Incidentally, another part of this that everyone seems to be missing...501(c)4s are not required to get permission from the IRS to exist in the first place.
From what I understand, you don't actually make 'a 501(c)4'. You _file_ as a 501(c)4. The organization exists regardless.
These groups, probably because they were all working off the same legal template and their lawyers all knew they were in a somewhat illegal area of the law, were trying to get _pre-cleared_ as a 501(c)4, which they did not actually need to do. This pre-clearance or lack thereof in no way interfered with their work or money-flow, it was just a _tax_ delay.
And even if they _hadn't_ gotten it they could have simply filed as a non-profit as a 527 and paid exactly the same amount of taxes. (That is, none.) The 501(c)4 thing was simply to keep from having from having disclose donors.
However, I shall assume that you were talking issue with 'I actually think the IRS scandal has less teeth than even reasonable people think. (I don’t think it even qualifies as a ‘scandal’ in any sense, much less one that has anything to do with Obama.)', and explain what I mean by that.
The simple fact is, 501(c)4s were being created in violation of the law. Now, this is a violation of the law that the IRS seemed to not take much issue with, but that was before thousands of them appeared out of thin air. (Thanks to Citizen's United)
Many of the ones that should not be allowed to exist had obviously political names.
Let's make an analogy here: Let's say there is a neighborhood where street parking is allowed, but only by residents. Residents are supposed to put stickers on their cars, but they sometimes do not, and that law has been almost completely ignored, and it ties up too much time in the courts if the cops ticket a resident, so they ticket no one.
And then let's say that a new college opens just past that neighborhood, and now 1000 college kids are parking on the street. So the cops wander up and down the street, putting tickets on every 'college-looking' car. (If they hit a resident by mistake, well, that can get straightened out in the courts.)
This is _not correct behavior_. It is, in fact, misbehavior. It's called profiling instead of actually doing your damn job. The legality of a car should not be judged by what it looks like, and the legality of an organization should not be judged by the name. There are actual standard, and those standards should be enforced.
It is also _entirely expected behavior_ by an underfunded police department.
Now, notice that I've been presenting this in a politically neutral manner, whereas certain people seem intent on making this something to do with the 'right'.
No. From what I can tell, they just picked the _most common_ political keywords of the incorrect 501(c)3s, and those really were right-wing ones, considering the ratio of right vs. left groups being created. (To continue my analogy, let's assume it's a mostly white neighborhood, and a mostly black college, so 'college-looking' included things that also indicate race, so on top of it the police look racist. So now it's a big race issue that actually has nothing to do with anything.)
The 'scandal' of 'politics' has rendered the entire actual issue here meaningless. The IRS should not have been caring about the names of groups, and, perhaps more importantly, they should have been REJECTING these groups. (Which, indeed, would have rejected more right-wing groups than left-wing, because there _were_ more of those groups.)
The problem here is complete inability or unwillingness of the IRS to enforce the law. And then some random profiling (Which looked political) while _continuing_ to be unwilling to enforce the actual law. (As opposed to the pretend law the IRS was enforcing, where 501(c)4s could be somewhat political.)
Actually, the problem is the law. There's not a hell of a lot of point for 501(c)4 groups in the first place, and even less point for them to be allowed to keep their donors anonymous.
Erm, while I have read a few of these questionnaires , you appear to have several question in your list I haven't seen anywhere.
What are your religious views?
I have not seen any questions at all about religion. Or heard anyone else mention such question. Nor do I find it plausible that the IRS would ask an _organization_ what religion it was.
Which people do you talk to?
Well, this would be an absurd question if actually phrased like that, but, again, I have not see that question. I've seen demands to turn over training material and presentation and stuff, but not 'Which people do you talk to?'.
Give us the names of all your donors.
Yes, that question was very inappropriate, and warrants a full investigation as to how it got in there, along with the targeting in the first place.
Give us the names of everyone who has interned with you.
Erm...firstly, no, I haven't see that question. Secondly, who interns for for an organization is _not private information_, and something the government actually already has the right to know, just like they have the right to know who that organization employs.
List all your unofficial contacts.
Much like 'Which people do you talk to?', this is complete nonsense as a question and not something the IRS has asked.
Give us backdoor access to all your websites.
And, again, nope. No one asked that.
So, I think the point of the article is well proved: Conservatives can't manage to refrain from making stuff up, even in the midst of _actual government misbehavior_.
All of the effects of the rule are bad and unfair and none good.
It's actually rather astonishing how many school rules fall exactly under that category.
All dress code rules fall into that category. None of those make the slightest bit of sense, at all. Including rules for dances and whatnot. It is the damn students' dance, and they can wear whatever they want.(1)
All rules about weapons fall into that category. If you actually were going to commit the _felony_ of assault and murder, why would school rules stop you? (I'm talking more about knifes than guns. I don't have any real problems with not letting students carry guns, although it's worth pointing out that's already illegal in most states on school grounds and hence doesn't need a 'rule' about it.)
All rules about 'drugs' fall into that category. We already have a perfectly functional set of laws about who can have and take which drugs. (Don't get me wrong, I'd be fine with a rule that allowed teachers to check that laws were being followed. I'm just taking issue that the school should be forbidding people from possessing a substance they legally can possess.)
The idea that a school needs an entire separate set of 'rules' in addition to the law of society is near complete nonsense.
I guess there a few rules about specific circumstances that could reasonable exist, like 'Students must get a parking pass before parking at the school' and 'Students must return tray to window after eating' and 'No running in the hall' (Although those are less 'school rules' and more 'signs on the wall'.) and a few classroom rules like 'Students can't use their cellphone in class' (Although classroom rules, ultimate, are the job of the teacher to set.)
But something like 90% of school rules are set by insane power-mad despots who want to control people and have managed to luck upon a job where they can do just that.
I'm mainly talking about high schoolers here. Elementary schoolers probably need a bit more structure.
1) I actually find it rather baffling that people don't understand the entire concept of high school dances and sports and stuff. All that really is an attempt to show students how to be social. It's a sort of enforced 'community' that they live in, and pretty much all decisions should be left up to them. Yes, they will make stupid decisions, but that's what high school is for. It's not the job of parents or administrators to come along and interfere except to stop extreme problems. (Aka, you do have to chaperon them, but that's it.)
It explains everything, even contradictory things, and can never be disproved because each event is just more evidence, no matter what the event was.
Scientists do not have an very accurate model of long-term weather, and there are lot of things that we are not sure how much temperature change will effect. I've read something the other day that pointed out that global warming changes two things about tornadoes, one of which makes more tornadoes and one makes less, and we don't actually know which is more important, so it's entirely possible global warming is reducing the amount of tornadoes. (Statistically, the amount of tornadoes is roughly the same, it's just that we are building denser so they are more harmful.)
However, there is ONE thing that goddamn global warming predicts...GLOBAL WARMING.
You appear to have this idea that just because we don't actually know the results of raising the temperature higher and higher and higher that, uh, it somehow isn't happening. That does not make any sense at all. There are specific things that we know happen with higher average temperatures. We have more drought, at least on average. Thus crops die. We have melting ice caps. We have deserts expand.
_Those_ are the bad thing, and those bad side effects are not up for debate. (Unless you want to debate the temperature increase itself, and feel free to do that, but you can't actually debate the fact that a temperature increase would result in those bad things.)
We _also_ are going to get random weather patter changes in random places, and because we don't fully understand many of the reasons weather patterns exist in the first place, we're pretty crappy at predicting the changes. But, generally speaking, randomizing the weather at all is a bad thing. Yes, one or two areas might luck out and get less tornadoes or less blizzards, but the vast majority of places are going to just have random changes that devastate the ecosystems. (Yes, ecosystems adapted...but it sucks to be living through it.)
None of the scandals really have anything to do with Obama, only the IRS scandal had any actual wrong doing, and I actually think the IRS scandal has less teeth than even reasonable people think. (I don't think it even qualifies as a 'scandal' in any sense, much less one that has anything to do with Obama.)
However, I think the point the article is making is that a _sane_ opposition would be able to use the IRS issue to throw some dirt on Obama, along with a little dirt from the AP thing. Not much dirt, but some.
I don't believe I interpreted anyone's motives. I merely pointed out that _any_ plan whatsoever that involves writing checks and giving them to poor people, for any reason whatsoever, is going to _incredibly_ unpopular with the right.
I ascribed no motive to this. Nor did I condemn it in any way. (I did use a bit of hyperbole, but hopefully everyone understands that most people would rather pay people money than be burned to death, and that was, indeed, hyperbole.)
Do you disagree with my statement? Do you think that the right _would_ be willing to pay for poor people signing up to be organ donors? Do you think they'd approve of any government plan that resulted in poor people lining up to receive money?
I actually find this habit of people objecting to me stating _what is clearly the actual position of the Republicans_ to be rather annoying. And it's never 'The right doesn't think that' or 'Republicans wouldn't do that', it's always 'David, stop painting them to be evil'.
I didn't call them _evil_. Neither did Mike Schilling for that matter. We made no moral judgments at all.
I simply stated what I suspect would be their position on a hypothetical law, based on other positions they have. If you disagree with what I think, then say so. Perhaps you can make an argument that Republicans _would_ be in favor of it.
But if you agree with what I thought, and you also think that position is morally wrong, then that's _you_ calling them morally wrong, not me.
You can actually solve a hell of a lot of problems in society by just _paying people to do the right thing_.
There's some sort of Philosophical Truth in that statement, somewhere.
Of course, the problem is that, at this point, the right sees the government actually handing money to human beings, especially _poor_ human beings, as the greatest horror imaginable, so would likely object to this. (1) Instead, they would demand it as a tax rebate...which would hilariously mean it was the middle class 'selling their organs', not the poor.
Incidentally, we can solve the problem of people not serving jury duty the same way...actually paying a _reasonable_ amount of money for their time, instead of wages that would actually be illegal under minimum wage laws. And provide child care.
And low voter turnout, too. And low voter registration. And recycling.
And the fun thing is, instead of paying for _enforcement_ of stuff, you can simply set up an office and have people _come to you_. If you're going to fine people for something, they will hide it and dispute it and you need court and whatnot, whereas if you're going to pay people for something, especially something that is no real effort on their part, they will show up at government offices and provide evidence to you. With no work on your part!
It's a crazy idea, I know. Paying people do things we want them to do.
1) Despite the fact it is not actually handing money to anyone, and is in fact exactly the same thing as the usage fees the far right seems to think the government should collect from everyone instead of taxes...except in the other direction. But I honestly believe that the right would rather DIE IN A FIRE than to hand poor people money.
I think if you showed up outside the Warehouse with the knowledge you gleaned from the show (assuming you watch it), Artie would get you to talk to the Regents post-haste.
That's a good point, and it makes me realize there's an exploit in the hypothetical. Namely, you can arrive _during a plot_. No one ever said you had to arrive in the 'now' of a TV show.
Now, admittedly, if you're just some random guy, you can't cut it very close, and there's not any way you're going to track how to call the Warehouse, so you have to fly there...
...but show up a few days before, for example, the disastrous season three finale and explain who you are and how events are about to go entirely pear-shaped?
Yeah, they might indeed loan you an artifact. Actually, you'd have a pretty good chance of becoming an agent, considering their recruitment policy.
Kidneys are one of those things that I don't have problems with paying for, if you can convince me that there is very little harm in donating a kidney. And the article is right...having a backup kidney is almost completely useless, as they always fail together. It only helps if someone shoots you in the kidney or something.(1)
So if we can invent some sort of public system to pay people to donate kidneys that was are sure are not going to make the person who donated life's worse off, and cover expenses in case it does, than I am okay with it.
1) You know, whoever designed a human to have backup part was stupid. Backup hands and backup eyes and even backup testicles, sure, those are on the outside, and can get physically damaged. But the stuff _inside_ fails because the system fails, and hence both of them fail at once! (Well, barring cancer, but for most of human history no one had any ability to remove the defective one.) What would be much saner is to only run one kidney or one lung, and only turn the second one on if the first failed.
Incidentally, my state already does this...for $5 off the driver's license registration. Yes, apparently donating your organs is worth five whole dollars. (But only if you drive.)
By 'a system' do you mean somewhere else? Because I really have no idea of what the laws are elsewhere.
Here is my invented system: Pay people $500 to sign up to be organ donors, starting at age 18.
That's it. Currently, the signed up organ donor average seems to hover around 20%. And based on poor college students that I know, something like 90% will sign up for anything that will pay them $500, especially if they don't actually have to do anything, and this has the added bonus of being for a good cause.
Now, you'll notice I didn't invent any way out of this system, because I don't actually care. I think if, by signing up, you committed to be an organ donor for five years, and then at the end of the five years, you can opt out or stay in, almost all people signed up would just stay in. (If everyone actually does opt out, we could fix that by providing renewal payments, but I suspect we don't need that.)
If 90% of people were organ donors, we wouldn't have to worry about 'buying' organs from anywhere, or try to carefully figure out incentives and laws to keep people from being worth more dead.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what the laws are about any of that.
I just hear stories about family members refusing to proceed with donation, which in my mind is roughly akin to family members asserting that they aren't going to read the will and instead will divide up the deceased's property how they want...it's complete nonsense. That's not how that works. A dead person's estate _owns_ their body.
I guess there's a point where prepping the body still counts a 'medical decision', and not 'property laws', but that just demonstrates that organ donation agreement needs to include an aspect of living wills.
But I don't actually know if this needs to change anyway. If we actually pay people for this, if something like 95% of all people are signed up, then just 5% of them is more than enough for all needed organ donations. And presumably the percentage agreeing would grow as organ donation became the default assumption for everyone.
What would make me change my mind? When we have at least attempted the _slightest_ effort to actual encourage organ donations after death, and that attempt has then failed.
I like how we've nonsensically leaped to 'Letting people sell organs', which at best would just let people sell organs that they have two of. (So, uh, kidneys then. And lungs, maybe?)
And not given the slightest amount of thought to 'Hey, maybe the government should somehow reward signing up to becoming an organ donor enough that people actually do it.', which would, duh, not only result in even more kidneys and lungs but also hearts and retinas and whatnot.
It is _trivially_ easy to create an organ donation system that does not have perverse incentives and does not take advantage of the poor, so why on earth would we create on that did?
I can't think of what specific Warehouse 13 you're talking about. They just got trapped in a book the last episode, but that was a property of that specific book, and they just left it when the story ended, so that wouldn't work in general. (And they got trapped in a comic in the webisodes, but I don't remember that well.)
However, if anyone _does_ have the ability to hope in and out of TV shows, it would be them.
But a big problem is, if you're just some random person in that universe, no way you're getting into the Warehouse, much less running off with an artifact. You could physically locate the place (It's the 'IRS warehouse' outside Univille, SD.) and pester the employees, but that's about it.
I'm not sure that declining the invitation would be a good idea...seems to me that could focus the plot on you. You'd end up dead, and the host of the party will be informed while Jessica Fletcher is standing right here, she will decide to investigate, and it would be a Clue that you did not attend the party.
No, if you find yourself in the Murder She Wrote universe, you must _immediately_ murder Jessica Fletcher. And not remotely. (That will just end up killing someone else due to her Plot Armor and she'll solve the murder.) Run up, and stab her repeatedly. Do not worry about getting caught...the _only_ way to actually catch criminals in the Murder She Wrote universe is for Jessica Fletcher to pretend to be trapped in an empty room with them and get them to confess and then they attempt to kill her while the police listen in.
Now, depending on how the world works, other people step in to attempt this trick. So, as a rule of thumb, never attempt to murder anyone who is listing circumstantial evidence against you. Ever. It is a trick. Pretend to be baffled, and then go along willingly with the police. They will have to release you due to 'lack of evidence', because there is no such thing as 'evidence' in that universe.
While The Real World is just pretending to be the real world, how about any talk show, which actually_are_ set in the 'real world'? (Just stay away from the political ones, or you could accidentally end up in a world where certain politicians are trying to destroy America.)
Hey, who wants to make a quick TV show with me about a very nice superhero, able to stop meteors, set in 10,000 BC, who has the power to exit, along with anyone else who has joined him, any fictional work he's put in? ;)
It really seems like that's a more ethical use of everyone's time.
Actually, the best bet to save the world would be to find a TV show that has done a 'Trapped in TV land' episode. Because in that universe, the technology to exit the TV show they're in already exists. (This might be slightly different tech than inter-dimensional portals.)
Go there, grab the tech, exit the show, go into the Superman TV show or something, exit that world with Superman in tow, and save the world that way.
The danger of the Quantum Leap universe is that God might take an interest to your arrival and suddenly _you_ now have a job putting right what once went wrong.
I think it should be pointed out that you can get into the Star Trek universe safely...you just need to join it in the _present_. As Star Trek canonically has cryogenic suspension from the present day (Khan, that business guy in TNG, etc...), you can just wait it out. But watch out for the nuclear war in the 2060s.
Or you can just find one of the many time machines...I'd suggest meeting up with the Voyager crew in 1997 and lie about being a time traveler from their time (You should know enough stuff about the Federation _and_ the near future of 1997 to convince them) and need a lift, but then you're stuck on Voyager, ugh.
I was thinking you might want to be in a dramatic universe with super-crime-solvers in it, like CSI or Bones or Psych or something, for safety reasons, until I remembered that those universes also have a surprising amount of serial killers wandering around, and lots of people end up dead before our heroes show up.
From the point of view of a non-main character, all most TV universes look basically the same. Would you actually know or care you're in the universe of the Big Bang Theory or Arrested Development or Breaking Bad?
Hey, what if you entered a TV show that was explicitly set in _this_ universe due to lack of fourth wall? Like Letterman or other talk shows? And won't they be really confused inside that show when the meteor doesn't kill everyone?
I don't entirely agree, because you've changed it from what you stated the 'shallow' opposition was. There are shallow people on both sides. What Morat20 and I were disagreeing with was that shallow people on the left were in favor of 'more' government.
The 'shallow' position on the right is, indeed, less government. Anti-government.
The 'shallow' position on the left is _not_ more government. It might be just randomly giving large amounts of money to the poor, or demanding that businesses hire minorities, or demanding that no one ever build anywhere that animals live, or whatever.(Although those are more parodies of the left that don't actually exist, but I will assume that they exist in real life _somewhere_.)
But the left, even the shallow left, is not 'pro-government'. If, for example, someone were to propose that the government build an FBI station in every single town and staff it, the shallow left would be just as confused as everyone else.
Even the most shallow person on the left is only 'pro-government' to the extent that they think they have a problem and they think they have come up with a government solution to it. They're not 'pro-government' in some sort of abstract. (1)
OTOH, if someone were to propose closing down post offices...hey, wait, the right actually is trying to secretly do that, right now. And there no problem with the post offices right now, and the right is working, right now, to get rid of them, for no reason other than they are 'government'.
1) Well, I presume there's some shallow left person who has come to the conclusion that to create jobs government should make up pretend jobs and hire everyone for them, and to do that the government should become huge as a goal in and of itself to 'create jobs'. But even this imaginary person is only 'pro-government' in that they think the government would be solving a problem.
Can’t think of a single piece of wood that Republicans have actually removed.
'Running around removing wood' was an exaggeration on my part. They almost never got anything passed like that. That's mostly because there have been two different trends in the Republican party, and they sorta cancel out the other, causing nothing to happen.
The first is the what I'm describing, where all government is bad, period, and all government should be removed, period. This is getting stronger and stronger, and started skyrocketing the instant that Obama took office. Let's call this trend A. (This has always been sorta the stated position of Republicans, but they clearly didn't _believe_ it until recently.)
The most 'pure' example of this was during the last election, when various candidates asserted they would remove multiple _entire Cabinet Departments_.
The other slope is their willingness to actually make policy, which has constantly decreased since Obama took office. Let's call this trend B.
So at some point in the past, Republicans would sometimes propose insane ideas, like Bush trying to privatize Social security. But other Republicans were not not as high on A, and shoot it down.
Nowadays, of course, Republicans are willing to literally do anything like that as they are all have high enough A, (Witness the Paul Ryan budget, which privatized Medicare)
But the Republicans are not even _trying_ to get actual laws passed anymore by the actual government...bills exist solely to vote for or against and than run around yammering about how they voted. Yes, yes, it would be pretty hard for them to get things passed now, but they are not actually trying to come up with anything that could pass. They have hit bottom on B. Their sole remaining policy seems to be 'tax cuts'.
The only 'wood removing' ones that passed were ones that no one actually understood what was going on when they did pass. NAFTA and crippling then repealing Glass–Steagall spring to mind. (Which also, you may note, got Democratic support.)
I find it baffling that _anyone_ is talking about paying for organ _donation_ when we could _probably_ just solve the problem by paying for people signing up to become organ donors.
I.e., they sign up _now_ to donate upon death, and we pay them _now_. Make it $500 or something that isn't huge, but isn't nothing. If saying 'Yes, I will be an organ donor' is worth $500, what 18 year old _wouldn't_ do it? (Might instead want to structure it as a yearly thing, I dunno.)
Also, we need to fix the laws, because right now organ donation is still legally dependent on the family instead of the actual donor. Which is nonsense....you own your own body, and after death your estate owns it, and if you've given clear directions to the government what you want to happen with your body, other people should not be able to override that.
Fix that and have 99% of people sign up, and we've solved this 'organ donation' problem _without_ the obvious dangers of paying for the _organs_.
I predict both football and boxing are going to have to drop their 'safety' equipment in less than a decade. The outside of the body is designed to be injured, the inside wasn't.
You are correct, there will be massive opposition to this.
I was about to post that, so I think I will be contrary and post the opposite: Fines.
It's hard to think of a form of punishment that is more regressive.
In fact I think I'd like to nominate the entire 'justice' system. From prisons and prison rape to fines that rich people shrug off but cripple the poor to the fact that simple being able to pay for a lawyer means you have +50% of getting off.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “This Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Things”
Incidentally, another part of this that everyone seems to be missing...501(c)4s are not required to get permission from the IRS to exist in the first place.
From what I understand, you don't actually make 'a 501(c)4'. You _file_ as a 501(c)4. The organization exists regardless.
These groups, probably because they were all working off the same legal template and their lawyers all knew they were in a somewhat illegal area of the law, were trying to get _pre-cleared_ as a 501(c)4, which they did not actually need to do. This pre-clearance or lack thereof in no way interfered with their work or money-flow, it was just a _tax_ delay.
And even if they _hadn't_ gotten it they could have simply filed as a non-profit as a 527 and paid exactly the same amount of taxes. (That is, none.) The 501(c)4 thing was simply to keep from having from having disclose donors.
"
However, I shall assume that you were talking issue with 'I actually think the IRS scandal has less teeth than even reasonable people think. (I don’t think it even qualifies as a ‘scandal’ in any sense, much less one that has anything to do with Obama.)', and explain what I mean by that.
The simple fact is, 501(c)4s were being created in violation of the law. Now, this is a violation of the law that the IRS seemed to not take much issue with, but that was before thousands of them appeared out of thin air. (Thanks to Citizen's United)
Many of the ones that should not be allowed to exist had obviously political names.
Let's make an analogy here: Let's say there is a neighborhood where street parking is allowed, but only by residents. Residents are supposed to put stickers on their cars, but they sometimes do not, and that law has been almost completely ignored, and it ties up too much time in the courts if the cops ticket a resident, so they ticket no one.
And then let's say that a new college opens just past that neighborhood, and now 1000 college kids are parking on the street. So the cops wander up and down the street, putting tickets on every 'college-looking' car. (If they hit a resident by mistake, well, that can get straightened out in the courts.)
This is _not correct behavior_. It is, in fact, misbehavior. It's called profiling instead of actually doing your damn job. The legality of a car should not be judged by what it looks like, and the legality of an organization should not be judged by the name. There are actual standard, and those standards should be enforced.
It is also _entirely expected behavior_ by an underfunded police department.
Now, notice that I've been presenting this in a politically neutral manner, whereas certain people seem intent on making this something to do with the 'right'.
No. From what I can tell, they just picked the _most common_ political keywords of the incorrect 501(c)3s, and those really were right-wing ones, considering the ratio of right vs. left groups being created. (To continue my analogy, let's assume it's a mostly white neighborhood, and a mostly black college, so 'college-looking' included things that also indicate race, so on top of it the police look racist. So now it's a big race issue that actually has nothing to do with anything.)
The 'scandal' of 'politics' has rendered the entire actual issue here meaningless. The IRS should not have been caring about the names of groups, and, perhaps more importantly, they should have been REJECTING these groups. (Which, indeed, would have rejected more right-wing groups than left-wing, because there _were_ more of those groups.)
The problem here is complete inability or unwillingness of the IRS to enforce the law. And then some random profiling (Which looked political) while _continuing_ to be unwilling to enforce the actual law. (As opposed to the pretend law the IRS was enforcing, where 501(c)4s could be somewhat political.)
Actually, the problem is the law. There's not a hell of a lot of point for 501(c)4 groups in the first place, and even less point for them to be allowed to keep their donors anonymous.
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Erm, while I have read a few of these questionnaires , you appear to have several question in your list I haven't seen anywhere.
What are your religious views?
I have not seen any questions at all about religion. Or heard anyone else mention such question. Nor do I find it plausible that the IRS would ask an _organization_ what religion it was.
Which people do you talk to?
Well, this would be an absurd question if actually phrased like that, but, again, I have not see that question. I've seen demands to turn over training material and presentation and stuff, but not 'Which people do you talk to?'.
Give us the names of all your donors.
Yes, that question was very inappropriate, and warrants a full investigation as to how it got in there, along with the targeting in the first place.
Give us the names of everyone who has interned with you.
Erm...firstly, no, I haven't see that question. Secondly, who interns for for an organization is _not private information_, and something the government actually already has the right to know, just like they have the right to know who that organization employs.
List all your unofficial contacts.
Much like 'Which people do you talk to?', this is complete nonsense as a question and not something the IRS has asked.
Give us backdoor access to all your websites.
And, again, nope. No one asked that.
So, I think the point of the article is well proved: Conservatives can't manage to refrain from making stuff up, even in the midst of _actual government misbehavior_.
(continued in next post...)
On “Is This Wrong?”
All of the effects of the rule are bad and unfair and none good.
It's actually rather astonishing how many school rules fall exactly under that category.
All dress code rules fall into that category. None of those make the slightest bit of sense, at all. Including rules for dances and whatnot. It is the damn students' dance, and they can wear whatever they want.(1)
All rules about weapons fall into that category. If you actually were going to commit the _felony_ of assault and murder, why would school rules stop you? (I'm talking more about knifes than guns. I don't have any real problems with not letting students carry guns, although it's worth pointing out that's already illegal in most states on school grounds and hence doesn't need a 'rule' about it.)
All rules about 'drugs' fall into that category. We already have a perfectly functional set of laws about who can have and take which drugs. (Don't get me wrong, I'd be fine with a rule that allowed teachers to check that laws were being followed. I'm just taking issue that the school should be forbidding people from possessing a substance they legally can possess.)
The idea that a school needs an entire separate set of 'rules' in addition to the law of society is near complete nonsense.
I guess there a few rules about specific circumstances that could reasonable exist, like 'Students must get a parking pass before parking at the school' and 'Students must return tray to window after eating' and 'No running in the hall' (Although those are less 'school rules' and more 'signs on the wall'.) and a few classroom rules like 'Students can't use their cellphone in class' (Although classroom rules, ultimate, are the job of the teacher to set.)
But something like 90% of school rules are set by insane power-mad despots who want to control people and have managed to luck upon a job where they can do just that.
I'm mainly talking about high schoolers here. Elementary schoolers probably need a bit more structure.
1) I actually find it rather baffling that people don't understand the entire concept of high school dances and sports and stuff. All that really is an attempt to show students how to be social. It's a sort of enforced 'community' that they live in, and pretty much all decisions should be left up to them. Yes, they will make stupid decisions, but that's what high school is for. It's not the job of parents or administrators to come along and interfere except to stop extreme problems. (Aka, you do have to chaperon them, but that's it.)
On “This Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Things”
It explains everything, even contradictory things, and can never be disproved because each event is just more evidence, no matter what the event was.
Scientists do not have an very accurate model of long-term weather, and there are lot of things that we are not sure how much temperature change will effect. I've read something the other day that pointed out that global warming changes two things about tornadoes, one of which makes more tornadoes and one makes less, and we don't actually know which is more important, so it's entirely possible global warming is reducing the amount of tornadoes. (Statistically, the amount of tornadoes is roughly the same, it's just that we are building denser so they are more harmful.)
However, there is ONE thing that goddamn global warming predicts...GLOBAL WARMING.
You appear to have this idea that just because we don't actually know the results of raising the temperature higher and higher and higher that, uh, it somehow isn't happening. That does not make any sense at all. There are specific things that we know happen with higher average temperatures. We have more drought, at least on average. Thus crops die. We have melting ice caps. We have deserts expand.
_Those_ are the bad thing, and those bad side effects are not up for debate. (Unless you want to debate the temperature increase itself, and feel free to do that, but you can't actually debate the fact that a temperature increase would result in those bad things.)
We _also_ are going to get random weather patter changes in random places, and because we don't fully understand many of the reasons weather patterns exist in the first place, we're pretty crappy at predicting the changes. But, generally speaking, randomizing the weather at all is a bad thing. Yes, one or two areas might luck out and get less tornadoes or less blizzards, but the vast majority of places are going to just have random changes that devastate the ecosystems. (Yes, ecosystems adapted...but it sucks to be living through it.)
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None of the scandals really have anything to do with Obama, only the IRS scandal had any actual wrong doing, and I actually think the IRS scandal has less teeth than even reasonable people think. (I don't think it even qualifies as a 'scandal' in any sense, much less one that has anything to do with Obama.)
However, I think the point the article is making is that a _sane_ opposition would be able to use the IRS issue to throw some dirt on Obama, along with a little dirt from the AP thing. Not much dirt, but some.
The GOP...is not a sane opposition.
On “What is your true rejection: Organ Trade Edition”
...'my interpretation of their motives'?
I don't believe I interpreted anyone's motives. I merely pointed out that _any_ plan whatsoever that involves writing checks and giving them to poor people, for any reason whatsoever, is going to _incredibly_ unpopular with the right.
I ascribed no motive to this. Nor did I condemn it in any way. (I did use a bit of hyperbole, but hopefully everyone understands that most people would rather pay people money than be burned to death, and that was, indeed, hyperbole.)
Do you disagree with my statement? Do you think that the right _would_ be willing to pay for poor people signing up to be organ donors? Do you think they'd approve of any government plan that resulted in poor people lining up to receive money?
I actually find this habit of people objecting to me stating _what is clearly the actual position of the Republicans_ to be rather annoying. And it's never 'The right doesn't think that' or 'Republicans wouldn't do that', it's always 'David, stop painting them to be evil'.
I didn't call them _evil_. Neither did Mike Schilling for that matter. We made no moral judgments at all.
I simply stated what I suspect would be their position on a hypothetical law, based on other positions they have. If you disagree with what I think, then say so. Perhaps you can make an argument that Republicans _would_ be in favor of it.
But if you agree with what I thought, and you also think that position is morally wrong, then that's _you_ calling them morally wrong, not me.
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You can actually solve a hell of a lot of problems in society by just _paying people to do the right thing_.
There's some sort of Philosophical Truth in that statement, somewhere.
Of course, the problem is that, at this point, the right sees the government actually handing money to human beings, especially _poor_ human beings, as the greatest horror imaginable, so would likely object to this. (1) Instead, they would demand it as a tax rebate...which would hilariously mean it was the middle class 'selling their organs', not the poor.
Incidentally, we can solve the problem of people not serving jury duty the same way...actually paying a _reasonable_ amount of money for their time, instead of wages that would actually be illegal under minimum wage laws. And provide child care.
And low voter turnout, too. And low voter registration. And recycling.
And the fun thing is, instead of paying for _enforcement_ of stuff, you can simply set up an office and have people _come to you_. If you're going to fine people for something, they will hide it and dispute it and you need court and whatnot, whereas if you're going to pay people for something, especially something that is no real effort on their part, they will show up at government offices and provide evidence to you. With no work on your part!
It's a crazy idea, I know. Paying people do things we want them to do.
1) Despite the fact it is not actually handing money to anyone, and is in fact exactly the same thing as the usage fees the far right seems to think the government should collect from everyone instead of taxes...except in the other direction. But I honestly believe that the right would rather DIE IN A FIRE than to hand poor people money.
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #10: The “Three Hour Tour””
I think if you showed up outside the Warehouse with the knowledge you gleaned from the show (assuming you watch it), Artie would get you to talk to the Regents post-haste.
That's a good point, and it makes me realize there's an exploit in the hypothetical. Namely, you can arrive _during a plot_. No one ever said you had to arrive in the 'now' of a TV show.
Now, admittedly, if you're just some random guy, you can't cut it very close, and there's not any way you're going to track how to call the Warehouse, so you have to fly there...
...but show up a few days before, for example, the disastrous season three finale and explain who you are and how events are about to go entirely pear-shaped?
Yeah, they might indeed loan you an artifact. Actually, you'd have a pretty good chance of becoming an agent, considering their recruitment policy.
On “What is your true rejection: Organ Trade Edition”
Kidneys are one of those things that I don't have problems with paying for, if you can convince me that there is very little harm in donating a kidney. And the article is right...having a backup kidney is almost completely useless, as they always fail together. It only helps if someone shoots you in the kidney or something.(1)
So if we can invent some sort of public system to pay people to donate kidneys that was are sure are not going to make the person who donated life's worse off, and cover expenses in case it does, than I am okay with it.
1) You know, whoever designed a human to have backup part was stupid. Backup hands and backup eyes and even backup testicles, sure, those are on the outside, and can get physically damaged. But the stuff _inside_ fails because the system fails, and hence both of them fail at once! (Well, barring cancer, but for most of human history no one had any ability to remove the defective one.) What would be much saner is to only run one kidney or one lung, and only turn the second one on if the first failed.
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Incidentally, my state already does this...for $5 off the driver's license registration. Yes, apparently donating your organs is worth five whole dollars. (But only if you drive.)
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By 'a system' do you mean somewhere else? Because I really have no idea of what the laws are elsewhere.
Here is my invented system: Pay people $500 to sign up to be organ donors, starting at age 18.
That's it. Currently, the signed up organ donor average seems to hover around 20%. And based on poor college students that I know, something like 90% will sign up for anything that will pay them $500, especially if they don't actually have to do anything, and this has the added bonus of being for a good cause.
Now, you'll notice I didn't invent any way out of this system, because I don't actually care. I think if, by signing up, you committed to be an organ donor for five years, and then at the end of the five years, you can opt out or stay in, almost all people signed up would just stay in. (If everyone actually does opt out, we could fix that by providing renewal payments, but I suspect we don't need that.)
If 90% of people were organ donors, we wouldn't have to worry about 'buying' organs from anywhere, or try to carefully figure out incentives and laws to keep people from being worth more dead.
On “Popular and Wrong”
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what the laws are about any of that.
I just hear stories about family members refusing to proceed with donation, which in my mind is roughly akin to family members asserting that they aren't going to read the will and instead will divide up the deceased's property how they want...it's complete nonsense. That's not how that works. A dead person's estate _owns_ their body.
I guess there's a point where prepping the body still counts a 'medical decision', and not 'property laws', but that just demonstrates that organ donation agreement needs to include an aspect of living wills.
But I don't actually know if this needs to change anyway. If we actually pay people for this, if something like 95% of all people are signed up, then just 5% of them is more than enough for all needed organ donations. And presumably the percentage agreeing would grow as organ donation became the default assumption for everyone.
On “What is your true rejection: Organ Trade Edition”
What would make me change my mind? When we have at least attempted the _slightest_ effort to actual encourage organ donations after death, and that attempt has then failed.
I like how we've nonsensically leaped to 'Letting people sell organs', which at best would just let people sell organs that they have two of. (So, uh, kidneys then. And lungs, maybe?)
And not given the slightest amount of thought to 'Hey, maybe the government should somehow reward signing up to becoming an organ donor enough that people actually do it.', which would, duh, not only result in even more kidneys and lungs but also hearts and retinas and whatnot.
It is _trivially_ easy to create an organ donation system that does not have perverse incentives and does not take advantage of the poor, so why on earth would we create on that did?
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #10: The “Three Hour Tour””
I can't think of what specific Warehouse 13 you're talking about. They just got trapped in a book the last episode, but that was a property of that specific book, and they just left it when the story ended, so that wouldn't work in general. (And they got trapped in a comic in the webisodes, but I don't remember that well.)
However, if anyone _does_ have the ability to hope in and out of TV shows, it would be them.
But a big problem is, if you're just some random person in that universe, no way you're getting into the Warehouse, much less running off with an artifact. You could physically locate the place (It's the 'IRS warehouse' outside Univille, SD.) and pester the employees, but that's about it.
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I'm not sure that declining the invitation would be a good idea...seems to me that could focus the plot on you. You'd end up dead, and the host of the party will be informed while Jessica Fletcher is standing right here, she will decide to investigate, and it would be a Clue that you did not attend the party.
No, if you find yourself in the Murder She Wrote universe, you must _immediately_ murder Jessica Fletcher. And not remotely. (That will just end up killing someone else due to her Plot Armor and she'll solve the murder.) Run up, and stab her repeatedly. Do not worry about getting caught...the _only_ way to actually catch criminals in the Murder She Wrote universe is for Jessica Fletcher to pretend to be trapped in an empty room with them and get them to confess and then they attempt to kill her while the police listen in.
Now, depending on how the world works, other people step in to attempt this trick. So, as a rule of thumb, never attempt to murder anyone who is listing circumstantial evidence against you. Ever. It is a trick. Pretend to be baffled, and then go along willingly with the police. They will have to release you due to 'lack of evidence', because there is no such thing as 'evidence' in that universe.
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While The Real World is just pretending to be the real world, how about any talk show, which actually_are_ set in the 'real world'? (Just stay away from the political ones, or you could accidentally end up in a world where certain politicians are trying to destroy America.)
Hey, who wants to make a quick TV show with me about a very nice superhero, able to stop meteors, set in 10,000 BC, who has the power to exit, along with anyone else who has joined him, any fictional work he's put in? ;)
It really seems like that's a more ethical use of everyone's time.
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Actually, the best bet to save the world would be to find a TV show that has done a 'Trapped in TV land' episode. Because in that universe, the technology to exit the TV show they're in already exists. (This might be slightly different tech than inter-dimensional portals.)
Go there, grab the tech, exit the show, go into the Superman TV show or something, exit that world with Superman in tow, and save the world that way.
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The danger of the Quantum Leap universe is that God might take an interest to your arrival and suddenly _you_ now have a job putting right what once went wrong.
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I think it should be pointed out that you can get into the Star Trek universe safely...you just need to join it in the _present_. As Star Trek canonically has cryogenic suspension from the present day (Khan, that business guy in TNG, etc...), you can just wait it out. But watch out for the nuclear war in the 2060s.
Or you can just find one of the many time machines...I'd suggest meeting up with the Voyager crew in 1997 and lie about being a time traveler from their time (You should know enough stuff about the Federation _and_ the near future of 1997 to convince them) and need a lift, but then you're stuck on Voyager, ugh.
I was thinking you might want to be in a dramatic universe with super-crime-solvers in it, like CSI or Bones or Psych or something, for safety reasons, until I remembered that those universes also have a surprising amount of serial killers wandering around, and lots of people end up dead before our heroes show up.
From the point of view of a non-main character, all most TV universes look basically the same. Would you actually know or care you're in the universe of the Big Bang Theory or Arrested Development or Breaking Bad?
Hey, what if you entered a TV show that was explicitly set in _this_ universe due to lack of fourth wall? Like Letterman or other talk shows? And won't they be really confused inside that show when the meteor doesn't kill everyone?
On “Ideology is the Enemy: The Creeping Victory of “Consistent” over “Judicious””
I don't entirely agree, because you've changed it from what you stated the 'shallow' opposition was. There are shallow people on both sides. What Morat20 and I were disagreeing with was that shallow people on the left were in favor of 'more' government.
The 'shallow' position on the right is, indeed, less government. Anti-government.
The 'shallow' position on the left is _not_ more government. It might be just randomly giving large amounts of money to the poor, or demanding that businesses hire minorities, or demanding that no one ever build anywhere that animals live, or whatever.(Although those are more parodies of the left that don't actually exist, but I will assume that they exist in real life _somewhere_.)
But the left, even the shallow left, is not 'pro-government'. If, for example, someone were to propose that the government build an FBI station in every single town and staff it, the shallow left would be just as confused as everyone else.
Even the most shallow person on the left is only 'pro-government' to the extent that they think they have a problem and they think they have come up with a government solution to it. They're not 'pro-government' in some sort of abstract. (1)
OTOH, if someone were to propose closing down post offices...hey, wait, the right actually is trying to secretly do that, right now. And there no problem with the post offices right now, and the right is working, right now, to get rid of them, for no reason other than they are 'government'.
1) Well, I presume there's some shallow left person who has come to the conclusion that to create jobs government should make up pretend jobs and hire everyone for them, and to do that the government should become huge as a goal in and of itself to 'create jobs'. But even this imaginary person is only 'pro-government' in that they think the government would be solving a problem.
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Can’t think of a single piece of wood that Republicans have actually removed.
'Running around removing wood' was an exaggeration on my part. They almost never got anything passed like that. That's mostly because there have been two different trends in the Republican party, and they sorta cancel out the other, causing nothing to happen.
The first is the what I'm describing, where all government is bad, period, and all government should be removed, period. This is getting stronger and stronger, and started skyrocketing the instant that Obama took office. Let's call this trend A. (This has always been sorta the stated position of Republicans, but they clearly didn't _believe_ it until recently.)
The most 'pure' example of this was during the last election, when various candidates asserted they would remove multiple _entire Cabinet Departments_.
The other slope is their willingness to actually make policy, which has constantly decreased since Obama took office. Let's call this trend B.
So at some point in the past, Republicans would sometimes propose insane ideas, like Bush trying to privatize Social security. But other Republicans were not not as high on A, and shoot it down.
Nowadays, of course, Republicans are willing to literally do anything like that as they are all have high enough A, (Witness the Paul Ryan budget, which privatized Medicare)
But the Republicans are not even _trying_ to get actual laws passed anymore by the actual government...bills exist solely to vote for or against and than run around yammering about how they voted. Yes, yes, it would be pretty hard for them to get things passed now, but they are not actually trying to come up with anything that could pass. They have hit bottom on B. Their sole remaining policy seems to be 'tax cuts'.
The only 'wood removing' ones that passed were ones that no one actually understood what was going on when they did pass. NAFTA and crippling then repealing Glass–Steagall spring to mind. (Which also, you may note, got Democratic support.)
On “Popular and Wrong”
I find it baffling that _anyone_ is talking about paying for organ _donation_ when we could _probably_ just solve the problem by paying for people signing up to become organ donors.
I.e., they sign up _now_ to donate upon death, and we pay them _now_. Make it $500 or something that isn't huge, but isn't nothing. If saying 'Yes, I will be an organ donor' is worth $500, what 18 year old _wouldn't_ do it? (Might instead want to structure it as a yearly thing, I dunno.)
Also, we need to fix the laws, because right now organ donation is still legally dependent on the family instead of the actual donor. Which is nonsense....you own your own body, and after death your estate owns it, and if you've given clear directions to the government what you want to happen with your body, other people should not be able to override that.
Fix that and have 99% of people sign up, and we've solved this 'organ donation' problem _without_ the obvious dangers of paying for the _organs_.
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I predict both football and boxing are going to have to drop their 'safety' equipment in less than a decade. The outside of the body is designed to be injured, the inside wasn't.
You are correct, there will be massive opposition to this.
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I was about to post that, so I think I will be contrary and post the opposite: Fines.
It's hard to think of a form of punishment that is more regressive.
In fact I think I'd like to nominate the entire 'justice' system. From prisons and prison rape to fines that rich people shrug off but cripple the poor to the fact that simple being able to pay for a lawyer means you have +50% of getting off.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.