Super PACs predated Citizen's United by some time; it's just that the term wasn't coined until then. People had been doing it for a while, including the group after which the decision is named. CU just made it legally certain and thus increased its popularity.

You are absolutely right about the way Super PACs work. Real change comes only from a concerted, long-term effort. Campaign finance reform is going to be a very hard sell, not just because of entrenched interests but also because it's easier to get people to agree to "something should be done" than "let us do this particular thing". It will take a steady, well-thought out effort.

I'm slightly less cynical about the ability to get media. The media sell air space, and they don't much care to whom they sell it. Capitalists will happily sell you the rope to hang them with. They do so because (a) they don't really believe you'll hang them, and (b) they know that if they don't, somebody else will. Their success won't impact this quarter's bottom line, or even next year's, and they're simply not going to worry about anything further afield than that. Too many other things change too quickly for them to forego cash on the barrelhead.

I've always wanted a unicorn. We'd play together, and I'd get to ride it. It would have much better gas mileage than a car, and because unicorns only poop rainbows, it would be much better for the environment.

My proposal has about the same chance of passing the Republican-led House as theirs does. This is an election year, and no Republican (and few Democrats, for that matter) is going to vote for a tax-raising bill in an election year. (Note: all years are election years now.)

(Besides, this is a revenue bill; they have to start in the House anyway. What gives?)

iPhones do have the advantage of being particularly distinctive. Android phones come in a stunning array of models and colors, but iPhones are rather restricted. If you're going to invest brain cells in "Don't take that phone" it would be easiest for it to be iPhones.

If so, it sounds as if you'd need a fair bit of "herd immunity" to make other phones safe. Either that, or some highly distinctive branding, which is not the way Android manufacturers tend to work; they make their living offering everything to everybody.

Certainly it would be to your benefit to know if the device you're risking your freedom for is worth the effort. But I had thought that phone thefts were largely crimes of opportunity: you see the phone unguarded and you take it. I wouldn't think you have all that long to judge what kind of phone it is.

I suppose maybe these are just professionals, good at their jobs, who have heard that the fences aren't taking some brands any more because it's not worth it. But I wonder if there's some other factor besides the kill switches that accounts for the data.

Irritatingly, laptops have speakers built in; worse, phones have to have speakers on. But I still like my desktop and the certainty I get from having a physical switch. I don't care what games you play to try to subvert my settings: I am not going to have to hunt down your noisy tab.

At 200 miles up, it's further from Starbucks than any point on the planet.

You're right about the vacuum, but I think you should consider this: the government raided the treasury (or rather, borrowed with the treasury's backing, which can be the same thing if you really insist on looking at it that way) in order to keep unemployment from skyrocketing. As bad as it was, there was serious risk of a domino effect, where the failure of one industry resulted in job losses that reduced overall national income, putting strains on other industries.

As bad as the recession was, the goal was to keep it from becoming far, far worse. "Creative destruction" would have resulted in years to decades of destruction before it ever got around to any creativity, with vast misery in the process.

The bankers may well have taken advantage of that for their personal benefit; I'll leave it to others to make the argument that they got screwed over. There was plenty of screwage to go around: the economy was crashing because the musical chairs of highly leveraged money came to a screeching halt, and everybody scrambled to insist that their paper gains were more real than other people's paper gains. Everybody felt screwed over and there was no way out of this that didn't leave the vast majority of people feeling like they got the shorter end of it.

Everybody will always be able to insist that the economy would have been just fine if we'd just done it their way. It wasn't great, and I'll never be able to prove the counterfactual of how much worse it could have been. But I think it merits consideration: jobs and industries don't bounce back instantaneously, even when there's need, because of inherent friction in the economy, and I think the government acted correctly (at least in the broad strokes) to prop up the existing economy. That gave us time to hopefully put it on a sounder footing. Whether we will or not...

They do, in some states. I believe Ohio has a Libertarian party ballot at the primaries; there may be others.

The Tea Party isn't registered as a political party; they are a movement within the Republican party. They may well be able to gain separate primaries if they wanted them, but as far as I can tell their goal is explicitly NOT to do that. They don't want to run against Republicans in a general election; they want to replace Republican candidates with those more to their liking.

If they were to run it as a third-party race (or if Cantor were to run a write-in campaign) it would open up a huge opportunity for the Democrats. (Something like IRV might prevent that, though there are other ways to subvert IRV.)

Arguably, yeah. When Constantine "donated" the western Roman empire to the Church, it basically turned Christianity into a (known)-world-spanning empire in one fell swoop. It's not as easy as that, of course, but it was a massive leg up that led to Christian domination of Europe, and from there to the Western Hemisphere during the Age of Exploration.

Jesus was only indirectly involved in that, unless of course you believe that he actually did give Constantine the victory at Milvian Bridge.

Now, that's all kinda BS, since the "Donation of Constantine" is a forgery and the real path to Christian domination of the Roman empire is more complicated. But he did pave the way for Christianity in both the eastern and western Roman empire, so while he might not be more important than Jesus to the domination of the religion, he's surely way up there. (And anyway I'd argue that Paul was more important than Jesus when it came to setting up the religion as we know it.)

This is more about putting an end to "range anxiety". Efficiency is a separate problem, though it should still be cheaper per mile than fossil fuels while putting less carbon into the air.

Trailers might be easier to swap out, but if shops and cars are designed to support a rapid replacement of an internal battery, you don't have to deal with the awkwardness of a separate object trailing behind you (prone to theft, tricky to park). Musk had already demonstrated a quick-swap battery a while back meant to make refueling as quick as putting in gas.

That's not a very good way to describe it. It's like blaming Boyle's Law for not predicting nuclear fusion. The Standard Model is anything but half-assed. It made a lot of predictions, including previously unseen quarks, mesons, and the Higgs Boson.

Nobody was trying to say that it was the final theory. They know it doesn't incorporate gravity; that's why there's string theory and alternatives (and the challenge of putting together an experiment with sufficient energy to show the discrepancies between general relativity and the Standard Model). They know it doesn't explain all of its own parameters; that's why they're looking for supersymmetry (or alternatives) and the presence of unpredicted particles to narrow it down.

It's all just physics. That's how science works. It's a process. It seems weak to run down the process for not being finished, when it's clear that the process does make progress (and when it comes to these questions, it's the only thing that makes progress).

That's correct: there were discrepancies that might-could-possibly have been caused by a Higgs+.

Or by any of a zillion other things, but it was a hypothesis that merited further experimentation.

The data go a long way to ruling out the Minimal Supersymetric Standard Model (MSSM), but other SUSY theories are still in the running. The MSSM has the advantage of being, well, minimal, but there's no special reason to expect the universe to have made it that easy on us.

It's hard to say which theory this points us to, if any, but the Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) is a part of several. Those theories will help refine what kind of data to look for and what kinds of experiments to configure.

The theory is that this is just one guy. He can introduce all the legislation he wants but requires over 200 others to also be on his side. A judge, by contrast, holds unique power in the room (or at least, one of a very small number).

In fact, given the difficulties in trying to reach a 60 vote threshold in the Senate, which has become essentially mandatory, the odds of this legislation going anywhere are extremely low. If it gets anywhere at all, it will be subject to the votes of the rest of the Congressmen, who have to face reelection.

Corporations can push to elect candidates who are predisposed to be favorable to them. They can't fund campaigns directly, but they can put out advertising to influence those voters, but voters are subject to a lot of influence, and it's easier to get other Congressmen to say "no" than "yes".

I'm not trying to defend the system; it's obviously a damn mess. But it's also the essence of representative democracy, a fundamentally antagonistic system. Judges aren't supposed to be in an antognistic relationship; they're intended to seek balance while juries make the actual decisions. (The top-level federal courts do work antagonistically, and that's actually a disaster in the making.)

You can't have legislators drop out due to conflict of interest: "interest" is what they were elected to do. The voters are supposed to be the brake on that: no matter what corporate push they get the voters can still dump them if they don't like it.

Whether the voters will actually do so on an abstruse issue like the FCC... well, there's democracy for you, and I have no further comment.