*quality engineering, sadly only required because the original contractors cut corners and no regulators caught it before it failed. IMO, the companies that built it should be paying that $1 billion price tag. They’re the ones who used low quality concrete, left out literally tons of rebar, and decided a soft dirt emergency spillway on an earthen dam was good enough.

This is why we need a $3 trillion infrastructure bill. Really, we likely need ten times that. We haven’t invested in infrastructure for decades.
Had there been regular real inspections they likely would have noticed the problem when repairs only cost $100 million. There are literally thousands of dams in America with similar, or worse issues, and no money to even properly inspect them, much less fix them before they fail. Waiting for them to fail costs at least 10 times what pre-failure repairs cost, but we only care after they fail.

Thanks Manchin, our nation is crumbling thanks to you joining the obstructionist Republican Party, someone needs to burn his yacht with his family on board while he watches, then burn him in his mansion and distribute his hundreds of millions back to the state he stole it from.
Edit: Btw- Goldman Sacks has revised their 2022 estimate for gdp based on Manchin killing the infrastructure bill from over 3% to barely 2%. >$200 BILLION just gone with his vote against America. This as Manchin says “the Democrats aught to push me into the Republican Party”, but you’re already there, Joe. They aught to deny you funding and primary you, but not hand another seat to Republicans as you suggest, traitor. They really aught to strip you of all assignments, all funding, all security, and start broadcasting your location 24/7 until you are gone. If you ask me, they aught to drop you feet first in a slow meat grinder and make a day of it, televised. Then they aught to forced feed you to your family before taking every dime they have and denying them any assistance from anywhere. That’s what aught to happen to skidmarks like you.

Lol. Yeah, in your own mind. You can’t write a single sentence without proving that wrong by sounding like a first year English student or worse. You not smart guy…you unsmart guy. Unsmart guy who like lies and liars and hate factses.
Sweet zombie Jebus, you moron.

Bob, they went on TV and said it. You don’t even have to read, just not hide your head in the sand…sadly that’s still too much to ask of you. God forbid you actually know what the party you blindly support is planning.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mcconnell-no-republican-legislative-agenda-before-2022-midterm-elections-2021-12

Historic Unemployment levels are way down. Historically negative GDP now up. My portfolio went up >25% in 6 months, under Trump it went down over 10% in 4 years. I have a diverse portfolio. Biden got serious funding for real infrastructure repair, not some vague promise of infrastructure week used as a distraction from innumerable scandals but never actually happening, not even for a week. Our international standing is on the rise after falling like a stone under Trump. Biden is doing fine…much better than Trump on his best day. Expectations are low with Republican obstruction a given and some “Democrats” being Republicans in practice.

Biden didn’t attempt a democracy ending coup. Trump did. That alone means Biden wins the “good job” medal 100-0.

Biden’s votes are all valid, Trump has dozens of voters caught voting more than once, and who knows how many not caught. There was voter fraud, 100% Republican voter fraud. How many senators won by cheating. If I used your (lack of any) metric, I would say every Republican representative is invalid and should be removed and jailed. D’oh!

Trump was a mess….an unmitigated failure at everything he tried. He inherited a healthy economy and nation, he left a recession, pandemic, and deep, DEEP division that already tried to destroy American democracy based on his lies.
Trump’s legacy is 3/4 million dead, economy in shambles, allies turning away, and the union crumbling…what you call an unmitigated success.

Edit: some light reading, since inflation is so important to you now…keep in mind the fed “created” over $4.5 trillion in 2020 alone to pay for Trump’s failures. (A dollar devaluation equating to 25% inflation long term)
https://money.cnn.com/2016/05/11/news/economy/donald-trump-print-money/

Yes, duh Bob.
Trump polling at 36% was worse, so you just claimed fake polls. He inherited a strong robust economy, a system to protect from epidemics, far less debt and deficit, and no pandemic…no crisis. I don’t argue Biden’s popular, like you do Trump despite reality, I only argue he’s a vast improvement, the best that could be hoped for under the disastrous circumstances one Trump term put the nation in.

The people coming, largely Haitians, almost all say they’re coming because they saw American politicians say the American borders are open and accepting everyone. Those are Republicans saying that, lying to get their base riled up, but the Haitians living in South America don’t know that, they think they are being invited by the Republicans. Look into it, you’ll see that’s true if you do. Biden sent many back to Haiti, Trump liked to dump them back in Guatemala to try again.
This energy independence myth, just quit. We were not. There was a world wide oil glut in 2020 because the pandemic lowered demand so much suppliers actually gave it away at one point….that was not some genius Trump energy plan bearing fruit, it was the economy and industry collapsing thanks to an avoidable pandemic. As the economy recovers, so does demand but not production. You seem to want to blame Biden for basic economics.
My gas is the same as 2019+-$.25….you want to compare to 2020 because gas was cheap thanks to Covid. Yours might be more for some political reasons, like your unprotected pipeline got hacked by Russians, but you need to prove it, then prove Biden’s failure caused it, not just say it, and not by cutting and pasting some talking head’s opinion. My assessment is he’s improved security on infrastructure but I’m open to evidence to the contrary.

Lowering corporate tax rates didn’t lower unemployment significantly, it raised upper management compensation and corporate profits. Investing in infrastructure will.

That’s good you don’t want to debate more Covid deaths, because there’s more than enough blame for both sides even if you don’t look at 2020 that was all Republican stoked (anti mask, anti social distance, anti contact tracing). Keep in mind, since Jan, >90% of all cases are in the intentionally unvaccinated population, almost 100% of deaths, and remember who they are and who they follow…not Biden. Covid deaths this year are nearly 100% caused by political division and misinformation created and spread by one political side. Guess which. That’s not to say Biden’s perfect, he should have implemented vaccine mandates Jan 21, no exemptions without permanent quarantine, what was needed to stop more deaths by stupidity, but he doesn’t have the balls for dictating. You should be so grateful for that.

Blaming the Chinese without proof, or even evidence they are to blame, just supposition, is outrageously dangerous and provocative. Accusing them of creating and releasing it on purpose….against themselves….is simply asinine and proof you aren’t thinking for yourself or at all.

Mid terms always go to those not in power, so yes, 2022 will likely return congress to partial Republican control, which you will call a massive mandate against Biden unlike when it happened in 2018 and you just whined that it’s unfair.

>26% of Americans are Republicans. The rest are what you call socialist communists because you don’t know what those words mean. Your party does not represent your (alleged) country….and is shrinking. Democrats aren’t even my party, they are just the only achievable adversaries to the madness of the right at this point in time. Given a better option, I would jump….you can’t say the same. You’re deep in the death cult of personality the Right has become…a true believer.

Biden got money no president in my lifetime has to invest in America. Bridges, Roads, Airports, New water systems, Digital communication improvements, Overall improvements and long deferred maintenance of rail, New funding to fight increasing wildfires (Brandon)…all the things absolutely necessary for the nation to function as a first world nation. He’s already a big winner, and if we aren’t speaking Mandarin in 3 years he still will be. The fruits of his legacy will be enjoyed for decades to come, Trump’s legacy is economic failure, failure to protect from a preventable epidemic, massive unemployment, an administration so corrupt that the convictions of people in his administration or campaign almost certainly outnumber the prosecutions of members of all previous administrations combined while the severity of their crimes outweighs the combined national injury caused by all previous political crimes, and a division so strong one party actually tried to destroy democracy and install a dictator.

History is the judge of any administration, not the midterm, and history will look kindly on Biden, no so for Trump, mired in constant criminal scandal and failures to this day. The only president in our history to not peacefully transfer power, to be impeached twice, who clearly put his own interests above those of the nation at every opportunity. Death and division are his legacy.

Merry Mithra’s season.

A 2012 United Nations report summarized 65 different estimated maximum sustainable population size and the most common estimate was 8 billion. Advocates of reduced population often put forward much lower numbers. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population

Since we are at or near 8 billion and are far from sustainable, haven’t been for over 50 years, I think the 1.5 number is far more realistic, maybe even high. I think the 8 billion estimates assume international cooperation, constant advances in farming tech with constantly increasing yields (that aren’t happening), and don’t account for climate change disrupting supply chains and production at various levels….so wishful thinking.

War sucks for population control. It’s messy, expensive, destructive of both infrastructure and ecology, and just crap at killing meaningful numbers. We need to reduce by billions, the worst war killed a few million and destroyed much of Europe. A war that kills 1000 times more people….yikes. Forget global warming, hello planetary disintegration.

The only acceptable method IMO is quit having children, then you don’t kill anyone to achieve sustainability. For some idiotic reason, average people find the idea of not having excess children horrific and totally out of the question, but the idea of starving their children to death seems to garner a “shit happens”.

Agreed, we need something like an airborne infectious prion where there could be no vaccine, no sterilization, no escape…..only that would wipe out everyone so maybe not that.

Not compared to his predecessor.
He’s your president….hardly a has been when he’s the current leader of the free world. 🤦‍♂️
He appears presidential to me, and our allies, in stark contrast to xenophobic insecure bunker baby, temper tantrum throwing Trump.

So sadly delusional, bob. Keep telling yourself he was popular with 36.4% approval, lower than Biden’s lowest, that he couldn’t be beaten, that you have no evidence after a year looking under every rock, but you just know it was rigged because the least popular president ever who personally exacerbated a pandemic that was preventable, caused a recession, and was floundering in every direction couldn’t lose.
🤦‍♂️

The left NEVER claimed fraud as sore losers, most blamed Clinton and the DNC. Liar. The left didn’t say Trump was an illegitimate president, just that he only won by quirky outdated technicality, not by votes. The left didn’t try to overthrow democracy because they lost an election they ran.

Cheating is the only method used by the right now, vote suppression, Gerrymandering, voter purges….all Republican dirty tricks. America will never forget which party tried to overthrow democracy. More info on how complicit the Republicans were comes out daily.

Trump removed the pandemic response team that would have identified the virus earlier and maybe stopped even the first outbreak in China, because Obama instituted it. Trump allowed 40000 people from China in with no screening, no quarantine, no tracing. His “stopping flights” was only stopping Chinese people, so WAS racist, blatantly, and useless, obviously.
🤦‍♂️

Trump whining, on every subject every single time. Never took responsibility for a single of the multiple daily failures of his administration. You loved it. Suddenly you don’t like it, because Joe wears the wrong jersey.

Lol. Pole numbers. Thanks for being our jester. You can still make me laugh. Every site needs a clown.



Not some future infrastructure week, but real infrastructure funding. That’s success.

Edit: 39%, your lowball number, is still higher than Trump at this point who had 37% 283 days in, and he inherited an economic boom, a stable nation and healthy democracy, and no pandemic….unlike Biden.

Derp.
Here’s your class for the day, Bobby.
To start with, >1/2 goes to preexisting transportation spending…and you just accounted for the rest…..wrongly. New transportation funding accounts for +-$280 billion. +-$240 billion for water, electric, broadband, and resilience.
Only one category grew in the final bill, cleaning up mines and superfund sites, now $20 billion. Funny how everyone can agree to spend tax dollars to clean up after corporate pollution instead of asking the polluters to pay.
100% of funding for schools, housing, home health care, r&d and manufacturing, and clean energy tax credits….gone. Not a penny left in the final bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/28/upshot/infrastructure-breakdown.html

Better go back to math class, the bill is $1.2 trillion….$540 billion is almost 1/2, not 1/4, not 24%….the rest is funding pre existing costs like road and bridge maintenance. Duh. Don’t you ever get tired of being so wrong so often?

Infrastructure improvement of bridges, highways, roads, ports, waterways, and airports—accounts for only $157 billion, or 7%, of the plan’s estimated cost. The definition of infrastructure can reasonably be expanded to include upgrading wastewater and drinking water systems, expanding high-speed broadband Internet service to 100% of the nation, modernizing the electric grid, and improving infrastructure resilience. That brings the total to $518 billion, or 24% of the plan’s total cost.

The rest mostly for buying votes via pork.

It was pretty disappointing that they didn’t include small generators in these equations. My solar is on my roof, it only uses transmission lines when I make more than I use, and then it stays local. Same thing with small home wind turbines and micro hydro. All these non centralized generation methods are incredibly better than huge farms IMO.

1) No transmission needed, power is generated and used locally.
2) multiple generation methods are tied together, so when it’s dark and solar doesn’t produce, wind and micro hydro are still available vs giant single method “farms”.
3) decentralizing power generation hardens the entire grid, and individual adoptors, against infrastructure attacks. (That alone should sway the climate change denying nationalist crowd to buy in if they could still consider thoughts, sadly they can’t .)
4) barring an emp, the entire grid could not go down and power outages would be limited to tiny areas and be easily repaired in the future.

Just a reminder that they've released the actual footage of Giuliani on the stand, under oath, admitting he did no investigation into the truth of the big lie, he just read it from random nutjobs on Facebook and repeated it as official statements from the President on national tv. Don't forget to watch!

Edit : Also, Sleepy Joe just did what Sudafed Stupor Trump couldn’t…funded infrastructure, and not for a few one week projects, but real infrastructure funding (yes, much more is needed, but with Republicans totally unwilling to vote to invest in America, it’s pretty damn good)….and has added 5.5 million new jobs since taking office (a record). I know OAN won’t tell you anything positive, so I am.

Let's stick with the one I know better...California.
Damn right I would like every state to have a >$76BILLION budget surplus, (we could use an extra $4.5 Trillion per year in America) an economy that's the 5th largest in the world, a producer of up to 1/3 of the food America can eat, centers for high tech advancement, free health care for the poor....

In what way is Texas beating California....not in freedom, not economy, not health, not infrastructure....pretty much just in fake unconstitutional religious Puritanism as the law and the percentage of illegal immigrants. In California illegal immigrants make up 5.6% of our population, in Texas where they spend billions to fight it it's 5.7%.

First, all the Texans who fled the state have to move home. I'm one...and you'll have to kidnap me at gunpoint to get me back in that third world state. Fuck that oven roasted shithole.

Lastly, abortion is not murder legally, by the definitions of the words, rationally, historically, morally, religiously, or in any way. To be alive you must first be born, you cannot murder that which was never alive. Until the cord is cut, it's a growth inside the mother entirely supported by her body....a tumor. You can't murder a tumor, if you think you can, go protest the nearest cancer center and leave pregnant women alone.

How's that Texas economy doing? Finally getting past 5% budget cuts to project a $750 million surplus....California, which isn't losing population despite right wing claims of an exodus, had $75.7 BILLION surplus....only >100 times better.

Texas population might be growing, it's economy is stagnant at best and it's infrastructure is horrendous, just criminally awful, actually so bad it's killing Texans.

Ahhh, so this is all uninformed opinion from a foreigner who has no clue about Texas or America, arguing with an informed Texan native and US citizen about America and Texas. I should have known, you really don't have a clue, and biased internet news isn't going to help you be informed.

Lol. Really. Such delusion. Who's circling? What war, we just ended one. What draft, our military is oversized, bigger and better equipped than all others combined, and has no fighting missions to complete. What the fuck are you talking about?

Big assumption. Many Hitler youth made the choice to fight for Germany, and joined on their own before children were being drafted.

As for those that were conscripted, is it your position that draftees are somehow immune from responsibility for murdering their neighbors, women, children, rapes, burning towns, or planting millions of landmines on foreign soil, etc? How convenient for them. I don't believe that's a popular or legal position.

I take responsibility for my actions. If their fate was mine, I would be eternally grateful I was treated so much better than I would have treated them if the tables were turned. I would be part of an invading Nazi army, trying to undo just a tiny bit of the damage we had caused, doing so at the direction of my superiors just like when I caused the situation. I would deserve execution, not release. This assumes I wouldn't have the spine to refuse to be a Nazi and be imprisoned or executed.

If the majority of Germans weren't complicit, the Nazis would have never come to power. You give them far too much credit. From the holocaust encyclopedia- "Opposition to the Nazi regime also arose among a very small number of German youth, some of whom resented mandatory membership in the Hitler Youth." Same with adults, the opposition was a minority by far, not the majority of Germans. Who told you that?

"Survived the fighting"? "Here"? "They"? Please finish your thoughts so they have meaning. You seem to be equating Nazi soldiers with the Jews they tried to eradicate. What?!?

The Geneva convention we know today was ratified in 1949. The accords of 1929 were found to be totally insufficient to protect POWs, civilians, infrastructure, etc. Yes, Germany did appear violate it's vague provisions....so did the allies. That's why it was strengthened in 49.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions

What provision of the 1929 version do you claim this violates?

Articles 20, 21, 22, and 23 states that officers and persons of equivalent status who are prisoners of war shall be treated with the regard due their rank and age and provide more details on what that treatment should be.
Or
Articles 27 to 34 covers labour by prisoners of war. Work must fit the rank and health of the prisoners. The work must not be war-related and must be safe work. ("Safe" and "war related" being intentionally vague and unenforceable).
Please explain the specific violation that makes mine removal a "war crime". It's not war related, the war was over, and it's "safe" if done properly.
Since this was done at the direction of German officers, the convention as written then doesn't apply.

Death camp!!! LOL. Now I know you aren't serious.
"The removal was part of a controversial agreement between the German Commander General Georg Lindemann, the Danish Government and the British Armed Forces, under which German soldiers with experience in defusing mines would be in charge of clearing the mine fields.
This makes it a case of German soldiers under German officers and NCOs clearing mines under the agreement of the German commander in Denmark who remained at his post for a month after the surrender - this means Germany accepted that they had responsibility to remove the mines - they just had far too few experienced mine clearance experts and far too many “drafted” mine clearers with no real experience in doing so." So, if it's a war crime, it's one the Germans committed against themselves.

I'm happy to say that anything done to a Nazi soldier is ethical, age notwithstanding. Many Nazi youth were more zealous and violent than their adult counterparts. Removing their DNA from the gene pool would have been ethical, but illegal. Taking their country to create Israel would have been ethical, but didn't happen.

At the time, there were few mechanical means of mine removal, they didn't work on wet ground, they required a tank and that the area be pre-cleared of anti tank mines, they often get stuck on beaches, and had just over a 50% clearance rate, cost $300-$1000 per mine removed, and they were in extremely short supply after the war. The Germans volunteered in this instance. Now, the Mine Ban Treaty gives each state the primary responsibility to clear its own mines, just like this agreement did.

So you know, the film is fiction, not history. Maybe read up on the real history before attacking countries over a fictional story. History isn't nearly as cut and dry as it's presented, neither are war crimes.

With Repbulican's relentless pursuit of deregulatio and infrastructure fot-dragging, it'll not gonna take long for the US to catch up to China!

Lol....your theocratic colors are showing.
We know you would prefer Sharia law, where religion determines what's criminal, immoral, and degenerate.
I ask you, what does the bible say about transsexuals?

Republicans
The party of
Death (penalty, covid, domestic terrorism)
Destruction (of infrastructure and the union, the economy, the ecosystem, discourse, functioning government, freedoms, and civil rights)
Debauchery (they ALWAYS are guilty of the sins they complain about...without fail and to extremes)

Puritanism (for others)
Patriotism (only for others)
Punishment (definitely only for others)