Cap'n Refsmmat

The Line Item Veto Act of 1996 allowed the president to veto spending, whereupon his veto held unless Congress passed a bill to oppose it, and the President signed it. The President, since he doesn't want the spending, could obviously veto Congress's bill, so Congress would have to override the President's veto, of course. Since the Act would have the veto stay if Congress did nothing, it basically allowed the President to do whatever he wants. The newer proposals, like HR 4890, require Congress to approve the President's proposal before it takes effect. If Congress ignores the proposal, it does not take effect at all. The proposals are different. The Supreme Court decision in Clinton v. City of New York states: However, the new proposal has Congress pass the law to make the amendment, rather than giving the President sole authority. The President merely proposes that Congress passes a new bill. I don't see how the Supreme Court's logic applies here; the President is not amending Acts of Congress, Congress is. Incidentally, my being an administrator should have no bearing in this discussion; our policy is that if we're involved in a discussion, we don't act as moderators in that discussion. If I think something's going wrong here, I report the post and let other staff decide what to do. We try to avoid unfairness whenever possible.

It's done after the signing of the bill. The bill is signed into law. After the bill is signed into law, the President sends his proposal to the House clerk and the Secretary of the Senate. They make the proposal into a new bill that changes the appropriations. The House and the Senate then vote on the bill. The rescissions are voted on as ordinary bills, but not amendable. That's it.

Well, duh. That's what I've thought all along.

Fortunately, the procedure does nothing before the signing of the bill. Requesting changes on bills just made law is exactly what the procedure does. The executive branch has the sole authority to actually spend money appropriated. It can avoid spending the money until the appropriations are revised by the President's suggestion, and in fact that's what the procedure will do. The OMB will withhold the funds until Congress votes on the President's suggestions. Here is the entire bill for you to peruse: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/blog/Unnecessary_Spending_Act.pdf

Violence comes out of your inability to erect a force-field with the power of your mind, so... Since a good being always uses its power for good purposes -- such as preventing evil -- there's no question of abuse of power. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedLet me add this: Both your side and Anselm's side have the option of just making up new scenarios to prove the other side wrong. "What about violence?" "Well, instead of violence, you could do ______." "What about free will?" "Ah, well, a truly powerful being would ______." And so on. I don't think examples will help here since each side can weasel its way out of problems. That's probably why Anselm thought his idea worked so well: he could come up with excuses for everything.

Can we please not get into the personal fighting here? I have not liked the tone of the past four or five posts here. We can be more civil than this.

The Anselm of Canterbury response is that your lying in that situation is a result of a lack of power; that is, you lack the power to adequately defend yourself against the murderous boyfriend, since he has a knife and you don't, so you are forced to lie. A more powerful person would be able to, say, pull out a gun and shoot the bastard, so lying wouldn't be necessary. Thus, lying isn't a good thing. It results from your weakness. That's what Anselm would say, at least.

Congress passes bill. President signs bill. President sends new bill to Congress, a bill which revises the old bill. (This is done all the time, as Pangloss points out. New bills revise old law.) Congress reviews the new one and votes on it. The legislative branch is allowed to vote, as they should, and they pass the revision bill just as they'd pass any other revision bill.

Anselm defined God to be "that than which a greater cannot be conceived," in effect defining God as the perfect being. Perfect is in God's job description, according to Anselm.

Please, explain the legal difference between "eliminating items" and "lining out items" before signing a bill, both IMO unconstitutional as being legislation from the Executive, who is charged with enforcing any law, including Congressional Legislation. You're absolutely right about it being unconstitutional, because the portion of that sentence in bold is describing a line-item veto. The bill does not propose this mechanism. The bill proposes what's after the semicolon: Obama signs the bill, then proposes changes to it. Again: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/05/democrats-cautious-on-obamas-s.html?wprss=44

I'd imagine that if the LHC turns up new particles or new physics, it'll take a lot of work before anyone knows what the next step is. What you do next depends on what you discover now.

The President often sends bills directly to Congress for debate, modification, and approval. Since Congress has the ability to accept or decline the President's removals, how is this different? The President is simply returning a suggested modification to the bill to Congress, which still has to approve it.

The proposal isn't a line-item veto; it's more of a line-item vote-on-removing-this-please. Here's more detail, including the name of the bill: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/05/democrats-cautious-on-obamas-s.html?wprss=44

What's unconstitutional about it? It'd still be passed back to Congress for a vote, so it's very much unlike a line-item veto. The bill as a whole would have already passed.

No. [thread]40177[/thread]

If the spacecraft is radiating, yes, it'd show up. But if it's also moving, it won't appear on the long-exposure shots that astronomers like to do with their telescopes.

Nice. Why can't she use that for recordings? I much appreciate real sounds -- real (fake) piano and real voice -- to synthesized everything and autotuned voice. On the other hand, I'm a Simon & Garfunkel fan, so acoustic is my thing.

Could he have been a New Zealander? And perhaps named Dr. Steve O'Shea? Just a guess, but he does a lot of documentaries and squid work.

But people do spot anomalous things. And nobody's figured out what some of them are. Numbers don't help you get over diffraction limitation, either; so long as they don't reflect bright light at us, there could be loads of small undetected objects in the solar system. There are, in fact, in the asteroid belts. Yeah, surely you'd at least spot the warp trail. I know this. My point was to contest your claim that 99% of investigated sightings were explained by non-alien phenomena. The Air Force was able to explain far less than 99%. Depends. How many people are claiming that unicorns exist, and what evidence do they bring? If they bring no evidence, and nobody's making the claim anyway -- as is the case now -- there's no real need to investigate. But if people start turning up blurry digital pictures of unicorns on their safari trips, it'd be fair enough to send along some wildlife photographers and biologists and see what turns up. In the case of UFOs, a few investigations have been made, but there's still evidence brought forward, and much of it isn't very well investigated. That's why this is my favorite UFO incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Tehran_UFO_incident I especially like how the DSP satellites even picked it up. But in the end, I think we agree on a lot here. The evidence does not let you conclude that aliens definitely have visited Earth. The evidence is rather muddled and often not very good. However, I wouldn't discount a lot of the incidents as quickly as you do; there are certainly many unexplained phenomena among the hoaxes and sightings of Venus, and there's lots of things they could be. Aliens can't be ruled out, but of course they can't be ruled in, either.

I'm not trying to put words into your mouth. I'm stating what my impression of your words is. As I pointed out above, diffraction limits mean we could never directly observe a small spacecraft in our solar system, even when as close as the moon. Do you have a source for this? How many UFO sightings have been investigated scientifically, and how many have just been investigated by bored people on the Internet? As a note, Project Blue Book had a statistical analysis done of 3200 UFO reports, and they were able to explain roughly 69% of cases. 1.5% of cases were deemed psychological (crazy people made it up). And strikingly, the higher the "quality" of a case (more evidence, more detail), the more likely it was to be classified as of an unknown cause. In the end, 22% of sightings were deemed of unknown origin, including 35% of the high-quality cases. Hardly 99.99999%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book#Project_Blue_Book_Special_Report_No._14 Fair enough, but that doesn't prove they're all fake, as I'm sure you'd acknowledge. In my experience, few cameras have the zoom capability to focus on, say, an airliner and get a decent image. Many will be confounded by the bright sky and underexpose the airliner, and others won't be able to zoom in far enough to get the image. You're looking for extraordinary evidence, which is great, but at the moment I don't think extraordinary evidence would be easy to get. It's just too hard. Could you cite this? By which I mean: who investigates them? Where are the results published? I have never seen an honest investigation of a UFO apart from the Air Force's work back in the 60s.

Weeeelll... let's see here. Let's suppose the alien spacecraft is about Space Shuttle size, making it around 80,000kg. Now, the moon is 7.3477 × 1022 kg, with a radius of 1,737.10 km. Let's assume it's a perfect sphere for a moment. Suppose the alien spacecraft is sitting on the surface of the moon. The distance from the center of the moon to the barycenter of the new system is: [math]r_1 = a \cdot \frac{m_2}{m_1+m_2}[/math] where m1 is the mass of the moon and m2 is the mass of the spacecraft, and a is the distance between them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_Mass#Barycenter_in_astrophysics_and_astronomy The result? The barycenter will be 2.36 × 10-20 kilometers away from the center of the moon. That sort of wobble would be completely undetectable. Heat emanated on the other side of the moon would also be undetected, because of its albedo and its huge mass. Radio signals are blocked by the moon, of course, and spacecraft that do go out there don't listen to the entire spectrum. Ground-based telescopes cannot resolve satellite-sized objects near the moon. http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/FOX.html Oh, I certainly agree. It would be very difficult to prove that aliens have indeed visited the Earth. You're taking the skeptical position that there's not enough evidence to believe it. However, you're going past skepticism. You've started to try to debunk all the evidence brought forth, and as I have shown above, you're resorting to explanations that don't actually make sense. A skeptic doesn't go lobbing out explanations and trying to debunk everything. A skeptic looks at the evidence and says, "well, I dunno. It could be a lot of things. Why don't we try to figure it out?" A skeptic doesn't go, "this can't possibly be true, so how can I debunk it?"

There have been incidents of UFOs being detected on radar. There have even been cases of amateur astronomers seeing things that looked like UFOs through their telescopes. But expecting ordinary telescopes to detect alien spacecraft is wrong. They don't necessarily produce visible light, they're small, and they're supposedly quite fast, meaning they'd never show up on a long exposure (like every telescope uses). In any case, this is an argument from ignorance.

For reference, what are your other favorite musicians?

The Spitzer infrared space telescope can get, at best, 5 minutes of arc on one of its detectors. There is no way you could survey the entire inner solar system with that sort of telescope. I'd again like to point out that our asteroid and comet belts are poorly explored. The Oort cloud hasn't even been directly observed, and new objects are detected in our asteroid belt all the time. It'd be ludicrously easy for something to wander about the solar system unnoticed. We haven't even detected all the mundane things out there, let alone the weird bits.

I don't think any of our spacebound infrared observatories would be searching the inner solar system, particularly with their narrow field of view. And infrared view from the ground is bad because of the atmosphere, so detecting a small hot ship may be rather difficult. As for gravitational disturbances -- there are thousands of asteroids in the assorted asteroid belts that we have not cataloged. There's all sorts of junk floating around the solar system that we don't know about. Trying to find a spaceship from the gravitational disturbances would be impossible when there's all sorts of other stuff.