Sure he can. Here's how: Put a hold on all legislation going through his committee. Any senator can do this, and the effect is to gum up the works so much that the rest of the Senate can either do as the one senator asks, or not be able to engage in any legislative activity at all that relates to whatever committee he's on. The other senators will likely decide that it's easier to fund his pork project than to deal with the hold.

Obligatory Mel Brooks - politicians have been doing that since time immemorial.

My view of trickle-down economics is that it's better described as tinkle-down economics: It's just dandy for those who are on top and don't care about anyone else, but the rest of us just get pissed on.

That does in fact seem to be all the rage, for reasons that I have yet to figure out, beyond people looking at tablets and going "Ooh, shiny!"

You apparently failed to read the last paragraph: GP blames both Bush and Obama for the TSA, which I think is fair.

I react somewhat differently as to what should be done with them, because I think George W Bush and Dick Cheney should be in roughly the same situation as the defendants at Nuremberg for their crimes against humanity and crimes against the peace - I want them to experience a humiliating trial in which the entire world sees exactly who these guys were and what they did, and then send them to the firing squad.

I live only a few miles from there, and yes, it's a problem. Interestingly, it met all the safety standards in place in 1955 when it was designed, and also accommodated various political wranglers who were trying to knock down some buildings and preserve others. It's not really an engineering problem though, but a political one: there's been a plan to solve it sitting in the Ohio Department of Transportation office for years, but it's never gotten close to being on the list of things to do. Part of it is that the Republican-controlled state government hates the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, but it's also simply expensive and not high on anyone's priority list.

So your basic point stands: It's not an engineering problem, it's not a know-how problem, it's a political problem.

Please explain why women, gay people, Muslims, atheists, etc can't be good military personnel. I know this much: The soldiers I've talked to and seen polled about it overwhelmingly either support or don't care about these kinds of measures. This might have something to do with the fact that when you're in a firefight you care more about whether the rest of your unit are good shots than who they like to kiss or what they think about spirituality.

Please explain why wearing a beard displays a lack of discipline or lack of military readiness. I'm really not understanding what the purpose of that kind of rule could possibly be, except some silly holdover from the 1950's that stereotyped bearded men as drunkards and foreigners. During the Civil War, wearing a beard was very common, and it doesn't seem to have had any effect on the skill or bravery or readiness on the troops (or at least not enough that anyone made any mention of it whatsoever in any military documents).

Well, let me tell you of another time the military was used to "advance a political agenda": Racial integration. In 1948, Harry Truman issued an executive order desegregating the US military. Today, black people are more likely to join the military than white people, in large part because they know that the organization will treat them fairly and give them a good chance of a career. We'd probably lose 5-10% of our military personnel had Truman not done that.

No, we don't, and we're at the very least no worse off for it. Running down the list of US military operations between 1974 and 1984 (the "glory days" you seem to be yearning for), the most significant military actions were the evacuation of Vietnam and the invasion of Grenada. Do you really think those were more difficult military operations than the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Did the government make sure to inform you about how we're all in imminent danger of being eaten by a giant mutant space goat?

"Fast-paced work environment" actually means "We don't actually make any management decisions about prioritization or scheduling".

That's important, because a company that is understaffed who's trying to hire people is doing the right thing, whereas a company that has stupid management who's trying to hire people is doing the wrong thing. The second company will never be satisfied with the team's performance, because it's always a lot easier to sit in a meeting and say "We should make a ..." than it is to make it.

What they're saying they want is people who will happily be in the office 100 hours a week, plugging away and barely stopping to eat.

In other words, it's a red flag, and I'll pretty much reject out of hand a contact from a company that makes a big deal about it.

Even if you could refer to the checklist, you have the basic problem that when the checklist says "Set the CRM-114 to standby" you need to know exactly what a CRM-114 is and how to set it on standby, and you need to know it quickly.

I can answer one of your questions for you:
PHP? Please, please don't. There's simply no good reason to use it, especially when there are CMS's in other languages that work at least as well as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla.

I do not think it's OK for businesses to take advantage of people, and think that the people who engage in the kinds of practices you're talking about should be prosecuted for fraud:
1. Students are defrauded, because they're told that passing these courses will get them good jobs. They're not infrequently induced to go into debt to pay for them based on these fraudulent claims.
2. Whoever employs the "graduates" is defrauded, because they believed that they would be getting someone certifiably competent when they are in fact not.
3. Whatever organization created the certification is defrauded, because the value of their certificate depends on the quality of the people who pass the certification exam. If someone becomes, say, an RHCE, and doesn't know how to manage a Red Hat server, that makes the RHCE worthless because employers will figure out that it's worthless, and then better employees will figure out that it's worthless and then the value of the entire program disappears.

There are also lots of scams going on in the for-profit higher education industry as well, and it's also based on the myth that somebody with an 2-year degree from ITT Tech or University of Phoenix is on even the same playing field as someone with a B.S. from MIT or Stanford. Seriously, look at their ads, and that's exactly what they're selling prospective students.

Actually, it's possible to eat well enough on a purely vegan diet, it's just that most vegans don't do that. You just need to focus on eating protein and B-vitamin rich plants like beans and kale.

Michael Pollan boiled it down to 3 ridiculously simple rules that I've found work well enough for all practical purposes:
1. Eat food (by which he means things that your great-grandmother would recognize as something you'd want to eat)
2. Not too much (for obvious reasons)
3. Mostly plants (that seems to be what we're evolved to eat, probably because plant food isn't as hard to chase down)

And then there's what he was saying during the whole shoe-banging episode. Theories abound:
"When I was at hotel, I put shoes out to be shined, and one of the shoes was stolen. What kind of man steals only one shoe?"
"Why can't I get good radio reception in this thing?"