Random Politics & Religion #00

Easiest thing to say, hardest thing to actually do.

There's a point where austerity becomes cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Can you provide realistic examples of cuts that would equal the amount of revenue generated by a federal gas tax?

So, we shouldn't do it because it's hard? Alright, I'll just let them take even more money directly from my wallet because they're not willing to try.

There's plenty, actually, but the most wasteful are the ones nobody want's to cut: defense and corporate welfare.

So, we shouldn't do it because it's hard? Alright, I'll just let them take even more money directly from my wallet because they're not willing to try.

Prime minister tells World Zionist Congress that Hitler only wanted to expel the Jews, but Jerusalem's Grand Mufti convinced him to exterminate them, a claim that was rejected by most accepted Holocaust scholars.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked public uproar when on Wednesday he claimed that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was the one who planted the idea of the extermination of European Jewry in Adolf Hitler's mind. The Nazi ruler, Netanyahu said, had no intention of killing the Jews, but only to expel them.

In a speech before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described a meeting between Husseini and Hitler in November, 1941: "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here (to Palestine).' According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: "What should I do with them?" and the mufti replied: "Burn them."

Netanyahu's remarks were quick to spark a social media storm, though Netanyahu made a similar claim during a Knesset speech in 2012, where he described the Husseini as "one of the leading architects" of the final solution.

The claim that Husseini was the one to initiate the extermination of European Jewry had been suggested by a number of historians at the fringes of Holocaust research, but was rejected by most accepted scholars.

The argument concerning Husseini's role was recently mentioned in a book by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, "Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East." The authors, like Netanyahu, draw a straight line between the mufti's support of Hitler and the policy of the Palestinian Liberation Organization under Yasser Arafat.

But even these two researchers do not claim that the dialogue described by Netanyahu ever took place. They say Hitler reached the conclusion to exterminate the Jews because of his desire to nurture Husseini, who opposed the transfer of Jews to pre-state Israel.

My only problem with infrastructure development taxes is the misguided belief that they should all come from gas taxes just because, derp, it's easy. The money is already there, it's just being spent in other places by idiots.

Meanwhile in jews news Netanyahu managed to make everyone equally mad

No, the national highway fund is directly funded by gas taxes and spent on the nations roadways. That's really all there is to it. It's been borrowed from to cover deficits in the past when there was surplus, but so has virtually every other solvent fund. When we did have discrectionary surpluses in the 90's and early 2000's, rather than pay back some of the money that had been borrowed from those funds or pay down the national debt or invest in infrastructure, they decided to just give everyone 300 bucks and cut some taxes. Now, we're paying for it, yet again.

And, Sparth is correct, the highway fund is not adjusted for inflation and CAFE standards were known in advance to cause it to be a diminishing value. It's effectively gone down by about 50% in the last 20 years while virtually everything else in the world has gone up.

Few sounds symbolize American patriotism like the piercing shrill of a bald eagle. But just like George Washington and his cherry tree, that majestic call … is a myth. The screech associated with the bald eagle, in fact, belongs to a different bird.

Bird expert Connie Stanger blames Hollywood. You know the scene:

Stanger describes it: “You’ve got John Wayne riding through the sunset and you hear the jingle of spurs and often that piercing, loud cry.”

It's a cry that’s synonymous with America’s national bird. But there’s a problem says Stanger, who works at the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise. If you were to look up at the bird making that sound in real life you wouldn’t see a bald eagle.

“They dub over it with a red tailed hawk’s cry,” Stanger says.
“Unfortunately for the bald eagle, it has like a little cackling type of a laugh that’s not really very impressive for the bird,” Stanger explains.

Stanger says one other thing you might not know about the bird that symbolizes American strength — most of the images you see are of the female of the species, which are bigger than the males.

Jews. Nothing but trouble.......for these P&R threads.

Antiboycott Laws:

During the mid-1970's the United States adopted two laws that seek to counteract the participation of U.S. citizens in other nation's economic boycotts or embargoes. These "antiboycott" laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). While these laws share a common purpose, there are distinctions in their administration.

Objectives:

The antiboycott laws were adopted to encourage, and in specified cases, require U.S. firms to refuse to participate in foreign boycotts that the United States does not sanction. They have the effect of preventing U.S. firms from being used to implement foreign policies of other nations which run counter to U.S. policy.

Primary Impact:

The Arab League boycott of Israel is the principal foreign economic boycott that U.S. companies must be concerned with today. The antiboycott laws, however, apply to all boycotts imposed by foreign countries that are unsanctioned by the United States.

No, I meant that the money is already there in the government as a whole and being spent wastefully in other programs. I could have worded that better.

Sometimes, I look in on this thread and realize I created a monster. It's like a child; in the beginning I was proud, it was cute even when it was irritating.... But it grew up and became an insurance salesman and married a chain-smoking stripper whose ovaries are too shrivled from doing hard drugs to ever give you grandchildren.

Sometimes I weep.

It's been one of the more successful long running threads. You might have created it, but it was my idea, homeslice.

I thought I made it to cut down on OPs constantly asking for people to be topic banned. Either way, my mother was right about you, you're a terrible thread-father.

nobody likes a one upper

When I'll have my own nation our symbol will be the hummingbird which is much more awesome.

Biden is so creepy

http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aDmPQQG_460sv.mp4

BS about gas tax.

WASHINGTON -- There’s an easy solution to stop the federal highway fund from going broke at the end of July, the head of the American Trucking Associations told Congress Wednesday -- raise the gas tax.

Bill Graves, the Republican former governor of Kansas, delivered that message in testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, telling lawmakers at the long-awaited hearing on fixing the highway fund that eventually, whether they want to or not, they’ll have to hike the tax.

“Congress must find the courage to admit what I believe it already knows,” Graves said after explaining why his industry -- which paid more than $16 billion in fuel taxes in 2013 -- believes paying even more tax is the best option.

Graves also noted that -- like six states this year -- he raised the Kansas gas tax when he was governor by explaining clearly to state residents why it had to be done. "It was, I confess, a little easier than I thought it would be," he said.

At the root of the problem, he said, is that the federal tax of 18.4 cents a gallon (24.4 cents for diesel) hasn't been raised since 1993, and it has failed to keep up with inflation, leaving Congress to find ad-hoc methods to keep the fund solvent with short-term cash infusions.

The funding uncertainty causes delays in construction projects and raises costs, even as many infrastructure experts believe not enough is being spent on transportation to begin with.

Graves and other witnesses Wednesday ran through a number of other ways to fund roads and bridges, including tolls, taxes on miles driven, oil taxes, public-private partnerships, or just funding highways out of the general revenue fund.

Graves said all of those options have flaws. Tolls are uneven and inefficient; accurately taxing mileage on hundreds of millions of vehicles still isn’t practical; taxing oil has several downsides; partnerships have proven to be a mixed bag, and scrapping the gas tax in favor of annual appropriations creates even more uncertainty than already exits, he said.

Wednesday’s hearing sounded all too familiar, Graves added, because many of the ideas had been proposed the last time the fuel tax was raised, and lawmakers declared the nation had to find better ways to fund transportation projects.

“Today’s conversation has been taking place for 22 years and I believe it’s time for Congress to acknowledge in the near term that the fuel tax continues to be the lesser of all the infrastructure funding evils,” Graves said. “I believe it’s the only funding option that makes sense.”

Congress has passed 34 stopgap measures to keep the fund operating while failing to find that mythical new way to pay for construction.

“Roads and Bridges aren’t free, and they’re certainly not cheap, yet Congress has been operating under the assumption that pennies might fall from heaven,” Graves said.

“We know the fuel tax works,” he added. “It would continue to be viable for years if the rate were raised.”

Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) flatly rejected the idea.

“We’re not going to raise the gas tax,” Ryan said.

Still, Graves wasn’t deterred.

“The whole business community has conveyed the message that they would support a fuel tax increase,” Graves said just after the hearing ended. “Many members of Congress have said, thank you, but we’re not interested in that approach, we’re going to try other, as I said, outside-the-box thinking, creating financing options. It feels like we’re getting close to the point where they’re starting to realize that those just don’t exist as many of them hoped they would.”

If Congress continues with the stopgap approach, it will have to come up with about $3 billion more this year, said Chad Shirley of the Congressional Budget Office. Next year, the tab would be $11 billion from the general tax funds, and the price tag would hit $22 billion by 2025.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed fixing the shortfall simply by indexing the gas tax to inflation, as well as adding a one-time up-front payment, but Ryan appeared to foreclose that option Wednesday.