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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[smjjames]

Michele Bachmann revealed to be Swiss mole.

That article is over two years old.

It's actually a bad thing that the republicans didn't win more seats than they did in an election that should've been a Red wave. All you have to do is look at the composition of the next batch of people coming up in 2016. And yes, the house is gerrymandered to hell and back so I honestly could care less about who's up for the next round as it'll still be 51% republicans seated.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a possible candidate for senator of California, lol, and Angelina Jolie is republican? heh Although in the senate election 2016 page for California, she's listed as independent.

[SalmonGod]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/19/politics/keystone-obama/

Keystone pipeline's dead. I never followed the issue closely, but it's making a good deal of stir in some of the places I frequent. Never understood what the problem was, myself. It sounds like a good idea on the surface.

The pipe was only meant to pass oil through the country to be exported.  The U.S. (the people anyway) wouldn't have benefitted from it at all.  And it was virtually guaranteed to contaminate huge swathes of water table, and cut a huge line of fucking people over across the landscape.  And the only justification we were ever given for putting up with it is "it will create a few thousand temporary jobs".

[ggamer]

I remember giving a speech last year about how the GOP was going to have to change their stance on immigration very soon, seeing as how there is a growing number of hispanic voters that consistently vote blue in America. Apparently, this is a lesson they are going to have to learn the hard way.

*sigh*

When my own party can't even concede an issue when it is pragmatically the best option for them and will literally* in no way backfire, It pisses me off.

_{*aside from a small minority of batshit fucking crazy voters who will hate everything if "the mexhicans geht into our cuntry," but at least they'll just stop voting instead of voting blue}

[Powder Miner]

Eh, I'm not a large fan of the immigration reform itself because there are people like students applying for visas who have to wait and wait and I can't possibly imagine this making it anything other than worse for them.

[Frumple]

... wouldn't that be a plus to the GOP, though? The party policies mostly seem to hate students. Inconveniencing them more would seem to be a bonus, not a malus, from their perspective.

[Reelya]

I think the argument immigration reform will make the "queue" longer thus disavantaging foreign students from getting visas doesn't hold too much water.

First up, reforms deal almost entirely with people who are already inside and working in the USA, so any "opening the floodgate" argument is mostly scare tactics.

Second, if the argument is that this will tie up immigration with processing visa requests, then that doesn't really add up, since currently immigration is swamped with deportation orders. That process - checking random people's papers, arresting those who don't have residency, processing them, putting them in cells and deporting them is vastly more time consuming and costly than processing a visa application. Also, most students would be applying for the visa in their own country, or at airports (in the worst case scenario), so I can't see how local processing issues inside the USA will necessarily slow this down.

"Immigration" reform is actually almost entirely about getting people papers who already work and live in the USA. Often they are people who've spent the majority of their life here. So there's no reasonable way this is going to cut into student visas: that's a red herring which doesn't have much justification. It's not like reclassing the paperless poor as residents is going to make usa stick up a "we're full" sign. In fact reform is a win win for tax collection, crime prevention etc. If people are not scared of being stuck in a cell for just existing, they will be more willing to talk to the police.

[PyroDesu]

Well, it's going to let Canada pumps millions of barrels of some of the dirtiest oil known to mankind?

Going to happen anyways, by whatever method available. Turns out to be trains, for some of it.

And to be honest, between rail transport and pipeline... I prefer rail. Takes more energy to move the same amount, but uses the same infrastructure as all of the other rail freight and rail cars are probably easier to maintain (I doubt a leak in a tanker car would be unnoticed for long, and even then, it's just the one car, not the whole line).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The entirety of the immigration department needs a radical expansion and overhaul. The US has an immigrant population of 45 million. You know who the runner up is? Russia, with 11 million. And a fresh million show up every year. The sheer volume of our immigrant population in both totality and rate demands special attention to processing them.

[MaximumZero]

Not to mention the fact that without immigration, the population of the US would be shrinking.

[LordSlowpoke]

Not to mention the fact that without immigration, the population of the US would be shrinking.

how are shrinking populations bad exactly

surely you don't subscribe to the theories saying "everything must grow forever"

[Reelya]

Population declines are the death knell for the capitalist system. Population declines are inherently deflationary, with demand falling for products. There will also be job losses, but those are offset by the reduced labor pool so the effect on unemployment and wages could go either way.

One note is that skilled migrants subsidize the US system, because other governments fund the education of their populations - most countries subsidize college education much more than the USA does. So the US gets already-trained people without needing to spend as much on actually educating, immigrants are basically a pool of "free" trained people that you didn't need to spend money on.

BTW a related issue, cheap labor in China might already be "over": employment in China is peaking out, and wages are starting to inflate strongly. So you need a "New China" and the only place left with sufficient population is India. Many jobs from China will shift to India next, and peripheral nations. But after that is tapped out (we're talking a couple of decades maybe), the whole ultra-cheap labor from outsourcing era will pretty much be over. My money is on the robotics era after that though.

[Sheb]

Well, actually if it's oil spills you're concerned about, trains do leak more than pipeline to move a given amount to a given distance. Granted, while average leaking for a pipeline is lower, any leak can be catastrophic.

But most importantly, the lack of pipeline is a major bottleneck, no pipeline means less oil being pumped, meaning less GHGs and overall less spills.

[Descan]

Well, it's going to let Canada pumps millions of barrels of some of the dirtiest oil known to mankind?

Yeah, don't be enablers, we have a problem.

[mainiac]

Population declines are the death knell for the capitalist system. Population declines are inherently deflationary, with demand falling for products. There will also be job losses, but those are offset by the reduced labor pool so the effect on unemployment and wages could go either way.

Also known as secular stagnation this view was in vogue for a while around WWII and was recently revived by people like Robert Gordon.  While a lot of economists consider it an interesting hypothesis I have the impression that an overwhelming majority dont think that a declining population necessitates deflation.  Japan had deflation but they also really botched their monetary policy.

[andrea]

a declining population through small birth rate also tends to imply an aging population.