Be afraid. Be very afraid.

From Reuters.

quote:

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The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it will not comply with a request from President-elect Donald Trump's Energy Department transition team for the names of people who have worked on climate change and the professional society memberships of lab workers.

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And so il Donald appoints the man who said he will abolish the US Energy Depart as its next head; the idiot Rick Perry.Sure is good to see that the purge of all the same old faces is going on and that instead of having to worry about lobbyists we just put their bosses in charge of stuff.Edited by jar, : b ----> p appaling spallin proff readin two

Yet more and more Christians are supporting and endorsing same sex marriages and of course it was never an attack on Christians anyway since marriage is a secular contract that has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity and existed long before Christianity.To claim otherwise is simply a total fabrication since it cannot possibly have any effect on any so called Christian marriage.

Here we are seeing direct evidence of a purge, of a pogrom and folk are talking about something as trivial as whether some Christians get their little panties in a wad when told they are expected to actually do their job.Faith are you so dense that you cannot see that they first came for the Global Warming evidence producers but soon they will come for YOU?

quote:

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First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.

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Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

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Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.

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Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak for me.

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I'm sorry Faith but that is still simply false no matter how many times you repeat it.

Unfortunately it would likely require a major change in the makeup of the Federal Courts and SCOTUS. As long as the Constitutional interpretation is that Corporations are individuals with the right of freedom of speech I see no way lobbyists could be prevented from having direct access to Legislators and members of the Executive branch.

You might think so which is why I said to achieve that would require a change in the Federal Courts and in particular SCOTUS.Beginning with Buckley v. Valeo and continuing through a whole series of cases to the most recent McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission our Federal Courts have determined that money is a form of Free Speech, that Corporations may spend general treasury money during elections and that any limits on the amounts they can spend are unconstitutional.In addition the current mess of rules (almost every branch, every executive area and every committee has their own set of lobbying rules) there is a major loophole going back again to a court case, United States v. Harriss where the SCOTUS decided while the various legislative branches can pass laws controlling lobbying, that the act applies only to paid lobbyists who directly communicate with members of Congress on pending or proposed federal legislation. So if they instead talk to staff or just speak in public and not directly to the members of Congress then the laws do not apply.While the actual people holding elected position change regularly much of the staff remains the same from term to term. The newly elected may well bring in a few of his own people at the top but the vast majority of Federal workers do not just continue but are protected by law from being fired to bring in cronies.

Actually there are several recent events related to that. In North Carolina the Republican Legislature is trying to remove most of the power of the incoming Democrat Governor who opposed recent bathroom laws and in Louisiana a Republican attorney general filed a lawsuit challenging the Democratic governor’s order that protected state LGBT employees from discrimination even though it allowed an exception which would allow religious organizations that contracted with the state to continue their discriminatory practices.