Great! The people least able to afford a pregnancy can only get the least-effective forms of birth control! Awesome! That's definitely not a bad idea.

Or we can offer them any method they want, including far more effective and foolproof ones (IUD, implant, etc.), all at the same cost, which is what the mandate is about.

Yes yes, No True Catholic.

If you started expunging all the insufficiently devout Catholics, there probably wouldn't be much left of the church when you were done.

Though that may not be a bad thing.

You're assuming all birth control methods are created equal. They aren't.

The pill is a comparatively poor method in terms of success rate (roughly 9%/year failure rate and needs to be taken religiously every day) compared to more recent methods, such as IUDs (0.2-0.8% failure rate, depending on type. Basically foolproof as they're insert-and-forget for 3+ years) and implants (0.05% (this is actually better than the success rate for tubal ligation), insert-and-forget for 4 years).

The mandate expanded the state of things from "Oh, you're poor, so you get the failure-prone pill because it's cheap" to "Take your pick of any method, they're all covered", which is a good thing. Saddling people who can least afford a child with the most failure-prone method for preventing that is a recipe for disaster.

HL has stated they're not against contraceptives, just the ones the voices in their head tell them are bad. And yet somehow, they didn't have a problem with them before the PPACA.

We'll see where they go now that they have their nose in the tent.

Actually just the male Catholic judges.

Sotomayor is also Catholic, but joined up on Ginsberg's dissent.

Sure there is. Up here in Canada, the counting of the ballots is observed by representatives of each candidate that wishes to send one. Unless you want to claim that all the candidates are in on it (in which case you're screwed regardless), it's decidedly difficult to mess with the counting process.

I grabbed the numbers from the World Bank site, though it seems to not be functioning correctly at the moment, as the data won't display for me now.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

I'm not sure that there's a whole lot of slack to be taken up as far as efficiency goes. Per capita, Germany uses a little more than half (about 7 megawatt-hours per year vs. 13.2) as much electricity as the USA does.

Blame Congress.

No, nothing about this ruling was based on the constitution. It was ruling whether or not Aereo fell under the provisions of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, specifically the provisions requiring cable TV system operators to pay broadcasters to carry those channels.

Fixing this would simply require an amendment to that act.

Don't bother trying to appeal to someone's better nature. They may not have one. Go at their self-interest instead.

No, this actually reduces it. This material would otherwise decompose into methane, a decidedly more potent greenhouse gas. This lets you shift that to CO2 and also reduces the need for some other source of fuel.

Hence this plant, which, in combination with composting and recycling programs, reduces the amount of stuff that goes into the landfill.

A good idea, but that has nothing to do with this. This process is for stuff that it is impractical to compost or recycle, such as wood or fabrics.

There's no smoke here, nor is there burning.

You're not burning the stuff, you're gassifying it, which is an entirely different thing. The latter uses a low-oxygen environment and no combustion.

From that gasification, you get hydrogen and carbon monoxide ("synthesis gas"), which you feed into a Fisher-Tropsch process, with the end result being diesel fuel you can pour into the city buses or sell or whatever.

Yes it is. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial in the park is almost directly under where the bomb went off, which is why the building was still (partially) standing afterwards.

Actually, the sites of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are inhabitable today, or would be. Both sites are public parks (the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Nagasaki Peace Park), which were opened in the 1950s.