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dik

dik

Structural
Apr 13, 2001
25,842
I sent my first tweet this evening:

Dik Coates‏ @CoatesDik 14m14 minutes ago

@SenFeinstein Can you have Michael Avenatti cross examine Kavanaugh?

Dik


 
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dik,
Could you describe for me the person who could passed the Democrat's standards for Supreme Court Justice? Please, could you? I can't say that I know of anyone who could not be led into a blind alley and mugged.

The charges allegations (they will never be charges) against Kavanaugh are so obviously fabricated (how did she get out of the locked room? How did she get home? Who drove her and why didn't they notice her reported "distress"? How did she call them when she "ran from the bathroom outside" 2 years before the first cell phone was on the market?), this is a hatchet job from beginning to end.

Drinking in High School, guess I'm not eligible for the SCOTUS.

Not using the 2018 definitions of two terms that were written in his 1982 yearbook? Was that a lie, or did the boys have their own definitions of terms that were not in general use?

Exactly what other "warts" are you talking about? Believing in the Constitution? Being unwilling to allow the Obama EPA to issue regulations that were in direct violation of the law that created the EPA? Having touched paper that the Bush Archivist will not allow to be made public? I think he was exactly correct when he said that after this experience, many people who belong on the bench will decline the offer. Much to the detriment of our country.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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Amen, David. I found Kavanaugh to be completely truthful. The only people who say he lied are those who already had their minds made up before they ever met him.
 
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Oh my, dik, you really haved swallowed the party line. Huff and Puff Post and all.
 
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JohnRBaker,
The Citizen's United v. FEC was truly a low point in Supreme Court Decisions. I've read the opinions in the case, and the majority opinion reads like a reluctant bow to precedents and the minority opinion reads like a bunch of pissed off children. Personally, I would have been happier with a simple "corporations are not people, and they do not assume the rights of the people who work there", but 200 years of SCOTUS treating corporations as people was too much precedence to get over.

The dissenting opinions were by Stevens (appointed by Gerald Ford), Ginsberg (Clinton), Breyer (Clinton), and Sotomeyar (Obama). The 5 that voted for it were Kennedy (Ford), Roberts (G.W. Bush), Alito (G. W. Bush), Scalia (Regan), and Thomas (G. H. W. Bush). Pretty much along party lines of the people who appointed them (with the exception of Stevens), but does that HAVE to be a conspiracy, or could it simply be that the five justices that found the precedents compelling could not convince Stevens that their position was correct and he went with the 3 that think SCOTUS should make law? We'll never know how Kavanaugh would have voted on Citizen's United (or Roe v. Wade for that matter), and I would not begin to try to guess how he would vote the next time something like Citizen's United comes before the court (that is the GREAT thing about Kavanaugh, he has a long long record of looking at the merits and the law in each case), but having read several of his decisions from the DC Circuit I am certain that an opinion he (or Gorsuch for that matter) wrote on either side of the decision would at least be coherent and founded in the Constitution, the law, and precedent, not the ranting of spoiled children.



[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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Luckily, Jeff Flake is still his own man, though it took a good woman to shake it out of him. If not, I'm not sure what would have happened going forward.

Good luck,
Latexman

To a ChE, the glass is always full - 1/2 air and 1/2 water.
 
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btrueblood,
The Senate passed the Patriot Act of 2001 by 98-1-1 (Russell Finegold D-WI voted No, it is too much work to figure out who didn't vote). The House passed it 367-66 with 9 not voting). Parts of the Patriot Act expired in 2015, but the "Freedom Act" put the expired bits back into effect (the House approved that bill 338-88 and the Senate approved it 67-32, President Obama signed it). In 2001 the Senate was 50/50 Democrat/Republican, the House had 52% Republican. In 2015 the GOP controlled both houses, but not Republican enough to override a veto.

The loss of liberty from the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Freedom Act of 2015 was significant and both bills were obscene, but you simply cannot blame either party for either of them.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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David, one of the issues with respect to the Citizens United case was that in the majority opinion, the Conservative justices wrote that while they had held that political donations by corporations (and trade unions) were Constitutional, that it was Congresses responsibility to enact laws that would require that these political groups, which were getting this corporate money, that they be forced to make public a complete accounting of where the monies came from and where it went. The majority opinion even stated that while they could find nothing in the Constitution to stop corporations from being given the same ability to influence elections as individuals, they recognized that not putting limits on the amounts given and keeping the details hidden from the public would lead to rampant corruption, but they were prevented from imposing those constraints themselves because then they would have been accused of 'making law'. They told Congress exactly what to do only because it was the job of Congress to fix the 'problems' which would result from this ruling. Of course, we all now know that nothing happened and I still think that if the Justices had known that Congress would turn a deaf ear to their 'request' that the vote would either have been different, or the Court would have taken the risk of 'making law' with their ruling.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
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David,

So, you're saying both parties can be blamed for stupid laws that encroach our freedoms? Shoot, I thought I had made that point, you win... :)
 
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The precedents were crock. The bottom line is that a company consists of brick and mortar and PEOPLE. Sans people, a company is dumb pile of bricks will no possibility of speaking, much less having an opinion to be voiced. The decision basically gave the people in charge of a company a double voice, their personal one, and their corporate one, but the latter is no more than an aggregation of voices of a bunch of people, but now able to spend unlimited amounts of money as a shill for the people running the company.


TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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IRstuff,
It is worse than that--the company consists of a legal document of incorporation. It may own stuff (and nearly always does), but that stuff is not the company.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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btrueblood said:
you're saying both parties can be blamed for stupid laws that encroach our freedoms?
Click to expand...

Have you not heard the expression, "I'm with the government, and, I'm here to help you." It's one of the three great lies.

Dik
 
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handleman,
Absolutely not. The economic multiplier of money in the hands of companies varies between 5 and 8 (i.e., a $100 in company profit will generate between $500 and $800 in new W-2 income). Money in the hands of government has a 1.5-4 multiplier. Bottom line is that the Treasury gets less money because of corporate income tax than they would get if they abolished it.

You might ask "then why does corporate income tax exist if the economics are that bad?" Glad you asked. Corporate income tax exists because the Congress wants to have a lever to pull to "direct" the economy. One of the (very very few) examples of this being successful is the Section 29 tax credits that were part of the obscene "Windfall Profits Tax". The Section 29 tax credits gave the Oil & Gas industry a tax credit (i.e., a direct deduction from their taxes rather than from their income) for money spent on developing unconventional fuel. At the time, the industry knew that coalbed methane (CBM) existed, and many coal seams had significant gas in them, but we also knew that the CO2 was way too high for cryo plants and that CBM produced way too much water to be economic. We would have to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to create the infrastructure to produce this stuff, and at $0.90/MMSCF there was never a payout. The Section 29 tax credits created that economic payout and CBM was developed. If the story stopped there, it would be a success, but a minor league success. To produce the CBM we had to basically create a new way of thinking about production and reservoir flow. These new ways of doing stuff made shale gas and shale oil possible (without new tax breaks), and Shale has turned the U.S. from exporting $500 billion/day to purchase foreign oil to exporting oil--THE major factor in the country's economic recovery.

Section 29 tax credits were a way for the government to incentivize companies to do something that was in the country's interest, but that looked like bad economics and had a really bad risk/reward profile. There are thousands of examples of Congress pulling wrong levers ("Cash for Clunkers", Solyndra, etc.), but without corporate income tax they don't have any levers to pull.

A corporation is a legal document. Period. If the corporation has "excess profits" whatever that means to you then what can they do with them? They can pay dividends (that are taxable to the recipient). They can increase their payroll (taxable to the recipient). They can invest in new stuff (which creates transactions that require people to do work for which they are paid and taxed). The economics of corporate income tax just don't hold water.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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Careful all, some intelligence is showing. [thumbsup2]

"Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively."
-Dalai Lama XIV
 
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Really? In an engineering forum?

Seriously, this is the kind of debate I'm used to - we started from apparent polar opposite positions, quickly realized that the stuff we were arguing about was fluff, and homed in on one of the real issues...where we all agreed about the problem.
 
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btrueblood,
It seems really easy to get to that point when you talk about issues instead of sound bytes. These issues are far too complex to handle in 140 characters.

No person is just one thing. People have many facets. I know a lady (who was on our town's city council for over 20 years) who was a serious sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll flower child in the '60's. She gets on every liberal band wagon that totters by. She was absolutely the only voice on our city council that asked "how are we going to pay for that?" when the Republican majority came up with their next hair-brained idea to "revitalize" our town. She's an old hippie who wants to combat global warming and ban frac'ing, but she is fiscally conservative. Everyone is like that, The idea of "Prayer in School" brings up pictures in my mind of the Baptist Minister/History Teacher in my high school who was given 5 minutes every day to spew his hatred of all non-Baptist religion over the PA system. No thanks. But I want spending to go back to the things authorized by the Constitution (the "Balanced Budget Amendment" is a truly stupid idea, but eliminating the Department of Education is fine by me).

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist
 
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dik - I forgot all about the great lies. Thanks for the laugh; I really need one today. [cheers]
 
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