Finally, some hope: http://www.politico.eu/pro/belgian-regional-government-set-to-block-eu-canada-trade-deal/

In a sign of increasing frustration on the Canadian side, the normally cheery Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Thursday that not signing CETA would issue a “deplorable” message that Europe is heading towards an “unproductive path” post-Brexit.

Deplorable, you say?

The fact that power over trade — one of the EU’s core negotiating competences — has shifted to Europe’s 38 national and regional parliaments is a major embarrassment for Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. In July, he was pushed by French and German Socialists into designating CETA as a “mixed agreement” requiring ratification in national and regional assemblies.
(...)
The decision was highly controversial, because Juncker and his chief lawyers believed this wasn’t necessary from a legal point of view, but was a gesture of political goodwill.

A gesture of political goodwill. Or as we call it: a Hail-Mary attempt at keeping it alive, because both the French and the German government are facing serious domestic pressure on this issue. If they hadn't acknowledged parliament's vote on this, CETA might have been taken out back and shot in the head already, like it fucking should be.

Because it's BS. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hillary-bill-clinton-secret-service-224578

I googled and looked at a few sites like
http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/delegate-count-tracker

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-delegate-tracker/
both of which said 913 left to win.
You're missing DC, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Also, I guess my numbers included super delegates in those remaining states. I couldn't find anywhere that listed what's left to win without the super delegates included, where did you find them?

I stick to people who believe in America.

Voodoo the fetus that got away from the abortionist.


You can stand with Pedophile Bill and criminal Hillary or an a bum named Bernie who never had a real job till he was 40,


http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/bernie-sanders-the-bum-who-wants-your-money/


Bernie Sanders, The Bum Who Wants Your Money


2016: Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Monday his parents would never have thought their son would end up in the Senate and running for president. No kidding. He was a ne’er-do-well into his late 30s.

“It’s certainly something that I don’t think they ever believed would’ve happened,” the unabashed socialist remarked during CNN’s Democratic town hall forum, as polls show him taking the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire.


He explained his family couldn’t imagine his “success,” because “my brother and I and Mom and Dad grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and we never had a whole lot of money.”

It wasn’t as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.


“I never had any money my entire life,” Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington.

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.

He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt.

This is a one sided issue because facts are one sided. It's not a political issue except for politicos.
It's always funny to me that the right, who claims they are for freedom and less government in people's lives are also the people who want to make their moral stances law. These are issues of freedom, and the right is against the freedom to act in ways they disagree with, that's it.
Weathermen are not climatologists.
No, abortion is clearly NOT murder. That issue has been clearly solved legally and scientifically long ago. If it were murder, you must believe it involves living, BREATHING children, but it does not. It involves living tissue, non viable living tissue. It's again, the right not living it's rhetoric, libertarians would never force one person to support another bodily, even if you believe the blastocyst is a person.
You and your ilk are ridiculous for your own ignorance and your loud proclamations from it.

So...NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, HuffPo, AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, Xinhua, Politico, BBC, NYT, Free Republic, RT, NKorea News not enough, eh?

You have it backwards...ignoring and denying climate change is all about money... climate saving is about surviving. It's the rare climate scientist who's fortune is tied directly to their theories...just about 3% I would guess.

'bio-fuel' is only an ecological 'neutral' if it's made from waste material, certainly not if other, more ecologically necessary things (like trees) are destroyed to create it. Everyone is NOT hacking down forests to make bio-fuel, most places have outlawed that, and many climate scientists decried it at the outset as neutral at best and terrible at it's worst.

Facts are facts, not manipulateable at all. Interpretation of the facts is easily manipulated, if one is not able to understand the facts enough to interpret them for one's self, but not if one is able to interpret them. For instance, the political right would have you believe that solar is an expensive wasteful fools errand, the political left would have you believe it's an expensive but ecologically sound and needed energy alternative...the facts are it's both relatively ecologically sound AND financially sound as a long term investment...mine has paid for itself in under 8 years with at least another 12 years of free electricity to come and I haven't been subjected to repeated blackouts like my neighbors...double win. The point being that if you allow politicos with agendas (on either side of the fence) to interpret the facts for you, as you seem to do, you'll only hear what THEY want you to hear. I interpret data for myself, and often come to different conclusions than those I hear publicly supported.

Religion is based on faith, not facts. Faith is believing something without proof or factual evidence and ignoring any factual evidence to the contrary. Science is thinking a certain thing until/unless the facts prove otherwise. Religious people often don't understand the difference, I'm a scientist. Show me full data sets and facts that disprove my current theory, I'll happily modify my theory. Show me an interpretation that attempts to disprove my theory without facts and/or data (or with cherry picked data and facts), I'll poke it full of holes and sink it in the briny deep. Put your life vest on now.

I hate to tell you, but I'm far more intelligent according to repeated testing than the average person, contrary to your insulting implication. 138 aint bad buddy, and my science degree helps too.

Those that attempt to say +-97% of climate scientists (along with near 100% of other scientists that peer review their work) are in cahoots to defraud the public in order to secure some phantom money (the implication being that they wouldn't possibly be able to make money if they didn't lie about science for some reason), and only the <3% that are paid by oil and gas companies to come up with theories that consistently benefit their benefactors are honest are simply insane or dishonest. Period.
Your analogy is false, because in it you speak of 'scientists' from a time before the scientific method was even a thing, people who based their 'theories' often on scripture, while the real scientists 'swam against the current' to support modifiable theories based on facts and data...just like climate scientists have done so successfully over the last 40+ years that they have now convinced nearly 100% of the planet that they are correct. Deniers are still floating down stream while the rest of us are swimming against their slowing current, spawning and trying to continue the species.

No hypocrisy by NGT, only your complete misunderstanding and/or misstating of the facts. Sorry.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/fccs-wheeler-net-neutrality-106465.html?hp=l4 Looks like politicians (on both sides of the aisle) are wary about wading into the tech waters after SOPA. This Wheeler guy may be left holding the bag.

This vid has a lot of comments on yt! Some of my favourites are:

• parque leptospirose (Leptospirosis park, like as in fun park, only not so much fun)
  
• Cadê a mãe dessas criaturas?É perigoso fazer isso! (Where is the mother of these creatures? It's dangerous to do that!)
  
• E do jeito que eu conheço os politicos brasileiros... não vou ficar surpreso quando oficializarem isso como transporte público. (And from the way I know Brazilian politicians... I will not be surprised when they formalise it as public transportation)
  

On the whole they are split between the sentiment of "oh let them be kids" and they shouldn't do it either from traffic, open manhole covers, or whatever. I admit that leptospirosis wasn't my first thought when I saw the vid, but it's a nasty disease and well worth avoiding, and since it is transmitted via animal urine I can see how it could be a risk. Many of the comments pointed out that risk, as well as typhoid and other bacterial infections. Others said they did it too and were fine

I love how such a narrow clip provokes such wide-ranging discussion here on the Sift. I think the clip itself raises two central questions:
1) Is Islam - in this point in history - more dangerous a religious ideology than the others, and
2) Is such a question/comparison even relevant? Or perhaps "promotes Islamic hatred" as the douchebag facing Maher seems to think?

To 1), I've argued above that yes, it is. as for 2), raised mostly by the commenters here, I would have to say "no, but" to both. Religious (and non-religious) ideologies should be strongly and non-violently denounced whenever/wherever they do harm. In the US, for example, Christianity does way more harm (to women's/gay's/atheist's rights, to education, etc.) than Islam does, but neither excuses/diminishes the evil done by the other. The "but" would be for when people get accused of discrimination and "islamophobia" when calling out the evils of Islam.
The necessity of the second "but" is illustrated by @shinyblurry's comment: there is always the danger of right-wing and/or Christian fundamentalists taking criticism of Islam to be a defense/validation of their own strain of wrong/dangerous BS and/or racisms (to be fair, sb only exhibits the former). This is inevitable, and should not stop people from criticising/denouncing unethical ideologies, nor should it prompt amalgamation of "criticising Islam" with "hating the for'ners/ragheads/Muslims".

Beyond the subject of the video itself, the correlation between poor socio-politico-economico-etc. status and the adherence to extremes, a point well-made by @Babymech, @Yogi and others is an important factor in the higher numbers of "Islamist evil" worldwide, one that I am well aware of. There is no better way of turning whole populations to fundamentalist extremes (or at least worse ones than they had before; let's not fall into the "noble savage" fallacy) than by meddling with their politics and then bombing the hell out of them. The danger is to go to the extreme of excluding the very nature of those fundamentals from the picture, which is just as simplistic and false as is blaming them exclusively.

Moreover, I always shudder at the left-wing strain of argumentation which puts ALL the blame on the Western invaders, (edit: 19-20th c.) colonisation and co. This view relies heavily on the "noble savage" form of racism, which assumes that only "White people/Westerners/Judeo-Christians" can wreak political/social havoc in the lands of those poor, innocent "Brown people/Muslims" (those two often being conflated). Having lived in Africa for 5 years I have a knee-jerk reaction to this kind of self-centered guilt-tripping, which deprives the "Brown/Black people" of one aspect of human nature: the ability to be evil, to fuck themselves up without any help from the "West". They can, and they do.

This tangent may seem irrelevant here, but the reason I bring it up is because that it is this sentiment that is behind much of this "Islamophobe" name-calling in the US and Europe, and behind the difficulty many "Westerners" have in bare-facedly criticising Islam, when they often have no such difficulty with their "home"-religion, Christianity.

@aaronfr raises the problem of how to go about denouncing an unethical set of beliefs, and gives several good examples of how not to (it is noteworthy that the only example of violent action is one taken by other religious people; I have yet to hear of atheists using anything other than words and pictures to make their point). Hitchens’ endorsement of the Iraq war lowered my esteem for him greatly (somewhat saved by the fact that his stance on this was of no influence to anyone, contrary to his huge effort against the evils of religion), but it is noteworthy that he and Harris are the most criticised (and the least influential) when they hold such positions.
On the side of the religious, however, it is often the crazy fundies who are the loudest and, in certain areas (with the aid of socio-etc factors of course) the most influential. And they have, especially in the Quran and the life of M., a reliable and divine source of hate/violence-mongering.

As you say, peace and prosperity are some of the best deterrents to religious extremism and unethical behaviour (but not solely; cf: the US, Saudi Arabia and co.) This does not render unnecessary denouncing the unethical nature of Islam, Christianity, etc. As noted above, the negative effects of religion are still felt in relatively peaceful and prosperous nations today (in France, for example, homophobes of Christian, Muslim and possibly Jewish faiths are causing a significant rise in homophobic violence ever since the gay-marriage hearings).

So long as the distinction between "Islam(/religious ideology)" and "Muslim(/person)" remains clear, we should be free to criticise and denounce the former to our hearts content. (Note how "Islamophobia" shits all over that distinction; one of the many reasons that term should never be uttered unironically).

_{My apologies for the dissertation-length comment}

*promote

Real rights for real families! Rep. Jamie Pedersen is one of my favorite State House politicos. I'm sad to have now moved from his legislative district [the 43rd]. Cool guy =o)

There's a reason America doesn't trust the mainstream media anymore and it not just one organization:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/157589/distrust-media-hits-new-high.aspx?ref=image

Yes, Fox has an obvious conservative bias and most of the other networks have an obvious liberal bias. If you want proof of a liberal bias, watch the Univision forum interview with President Obama:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81470.html

Contrasting it to the softball interviews he usually gets, it's amazing to watch the president get grilled like that. Amazing because if you've been relying on the mainstream press for your information, you have forgotten what real journalism looks like. It's also proof positive of the free ride that President Obama has been getting since 2008. Yes Fox News is guilty of the very same thing on the other side of it.

But it's almost criminal when you consider how the mainstream press has been carrying water for President Obamas narrative about the video being the cause of the Libyan embassy attack, when it was obvious from the start it was a terrorist attack. I think they've been suppressing the story so as not to damage his re-election chances. What I mean by that is they didn't want to tread on the campaign narrative of President Obama being some kind of foreign policy giant, and that he had the Muslim problem solved. Obviously he hasn't solved that problem, and killing Osama Bin Laden didn't defeat Al Qeada. His systematic withdrawal of American influence from the region has left a power vacuum that groups like the Muslim brotherhood and Hezbollah have been more than happy to fill. Coupled with the Iranian nuclear threat and the failure of the sanctions to stop them, you have an unmitigated disaster on foreign policy, but out of the mainstream press you hear not a peep. If any of this happened under Bush the press would have murdered him but in this case they are running defense because they want to keep their guy in office. Considering all of this I don't think they have much credibility left.

The more cranky and crochety Chris becomes, the more I love the guy. It's so nice to see these smug, out-of-touch politicos get the Tammany Hall smirk rubbed off their face for even a brief moment.

Righto!

>> ^dag:

Didn't this exact same flub happen last election? I'm getting a déjà vu. I think it was Obama introducing Biden though.

Most telling to me is his inability to reasonably react to a simple question. He seems embarrassed after he curses, by the way he continues to badger the reporter. Just another amateur running for office. At least we won't have to worry about anti-curse laws on his agenda!

& for those who enjoy a little context, here is the quotation from Santorum's speech that the New York Times reporter and others "spun":

SANTORUM: Fifty-dollar abortions subsidized by RomneyCare. And if you’re low income, they’re free.
Why would we put someone up who is uniquely -- pick any other Republican in the country. He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama. Why would Wisconsin want to vote for someone like that?

from: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/03/santorum-explains-bulls-remark-on-cnn-118709.html