savings when there is nothing worth investing in.

There would never be enough choice in ISPs that Net Neutrality would be unnecessary. It's simply too expensive to run a dozen or more lines to each home. Even if locals opened up land access to more competition, it's likely that the few small/medium companies that actually popped up would be bought up by their larger competitors. We'd wind up with the same thing we have in the cellular service industry: a few choices, but none of them good. The ISPs that are left will always favor "fast lane" style service because it is going to be profitable for them.

Shut the hell up Bennet.

Allow me to add one gripe. Creating an outline for text in GIMP requires creating a selection from the text, creating a new layer, growing the selection to the outline size, and filling the selection with the new color. WTF? What if I want to change the text now? I have to redo those steps all over again because the outline is in no way associated with the text. It's just a separate object. That's absurd.