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[Karnewarrior]

I've been reminded today by an argument I just had.

I'm an atheist, therefore I'm a second class citizen. I'm accepted as long as I keep quiet about it. As much as I'd prefer to be correct for once, American history does not support the idea that we were founded on religious tolerance.

Nope. That was an idea three guys had 243 years ago that everyone else humored them on.

Never had that issue myself, and I'm not exactly hiding my faith (or lack thereof). I'd chalk it up to location, but my father's expressed similar sentiment, and I live with the guy. I wonder what's up with that.

[Hanslanda]

I'm going to go with location.

[Starver]

In highschool, my history teacher showed me footage of himself in his rowdy drunken college days, of him joy riding with his buddies through a fully grown corn field; just plowing through thousands of cornstalks in car.

*mumble mumble* something about those that don't learn from history */mumble mumble*

[Folly]

Hi guys, i’m just popping in hoping that someone can ELI5 for me: How has Trump shut down the government?
Specifically not why or anything, but if Congress is majority democrat, how are they able to do a government shutdown? What’s the mechanism which would normally happen? Does America have a senate? I know nothing sorry.

To expand slightly upon EP's response...
The government was about 2 weeks away from running out of monies, so the House agreed upon a spending bill, the Senate approved it, then it went over to Trump's desk. Trump saw there was no budget for his wall, so he vetoed the bill and no monies were made to fund the government.
1 week before the government was going to run out of monies, Trump invited the congressional party leaders over to the White House, along with a bunch of fake news and their cameras, and they had a little meeting. It went something like this...

Dem's: Hey Trump, we need monies to keep the government open. Stop cockblocking our monies.
Trump: You can have all the monies you want, as long as you also give me monies for my wall.
Dem's: We will give you 0 monies for your wall.
Trump: No, I need 5.7 billion monies for my wall.
Dem's: Okay well if it will keep the government open, maybe we can give you some wall monies...
Trump: I want all the wall monies.
Dem's: Well that's not how this works. You see, there's this thing called compromise where we-
Trump: You don't tell me how to make deals! I am the dealmaster, and I make all the best deals! I invented deals!
Dem's: Of course you did. But if the government shuts down, then we all look bad. So why don't we just-
Trump: Are you trying to take credit for my wall? This is Trump's wall! And this will be Trump's shutdown! Everything that happens from now on is all because of Trump!
Dem's: Umm...okay. You do know those cameras over there are broadcasting all of this to the entire nation live, right?
Trump: I know everything! And if I say this government shutdown is all my fault, then it's all my fault!
Dem's: Uh, alright. Well if you're taking all the blame, then I guess we don't really have any reason to give you anything. Enjoy your shutdown, Mr President.
Trump: I will!

I may be paraphrasing slightly. But only slightly

So, Congress went on vacation for Xmas, the government ran out of monies, everything shut down.
Then Congress came back and the Dem's took over the House. The Democratic House immediately voted and passed a radical new bill, which was exactly the same as the previous bill that Trump veto'd. Nobody really knows why they did this. But the bill went up to the Senate, and they took one look at it and said, 'Hey, Trump already vetoed this. We're not going to waste our time voting on the same bill again. Come up with something new, or don't even bother!'.

And that's basically where we sit right now. The House have no incentive to offer Trump and wall monies as long as he's taking credit for the shutdown. The Senate are just being moody and refusing to do their job because they know it's all pointless anyway. And Trump is a lunatic that nobody can predict; he may keep the government shutdown for the remainder of his presidency, or he may sign a spending bill tomorrow and declare himself the winner of his own shutdown. We're at the mercy of fate now...

[Trekkin]

Hi guys, i’m just popping in hoping that someone can ELI5 for me: How has Trump shut down the government?
Specifically not why or anything, but if Congress is majority democrat, how are they able to do a government shutdown? What’s the mechanism which would normally happen? Does America have a senate? I know nothing sorry.

We're going to have to start really zoomed out here, so please bear with this wall of text.

There are two ways in which the US government spends money: entitlements and discretionary spending. Entitlement programs work automatically, so their budget is just however big it ends up being to do whatever it does for however many people need it. This is, incidentally, why you hear people talk about entitlement reform: if nobody does anything, these programs just keep on running and effectively have a blank check, albeit not one they can spend however they like. Discretionary spending, by contrast, is money the government regularly allocates to different departments via appropriations bills as part of the budget process, all of which is explained below. The critical point here is that these amounts are specific and finite, in keeping with the relative autonomy of the departments they're funding, and a finite amount of money provided to a department with ongoing expenditures, most obviously wages, will eventually run out. In the normal process, another appropriations bill will be passed before that happens. If not, that department has to stop operating, which we call a government shutdown.

The usual mechanism for discretionary spending works like this: Congress passes a budget resolution detailing the total amount of money it can allocate based on projections of tax income and entitlement spending and so forth. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees then decide how to divide that money between their subcommittees, which then each draft one appropriations bill. Those bills then go through the normal process of hearings and changes and so forth, with the caveat that they have to keep within the limits outlined in the original budget resolution. Eventually the Appropriations Committee passes them, then both houses of Congress, the House by simple majority and the Senate by 3/5 majority, and the President then either signs them or vetoes them. (This is a simplified explanation leaving out amendments, although appropriations amendments are different.) A breakdown at any point in that process can lead to a shutdown, but in recent years it's most often been caused by real or threatened Presidential veto of those twelve appropriations bills, as in this case.

[Starver]

The Democratic House immediately voted and passed a radical new bill, which was exactly the same as the previous bill that Trump veto'd. Nobody really knows why they did this.

Well, maybe because it was the deal Everyone already had agreed would get signed, including Trump. It was only when someone on Fox called Trump a wuss for wanting to sign it that he decided not to sign the unanimously agreed bit of paper. And it was so well supported that if it was made more GOP-friendly it would annoy the DNC (and still not be liked by Foxed Trump), and if it was made more DNC-friendly it would annoy the GOP (and definitely not be liked by Foxed Trump), so it was still the best compromise that everyone except Trump would accept.

And Trump is known for changing direction so readily (he even finishes some sentences saying the exact opposite of what he was saying at the start of them) that there's no point even trying to change it. Especially as he's likely take the "go on, have your $6bn for a wall" as a prompt to now to refuse to sign even that until they make it $36bn, and he'd call that a necessary compromise. (Apparently it's not a compromise unless he gets everything he asks for. Makes you wonder what might have been better done not to humour him in his earlier life to have taught him that a win may be a win, but a non-loss can be almost as good.)

[Il Palazzo]

We're going to have to start really zoomed out here, so please bear with this wall of text.

Honestly, dude. This is the Ameripol thread. It barely qualifies as a tl;dr;

[Max™]

I haven't heard the press conference, are they literally saying it was their work which led to her escape and rescue? Or are they thanking the piles of investigators/police that worked on this in the interim? The first would be shitty, the second would be routine.
 
Either way I don't see the problem with acknowledging a belief in prayer. Maybe they think they finally prayed enough for God to open a window of escape, I don't know. Taking vocal offense about them mentioning their beliefs to the point where you start broadly painting all religious people everywhere as stupid and self-centered is.... stupid and self-centered.

The press conference was not thanking people for their hard work; it was very much an extensive listing of all the people whose efforts were utterly fruitless, and crediting them for the girl's escape because they also happened to be praying.
The prayer thing is firstly absurd. I'm not trying to pass judgement on faith in the supernatural here; I am saying that the act of thanking and praising a deity who just allowed a 13 year old girl's family to be murdered and her to be held and abused for three months is ridiculous. They should not be praising, but cursing this wretched god they choose to believe in.
Secondly, implying that prayer was directly linked to this girl's release is justification for their own inadequacy. All of these people failed to find the missing girl. They need to be figuring out how they can do better next time, not praising themselves for a job well done.

That's a great idea! A national emergency is, if anything, an understatement of Global Warming, so I think that's fair.

And will it still be fair when the next president unilaterally declares the emergency over and reallocates those funds to the Wall 2.0 or something equally asinine? Will it continue to be fair when Congress reasserts its power of the purse and the bureaucracy bloats under the weight of increasingly specifically appropriated funding, cutting back on needed services? Will you still think it's a great idea when it becomes funded purely at the pleasure of those presently in power?

If national emergency protocols are used build a wall, we lose a relatively small chunk of monies and get a monument to our own stupidity.
If national emergency protocols are used to address global warming, we just might manage to narrowly avoid a continent that is half underwater, and half scorched earth.
We shouldn't be afraid to invoke the national emergency in a real emergency, just because it might later be used for non-emergencies.

Ranting about belief in one nonsense idea in the first part, then ranting about a nonsense idea you believe in the second part?

[EnigmaticHat]

Hi guys, i’m just popping in hoping that someone can ELI5 for me: How has Trump shut down the government?
Specifically not why or anything, but if Congress is majority democrat, how are they able to do a government shutdown? What’s the mechanism which would normally happen? Does America have a senate? I know nothing sorry.

You're right to be confused about this, I'll get to that at the end.

We have a house and a senate.  The democrats have the house.  The republicans have the senate.  The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, is pretty much a hate sink for the Republican Party.  He has an uber safe district, so he's unlikely to face personal consequences from voters for anything he does.  As a result he's been exploiting the Senate rules and lying through his ass for years.  The idea is he'll take the heat off individual Republican senators for anything unpopular the Senate does, which thus far has been an effective strategy.

In this case, Mitch McConnell is content to sit back and let Trump take credit for a shutdown.  Trump has little political power to cause a shutdown.  Trump has political *influence*; if the Republican senate is perceived as going against Trump's wishes they might face backlash in 2020 from their own base.  Mitch doesn't need to worry about his own appearance but he cares about how the republican senate looks.  Their majority is very slim and obviously if they lose majority Mitch becomes Senate Minority Leader which has no real power because he basically destroyed the filibuster in 2017.

Anyway, the only power Trump has to cause the shutdown is to veto the budget.  This is largely irrelevant however, as democrats in the house have been passing budgets up to the senate, and democratic senators would likely be willing to vote for those.  So getting the 2/3rds votes needed for a veto override would be easy for Mitch.  Mitch's solution to this is very elegant: never call any of the budget bills to vote.  Why does he have the power to do that?  Because the senate is allowed to make its own rules and they've been doing a bad job lately.

So, anyway, good observation.  We do have a senate.  Its just... not doing its job.

[Max™]

Hate sink like a heat sink in battletech: awesome naming, fuck this gay earth for it being an apt description of that turtle looking motherfucker.

[Folly]

Ranting about belief in one nonsense idea in the first part, then ranting about a nonsense idea you believe in the second part?

Firstly, one of these ideas has absolutely no tangible evidence substantiating it. The other idea has overwhelming physical evidence substantiating it. So yeah, I'll stand by that.

Secondly, I was not taking issue with the idea of faith in gods. I specifically explained that I was taking issue with the interpretation of that god's perceived intervention as a good thing when considering that the preceding events were overwhelmingly horrific. I was also taking issue with humans using perceived acts of god to excuse their own incompetence.

[Max™]

Ranting about belief in one nonsense idea in the first part, then ranting about a nonsense idea you believe in the second part?

Firstly, one of these ideas has absolutely no tangible evidence substantiating it. The other idea has overwhelming physical evidence substantiating it. So yeah, I'll stand by that.

Secondly, I was not taking issue with the idea of faith in gods. I specifically explained that I was taking issue with the interpretation of that god's perceived intervention as a good thing when considering that the preceding events were overwhelmingly horrific. I was also taking issue with humans using perceived acts of god to excuse their own incompetence.

There is no evidence supporting half of the continent being drowned and the other half scorched, reality doesn't work like that, and worse: not even the most shrill voices raising a panic over warming are saying anything like that unless I just filtered them for being obviously insane. The IPCC reports certainly don't say it, I know, I've read them, the closest they get to anything like that is in the far off projections for scenarios in which we somehow burn every last drop of fossil fuels in existence, the magical positive feedback effect they put in their models is at least three times stronger than any observation could possibly support, and this continues for the next THREE HUNDRED YEARS at which point we could be talking about raising the global average temperature oh wait, the anomaly around 4 Kelvins over the 1850~ pre-industrial temperature and have possibly a meter or so of sea level rise.

That is a magical belief in fairy tales designed to scare children into acting good except these children got tall enough and old enough to vote and make their own opinions--which are terrible things in themselves--about which things they want to believe. Trying to argue against this results in "HOW DARE YOU HATE THE PLANET, YOU WANT TO KILL THE PLANET YOU MONSTER" backlash and it never ends up doing anything but frustrating me so I don't know why I bother but gods damn it I hate seeing blatant misinformation passed around as facts.

You can pick your nose, you can pick your politics, you can pick your beliefs, but you don't get to pick your own fucking facts!

In actual political news, remember my political crush on Tulsi years ago?

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/11/tulsi-gabbard-2020-president-run-1098629

Yay.

[MrRoboto75]

the president picks his own facts all the time tho

[Max™]

Fuck that guy, that's a small part of why I'd happily feed him to sharks, nazi sharks, slowly, and watch while laughing.

[Dunamisdeos]

Max supports Nazism in marine life, pass it around.