The bus works great if you have to go to a single place for work each day, work, and then go home.

The bus doesn't work at all for those who must often travel to random points at different times in the day for their job.

I'm one of the latter people. Now, I don't drive myself around in a massive empty bus because it isn't efficient. I use a small car instead. Somehow though, people think it is environmentally friendly to drive massive empty buses around, when small vans would do the trick. I'm just not really comprehending that logic. I certainly don't use it my own life.

Color me surprised that it's happening in Austin, where the "metro train" is frequently empty... but hey, at least we have feel-good public transport options, right?

I live in a smallish city (about 80k -- biggest city in the county). We aren't big enough for a train, but we do have a constantly growing bus system (and a plastic bag ban). The buses, giant Gillig buses that guzzle diesel, drive around moving air from one part of the town to the other for the most part. Seriously, I see empty buses, or buses with less than five people on board driving around all the time. Our bus service would do just fine with a few big buses for rush hour, and a few passenger vans for the rest of the time. Instead, about the time our plastic bag ban went into effect, we expanded the bus service and increased the frequency of service. Though interesting things like runs from 2-3 am on Friday and Saturday night aren't even dreamed about. Just extra runs when nobody needs them. For the environment.

(I say all this as a liberal Jill Stein voter, in case you New GOP (aka Democrats) want to jump up my ass about it)

Not to mention the issues with clear cuts, dioxin, high water usage in manufacturing, much greater energy use in manufacturing, and much greater energy use to recycle.

FYI, akin to bathtub girl. Click only if you wish to be grossed out.

With bundling, they ARE only accepting individual donations. In my example, they don't get one $150,000 check. They get 100 individually dontated $1500 checks. They do this right now to skirt similar finance laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_States#Bundling

No. 2 in your list is a perfect opening for bundling. The median income is something like $50k so 3% would be $1500. Not chump change but not all that juicy. However, you get together 100 of your like minded friends on an issue, have a fundraiser dinner and invite the candidate to speak. Now you're talking about a $150,000 donation, comprised of 100 $1500 checks, from the "Lobby to Fuck America for Our Personal Profit."

But that's just for that particular candidate. Next, the LFAOPP will have a fundraiser for the political party that supports that politician. Politician will point out he never took any money beyond the legal amount, and the contributors will honestly state that donating to the party is not the same as donating to the campaign. Honest for weasely senses of that word, but perfect for court.

And after that, the LFAOPP will fund a "think tank," i.e. a marketing organization that will independently support its candidate with additional monies donated by its members. Our humble honest politician will correctly point out that he only took the legal amount of contributions. Contributors will point out they only donated the legal amount to the campaign. This think tank is a separate organization free to buy whatever advertising it wants to because Politician's campaign has no say in what it does.

I don't know what the solution is. Something needs to happen, but just limiting the amount people can donate is not going to work. At least not in the way we hope it will.

Except that's not how it works. A plea deal isn't a contract in which you get what you want in exchange for what they want.

Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. .... More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

The whole Bush Obama thing has made me wonder if the true danger to our country will be some kind of civil war between the GOP and the DNC. Their policies are essentially the same (aside from edge issues like abortion and gay marriage(*)). On critical issues like the right not to be randomly jailed or murdered, on war, on domestic surveillance -- they're completely identical.

Yet GOPers loathe Obama and Democrats Loathe Bush. It's personal though -- it can't be about policies, it is only a personal hate based on the person's tribal identity (party). There is no logical basis for the two groups to hate each other because they do the identical shit. What you have is the pickup truck driving GOPer sneering at the iPad toting DNCer -- not because of an actual difference in policy, but merely because of mutual hatred. And that's dangerous because there is no reason or logic -- it's pure tribalism.

(*) I'm not saying these are unimportant, I'm saying that they don't matter if you are dead or in a gulag. There is a hierarchy of importance and there are more fundamental issues at the top of it.

Unbelievably myopic DNC apologists like you are just setting us up for ruin. Your hero won't be president forever, and the next time a Dick Cheney type is in office, do you think that precedents like due process free execution, or starting a war without congressional authorization (Libya) will go unnoticed? Obama has made the future a whole lot worse. When GWB was acting like a fuckhead, people thought at least the Democrats would work to reign in the abuse. Now that the DNC has simply embraced and extended that abuse -- we're screwed, and apologists like you are making it easy.

No. I'm a liberal and I'm more than a little resentful about the New GOP (aka Democrats -- with the emphasis on "rats").

A body of Federal laws so vast and vague that it is unknowable and any random person commits a federal crime unwittingly probably every day.

President tells his minions to go after "X" group.

Prosecutors find random law and prosecute the person.

Result: unlimited presidential power.

Welcome to the new American Paradigm.

President: Legislator, executive, judge, jury, and executioner.

True, but I didn't think of it at the time which is an example of how leaking info is so easy.

Don't be a retard. Al Alwaki was dead for two weeks before they killed his son. In fact, he hadn't even seen his dad in two years. Murdered by Obama without any evidence of wrongdoing on the kid's part. I mean, how deep do you want to deep throat that Federales Uber Alles propaganda cock? Here's an advance "thank you" for the police state we are soon to have where you can be jailed at the president's whim, murdered at the president's whim -- all of it based on "secret laws". How Soviet of you.

Seriously, click on the link I posted. It only takes the most minuscule effort -- way less then it takes to rationalize the gutting of the Constitution. Oh wait, you're too lazy and stupid to actually learn anything about what's going on. Here's a quote and a rag to wipe that DC jizz out of your eye -- once you can see again, read:

Gibbs wasn't entirely familiar with the situation, and didn't know that al-Awlaki's son was killed two weeks after his father was killed ...
***
He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

Google's youtube had no trouble connecting my real name to my youtube alias. I suspect that it's extremely hard to never leak information, possibly involving separate hardware (or at least virtual separate hardware), vpns for unrelated IP addresses, and never giving google your credit card info -- for each online alias. I do have an android phone and google play account so it isn't rocket science to imagine how google could cobble together who I am from that info. IP address plus credit info (which includes real name) compared to IP address plus youtube login and it is a reasonable guess I'm that alias.