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[Earthquake Damage]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I interpreted Aqizzar's comment as "on second thought, let's keep the abortion thing out of this thread".  So perhaps we should let it rest?  Or you (the general, nonspecific "you") could start a new thread for it, though you may want to stock up on flame-retardant first.

[Criptfeind]

Yeaaah. Sorry guys. Totally misunderstood him.

He is completely right.

[Aqizzar]

Yeah, when I posted a line about a vote that was not a vote, it was about "which developing story do you want me to link/describe next", not "which of these would you rather have happen in your locality".  Seriously, how did this "argument" even happen?

Likewise, yes, I'm leaning towards forgetting any further mention of abortion-related legislation, because all it accomplishes is getting a bunch of people dropping their earthshaking opinions on big-picture generalities without ever talking about the specifics on the table, which just pisses everyone off.  This might go better when I bring up the actual proposed legislation in question.  Until then, everyone calm the Hell down and don't bring it up.

[Vector]

Yes, I'd like to read about the news, but I don't intend to argue about it.  Period.

So, please feel free to bring it up, and know that I won't be sparking any flamewars if I can help it.

[Aqizzar]

Okay, I'm going to take a shot at this.  This one isn't exactly a huge or appalling thing like those other states, but it's juxtaposition of the stories that makes it worth noting.

The legislature in Maine is preparing to pass some amendments to their child labor laws, specifically regarding how many hours during school-years teenagers can work, especially in restaurants and hotels.  Let the spokesman for the Maine Restaurant Association explain it himself -

“Here’s the bottom line: Maine is considerably more restrictive than anybody else in New England. Not just a little bit, a lot,” said Dick Grotton of the restaurant group. “We’re just trying not to be the bottom rung of the ladder. The next up is Connecticut — they restrict hours of work per day to six rather than four, [let students] work until 11 p.m. rather than 10, 32 hours a week, not 20.”

Grotton said officials with Gov. Paul LePage’s administration have spoken with various industries, asking for examples of state laws they felt were stifling business.

Yes, not allowing people under 18 to work six hours a night instead of four is crippling Maine's service-economy.  After all, it's not like teenagers have trouble spending time doing anything else in a week, quote Sen. Debra Plowman, bill sponsor: "We have no other restrictions on any other things they do, They can play sports 32 hours-a-week. They can watch TV 32 hours-a-week. They can skateboard 32 hours-a-week."

Now, the obvious defense of this idea is that "allowing" is not "forcing".  Certainly, upping the maximum hours high-schoolers can work at a restaurant by 60% is not locking kids in a coal-mine.  But as the opponents of the bill pointed out, and anyone who ever worked when they were a teenager can attest, when you're a 16 year old busboy, and your boss "asks" you to work six hours instead of four, you are in absolutely no position to refuse him if you want to keep that job tomorrow.  As likewise pointed out, allowing employers to ask existing employees to work longer hours does nothing to employ more people - if anything, it does the exact opposite.  'Cause, y'know, it's all about jobs.


Admittedly, it's not that big of a deal, considering Maine does have the most restrictive teenage-working laws in New England, as quoted.  But like I said, it's the context that makes it noteworthy.  The Governor riding herd on this argument, and in total favor of the bill, is Paul LePage.  What else has Governor LePage been exercising his authority?  Ordering a 2008 mural depicting the history of labor-rights movements in Maine removed from the Department of Labor offices, and renaming the boardrooms from "Cesar Chavez" to... "Dick Grotton", by the sound of it.  Apparently, lauding the history of labor rights inside the government building dedicated to defending labor rights sends a bad message to employers.  And what prompted this decision you ask?  One anonymous letter to the governors' office, saying a viewer was appalled by the display, because art-college quality depictions of a shoe-factory strike on government property is one small step from Maine becoming North Korea.  Hey LePage, don't show us all your cards at once.

And this last link has nothing to do with anything, honestly it doesn't, but Governor LePage likes to tell stories that when he was a tween, he liked to steal candy from Trick-or-Treaters.  I know it's prurient nonsense that really does say nothing about his qualities as a governor or what legislation he supports, but it's just too funny to ignore.

[Criptfeind]

So apparently this LePage wants to be a industrial baron soooo bad he is doing everything he can to be stereotypical. Right down to stealing candy from babies (presumably)?

And he is proud of said stereotypicalness??

[Ghills]

There might be well-reasoned and thoughtful arguments to be made in favor of raising Maine's maximum teenage working hours (increasing the employability of teens is one I can think of off the top of my head), and I would be interested in hearing those arguments. But 'everybody else is doing it' is not a well-reasoned or thoughtful anything. Seriously, what are these people doing with the space between their ears? They aren't using it, as far as I can tell. 

And:

Grotton said officials with Gov. Paul LePage’s administration have spoken with various industries, asking for examples of state laws they felt were stifling business.

That would be...all of them. No, seriously, laws exist to stifle people's ability to exert power over over people, which is what an employer-employee relationship is all about.  This kind of thing can be very good in terms of getting properly framed and enforceable legislation. But somehow I don't think that's what's going to happen here.

[PTTG??]

Having more working teens would only harm the job market for workers...

[Urist Imiknorris]

I am beginning to feel justified in leaving Maine.

[Solifuge]

How do people sit comfortably in government, knowing that they are ignoring real and relevant problems, in favor of pointless legislation about marriage and abortion?

I may be misreading you, but for me, at the very least, legislation about abortion is a big honking deal.  My future may be very different depending on how the laws end up being written.

There's other things that are hugely important, of course, but there is a reason why people get so incensed about this.

Pardon my lack of clarity, and any resultant Arglebargle... I get pretty keyed up when I see bits of the system working poorly, because I have no way to fix it.

I didn't mean to say that either were unimportant or not worthy of debate, but rather that I don't understand why legislation around abortion and civil unions has become as legally pervasive as it is. Though both are certainly issues that need to be resolved in a fair and just way, the big incestuous legal slurry that results when abortion or marriage law spills out into unrelated bills is ridiculous. It drives me nuts when I hear that another bill went back to the drawing board, because someone decided to insert some unrelated and controversial language into an otherwise straightforward bill.

The mess of petty bickering and personal agendas, with individuals in government constantly trying to use their power to impose their beliefs and wills on the rest of the nation, congeals in the veins of the legal process, holding up all sorts of real progress that could be made. It's truly infuriating.

Spoiler: ...and for the record: (click to show/hide)

To me, the abortion debate represents little more than a confused war of definitions; it's being fought over when an organ becomes an organism, when they are physically and functionally the same damned thing. Life is one great, big sustained chemical reaction; each person alive today was once made of the same material as their parents, and their parent's parents, right on back to the first chain of amino acids drifting through the primeval seas. A zygote, and a developing fetus is its mother (and partially its father), until it is born and becomes its own organism.

To be honest, it seems tantamount to murder to chose to abort a near-fully-developed fetus, but the push to make it illegal to abort soon after conception makes about as much sense to me as making it illegal to use contraceptives, to masturbate, or to not constantly be procreating. (After all, every second you're not pregnant/impregnating someone, you're keeping a life from being born </sarcasm>)

[Vector]

Ah, okay okay.  That's what I thought you might have meant.

Yeah, I think it's really stupid that people keep on tacking "little extras" onto bills that have nothing to do with the stuff in question.  I understand the why, but not the Why, as in "Why on earth would that be okay."

And yeah, I'm getting kind of tired of definition arguments.  If I could, I'd go hold up congress, then in the resultant confusion read the entirety of the material we've covered for my rhetoric course.  Then I'd lead a discussion about definitions and mythologizing speech, wrapping up by giving gold stars and hugs to those who seemed to have a good grasp of the material.

Then I'd leave before the cops could arrest me for sexual harassment.  Via a jet plane with "Team Derrida" painted on the side.

[Solifuge]

Education at gunpoint: a solution to the world's problems, or THE solution to the world's problems?

[Aqizzar]

Though both are certainly issues that need to be resolved in a fair and just way, the big incestuous legal slurry that results when abortion or marriage law spills out into unrelated bills is ridiculous. It drives me nuts when I hear that another bill went back to the drawing board, because someone decided to insert some unrelated and controversial language into an otherwise straightforward bill.

Yeah, I think it's really stupid that people keep on tacking "little extras" onto bills that have nothing to do with the stuff in question.  I understand the why, but not the Why, as in "Why on earth would that be okay."

I can kinda explain this one.  Certainly, a lot of times, it's because a legislator has some pet culture-war issue he wants solidified, and has enough party backing that he knows he can attach it to something completely unrelated and it will still get passed - the current example being Ohio attaching a (completely superfluous no less) ban on recognition of gay marriages to its state budget.  Likewise, it's to get an issue thrown into a bill that's guaranteed to pass, so the party-aligned legislators can go home for their next campaign saying they stamped out gay marriage or whatever, without having to go through the much more public process of making a bill themselves.  Basically, it's a way of getting an issue into law, without the publicity of proposing it on its own merits and allowing for an extended discussion of the issue, since most legislatures have pretty stiff rules on how much debate time amendments can get, and the opponents will ultimately allow it just to get the rest of the bill passed.

Other times, it's because a legislator specifically wants a bill to not pass (however reasonable it may seem to you) so he'll attach something utterly repulsive to it, specifically to kill the bill's vote - for instance, the amendment added to the big Health Insurance bill mandating Medicare coverage of Viagra for sex-offenders (or something equally inane).  Which if the bill passes, also makes it easier to attack later on, since quite a few politicians have absolutely no shame about denouncing laws due to niggling clauses they themselves proposed, since they know almost nobody will actually check up on history like that.  And sometimes its just to raise the issue - like Bernie Sanders proposing an amendment to end Social Security, just to force people to debate it - that winds up backfiring and staying in the bill (that one didn't happen, so don't worry).

[Strife26]

Gotta love riders. I'll say that I've really messed around with them back in my student congress days. Doing stuff like attaching non-planned breaks into the resolution to vote on a topic, plus all the fun of postponing bills for ten minutes, or better yet until the exact middle of the lunch break. Good times.

[Aqizzar]

I'm not exactly sure what the theme of this thread is (besides just stuff I heard on other news sources and thought was interesting), but I guess it's basically "Privatization taken too damn far".  That usually means grift and graft at the state's or the taxpayer's expense, mostly having to do with newly elected Republican governors, and there's a couple of good ones on the table lately.

Florida's newly elected Governor Rick Scott wants to assure the public that they're not paying taxes to go to unsavory people, whether it be slacker public employees or welfare junkies.  Ergo, Scott wants to use his authority as Chief Executive to mandate quarterly drug testing of all public employees and is pushing for new legislation to require drug tests of all state welfare applicants.  In both cases, this could run into standing legal precedent under the 4th Amendment (Unreasonable Search and Seizure), which has repeatedly rule that outside of certain jobs and social statuses, you cannot mandate drug testing without legally reasonable suspicion.  4th Amendment protections aside, this might just sound like an unusually draconian attempt to do most everyone would agree is at least a principled idea, making sure government employees and welfare recipients are not abusing drugs.

However, bear in mind that government agencies do not perform their own drug tests (virtually none anyway, outside of the military).  They contract private, which is to say for-profit, clinics specializing in such services to conduct and judge the tests.  At either the government's expense or the employee's obviously, probably the government's for the employees and the citizen's for the welfare.  And where this story moves from just running roughshod over privacy precedent and into plain old graft, is that Rick Scott founded Solantic, one of Florida's biggest and most frequently public-contracted drug testing clinics, ownership of which he transferred to his wife right before being sworn in as governor.  Somehow his wife owning a drug-testing clinic service instead of himself clears the conflict-of-interest rules.

Yeah, this one isn't even very long or elaborate, it's just a new governor with the legislature at his back drawing up legally-questionable legislation to shovel the state's money into his pocket, in the bargain making the lives of public workers and the desperately poor just a little bit harder.  So there's Florida for you.  The one in Ohio is almost hilariously blatant, but I'll need to get more articles first.