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posted by n1 on Monday August 08 2016, @03:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the representation-is-a-privilege dept.

Ballot Access News reports:

On August 5, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer, a Bush Jr. appointee, ruled against Gary Johnson and Jill Stein in their debates lawsuit. The case had been filed on September 28, 2015, and is Johnson v Commission on Presidential Debates, U.S. District Court, D.C., 1:15cv-1580.

[...] The 27-page decision[Redirects to a PDF] [...] says, "Because Plaintiffs have no standing and because antitrust laws govern commercial markets and not political activity, those claims fail as a matter of well-established law."

[...] Footnote three, based on the judge's own research (or the research of her clerks), has factual errors. The judge relied on election returns published by the FEC, but the FEC returns do not say which candidates were [...] in states with a majority of electoral college votes, and the opinion's list of candidates is erroneous.

[...] Another factual error in the decision is on page 21. The decision says Ralph Forbes, an independent candidate for U.S. Senate, lost a case over debates in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998. Actually Forbes was a candidate for U.S. House.

In the comments, Richard Winger notes a similar case.

the lawsuit Level the Playing Field v FEC is still pending, before another judge, in the same court

The presidential debates were previously moderated by the League of Women Voters (1976, 1980, 1984). The Democrats and Republicans screwed things up in 1988. The Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporation controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, has run each of the presidential debates held since 1988.


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 08 2016, @06:53PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 08 2016, @06:53PM (#385415)

    Your evaluation about natural gas is probably fallacious [nationalgeographic.com]: The natural gas industry has put a lot of money into convincing people that natural gas is much cleaner than coal, when it actually isn't.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 08 2016, @08:11PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Monday August 08 2016, @08:11PM (#385437) Journal

    Well, I walked right into that one. I wasn't asking whether the reasoning I used to arrive there was wrong. I was asking if it was a "fallacy of the middle" to split my opinions between "left" and "right" like that.
     
    Meanwhile, I'll take a measurable reduction in GHGs for the first time in US history over a bunch of "coulds" and "mights."

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday August 08 2016, @10:04PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Monday August 08 2016, @10:04PM (#385493)

      The Fallacy of the Middle isn't that sort of thing: It's normal to be conservative about some issues and liberal about other issues. A common split is "Government pays me - I'm liberal. I pay the government - I'm conservative."

      What I mean by the Fallacy of the Middle: The left wing wants to raise tax rates overall by 5% to create new program X to address what they see as a pressing problem. The right wing wants to cut tax rates by 5% and cut out program Y they see as unnecessary. The centrist will conclude that tax rates should remain exactly as they are, and either Y remains and X doesn't happen, or X is started and Y is cut so that both sides get something they want. That seems very sensible, until you realize that the centrist skipped right past the part where they evaluated whether either X or Y were a good idea, and whether they are worth 5% of everybody's income. That's the problem with centrist ideology: It replaces thinking and evidence and such with an assumption that both sides of a debate are equally right or wrong about something.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @05:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @05:55AM (#385652)

        That's the problem with centrist ideology

        Except thats not the ideology of the political center at all. The ideology of the political center is that there is no ideology and instead some problems are handled conservatively and some problems are handled liberally, whichever is the best approach to handle that specific problem, rather than strictly sticking to one ideology based on tribalism and ideological purity. What you describe is exactly what you said it was, fallicious thinking.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @09:56PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @09:56PM (#385987)

          Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" have no concrete definitions. They are vaguely-defined at best. So these "centrists" have the same problem as "liberals" and "conservatives" have: They are obsessed with labels.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday August 08 2016, @11:07PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Monday August 08 2016, @11:07PM (#385527)

    uh huh. Here is the money quote:

    An abundant supply of natural gas "delays up to decades the time period over which renewable energies become economically competitive," the researchers write. And if natural gas makes energy cheaper, the study argues, people will use more energy rather than cut back to save money.

    In other words they are just talking about their hokey religion and totem objects like windmills. As to the actual reality of whether gas is cleaner than coal, they say, "Natural gas has been promoted as a "bridge fuel" even by some environmentalists because it emits half as much CO2 as coal to produce a given amount of electricity. "

    But all that misses the point entirely, that whether one fuel is cleaner than another should count more than bullshit religion like AGW. CO2 is not a very dangerous burn product. I have an unvented natural gas powered space heater and clothes dryer in my home. The gas powered hot water heater is vented, go figure. A hell of a lot of people have natural gas ranges in their kitchens. Because they do not produce any waste products harmful to humans unless they malfunction and produce carbon monoxide due to incomplete combustion. (Please buy a CO detector is you have natural gas service in your home!)

    You certainly wouldn't want to sit in a room with an unvented coal fired furnace. Even the large coal fired power generation plants with scrubbers still put a lot undesirable stuff out.