Salt Lake Tribune’s golden cartoonist, Pat Bagley, sums up so much of the difficulty we face in policy debates and discussions these days:
Pat Bagley for the Salt Lake Tribune, “Spawn of the GOP” – in Tribune August 20, 2012
Especially “trickle-down” economics.
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(The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense)
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump:
Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control. My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it. BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub
Last year we lost a third of the beef herds in Texas. Sold out. Kaput. Gone, Can’t be reconstituted. This year’s losses will be massive, too. Billions lost, in two years, at the end of a decade of drought that shows now sign of going away.
Next year? Those herds won’t come back.
Weather? The forecast for this week is weather. The rain from last week is weather. 30 years of consistent trend is climate change.
http://summitcountyvoice.com/2012/03/25/wmo-says-global-warming-accelerated-in-past-decade/“>
No rise for 13 years? <a href="I'm sorry. I had understood you lived on Earth. What planet are you on?
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“We face real disasters. The beef industry, wheat farmers, and shipping on the Mississippi have already been hammered this year”
What about last year? What about next year…its called weather!!!!
Yes I will read more carefully the newspapers printing of dud scare predictions ..in search in vain for a correction of past dud predictions.
temperature have not risen for 13 years , this is odds with AGW …would you advise your students caution in there whole hearted acceptance of AGW ? Would you a least try and promote the ideals of scientic inquiry?
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Who is “Fast Eddy?” Doesn’t live here, so far as I know.
You seem to have no difficulty recalling bad information, especially biased information from denialists that never made the newspapers. Maybe my advice should be to simply read more carefully.
We face real disasters. The beef industry, wheat farmers, and shipping on the Mississippi have already been hammered this year. Global warming is not hypothetical at all.
You didn’t read that malaria is returning in any news column in any newspaper. That line is only maintained by the broad group of industry-paid flacks who deny the science behind the limiting of DDT.
You may have read, accurately, that the range of malaria mosquitoes is spreading. That’s a result of climate warming, and it’s accurate. But the number of malaria cases, and deaths, remains in decline.
However, there are other diseases spread with the help of warming we might do well to worry about, including West Nile virus. DDT can’t help there.
Are you familiar with IPCC publications? On one hand you criticize the agency for stuff it doesn’t do, and you denigrate findings in its reports. Then you ask a question that one might think would be clear to anyone who reads their works. Perhaps you should start here: Working Group II Report, “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/contents.html
Where are you getting information on warming, other than the wrong stuff from newspapers?
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Fast Eddy
“So, reality has no place in your odd “worldview,” and disasters are the responsibility of others”
Oh dear…what ‘disasters’ and who are the ‘others’? All the disasters I mentioned were ‘scares’ based in AGW which I read in newspapers. So malaria isnt returning – great now your on board with me ! But why did the newspaper print it? I am confused that you told me to read more newspapers…….because they only report the scares and then it goes down the memory hole.
And also , has the IPCC never ever issued predictions or warnings based on its modelling of future global warming? Reality and odd worldviews indeed.
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Natural courses will of course go their own way, it is stupefying to think that we can do anything about it. Is the scale of warming “un-natural” , now your starting to sound like a religious nutter – how do we know that they are unnatural , be because we have no records- please! We know it has been much hotter with greater CO2 levels and life reigned supreme!
I don’t consider CO2 a pollutant- so I am not ‘pro-pollutant’ and what a dull thing to say! – CO2 is plant food, we know that the great evolutionary explosions happened when CO2 where many times higher than today…are you anti-life? If life is formed from carbon , wouldn’t any grand design provide a feed back loop, a way for Carbon to reintroduced into the life-chain? Your thinking is limited – you assume that we are outside nature , when we sit within it.
As for prevention analogy, you lay your cards on the table , it doesn’t matter to you whether AGW is real or not, it’s the sentiment, it feels wrong. I say to you , is it wise to spend Billions to prevent something that is the un preventable, like Climate change? Is is wise to drive up food prices due to the ethanol subsidy…. Killing people through starvation – oh they are only poor brown coloured people in far way places , so as long as you can fill the car with E10 you can feel good about saving the planet.
Again: Temperatures are just going up and down from year to year by tiny amounts. All the results are explicable as temperatures having reached a plateau wherein they differ only in hundredths of a degree from year to year. A plateau will produce lots of warm years too. It doesn’t need a warming trend- and this is what’s ben happening for 13 years. If the theory has contra indications, then it places the theory in doubt. Will you acknowledge this point?
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What a bizarre claim. IPCC’s charter is merely to gather information that nations can use to prevent disasters, or encourage growth. Why do you slander the agency so?
Here’s the official explanation:
David said:
You’re not paying attention.
So, reality has no place in your odd “worldview,” and disasters are the responsibility of others?
Malaria isn’t returning. It’s at the lowest level in human history, and mostly without DDT — DDT stopped being effective against all mosquitoes in the 1960s, and it is used now only when lab reports indicate it has some killing effect on the local mosquito population. That you’re so badly informed – malinformed? dysinformed? — on malaria and DDT is just one more indication to me that you really need to read newspapers sometime, and that you don’t understand much about climate change, maybe all of science.
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Are you arguing for letting natural courses take their way? We’re overdue for a new ice age. There are some who conjecture that we’ve stopped it.
Warming on the scale we’ve seen is not natural, and the warming catastrophes have a huge component of our own hubristic action in them. Yes, things change. That’s a poor reason to piss in the soup, you know?
Are you pro-pollution in all other areas, too? Cow pies are natural, but I don’t like them on my dinner table. I think we have an obligation not to plop human pollution all over the planet, at the risk of all other species, and especially ourselves.
Accidents happen. That’s not an argument against seatbelts. Disease kills people. That’s not an argument against vaccination.
Sometimes I wonder who the poster boys were for Bagley’s cartoons (see original post).
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your blog , let you have the last word…
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Ed and JK
I have no dog in the fight, I believe we should not be in Iraq , Afghanistan , or , even if it’s just planes and logistics – Libya or Syria. We cannot supplant democracy to lands where Islam blooms. We must separate ourselves as I have outlined previously. Bush is not a monster , he was a fool that believed that M.E people want Western style freedom..they don’t , the Middle East wants Islam…so leave it to them. Obama is a fool because he thinks he can ingratiate himself with the Muslim world…nope, an American dead in Benghazi today- Muslims hate us because of who we are. They probably hate you guys more because your are a bunch of liberals….even as you open the door so very wide to them , because more diversity and tolerance is what makes you feel so morally good. Living up to your liberal ideals –even if it kills you. Me – I say we discriminate like crazy.
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James K (“ Jimmy the Knife”)
“Sorry, David, despite your delusion to the contrary creationism is not an alternative to the theory of evolution. “
Do actually read what I have written or do you argue with the conservative caricature that lives in your head? The survey asked whether Humans are a result of evolution guided by god? This is a from of Intelligent design theory- it is a form of creationism. If you don’t believe God has any relationship to how man was created – then how can you be a Christian or any other theist?
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Ed,
So everything must not change? There has been no climate change until- man kind industrialized itself? So Man can stop ‘climate change’? We can stop the oceans from rising – yep that’s change we can believe in. No , we cannot stop climate change.
Climate is always changing. Fullstop! There is an underlying cycle or process that pre-dates mankind. Correlation is not causation – that increased Co2 has occurred during the less than one degree temperature rise in the last century ( the majority of it in the first half) – does not mean it is the predominate cause , again the underlying climate process that has changed the earth’s climates for eons must be separated out. This is hard to do.
You cite all these disasters, but there have always been disasters, there has always been weather, and new records being set, that is the essence of a complex changing system. So a record drought —wow, its called weather. As to Big Wildfires , how about greenies stopping back-burning to prevent fuel loads being too high.
The earth has stopped heating for the last decade and a bit. Yes your news articles all say that there are records, but the temperatures aren’t varying by much and are oscillating around a plateau. That’s why they are talking 9th warmist year and the warmist decade ever…..but the temperature has stopped for 12 years …so where does that leave AGW theory? There is SOMETHING else going on, another underlying process. This should get you pause at least….?
IPCC has published numerous reports. It is an organization that requires that AGW theory to be true. Each of its reports have reduced there alarmist predictions to the point where even if the prediction now come true , the changes will be manageable. So as we know more, we have more understanding ,and the risks seem less. I am no counting the usual arctic ice scares( and what of the Antarctic), polar bears, coral bleaching, return of malaria( lucky we still have DTT) etc and an unending liternany of dud predictions that get reported in the 4 estate but never corrected because good news is NO news. ..This is the IPCC
It’s beautiful—and just proves my point that every time you turn around, science discovers something that proves earlier presumptions wrong. But the scientists never learn from being repeatedly being proved wrong; they always believe that “this time, they have it right.” A little humility would go a long way with you people.
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Nope there’s no global warming going on..it’s all made up….Uhhuh. ANd if you believe that I’ll tell you where Jimmy Hoffa is buried:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/09/global-warming-30-second-video
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To quote:
It was also illegal war conducted by Obama , with consent from Republicians. Democracts protest even legal wars – emocracts must think hypocrisy is a strenght.
The Iraq war may have been “legal” but it sure wasn’t just, child. It was a collossal waste of time, money and especially lives. That’s why we protested it.
And if our involvement in Libya had been in your view a “legal” war you wouldn’t have protested it? OH please. You still would have opposed it because of the Big Scary Black man in the White House.
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So, you supported Gaddhafi because he recently made nicey-nicey about the U.S., though he still protected the Lockerby bombers, tortured his own people, and posed a great threat to security of the entire Arab world, AND you think we should have violated the NATO agreement and stayed out of the thing completely, though what we got is 100% better than what was there before?
I’ve heard of “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” but never before have I heard of doing that and poking your own eyes out at the same time.
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Sorry, David, despite your delusion to the contrary creationism is not an alternative to the theory of evolution. it’s not science, it’s not theory, it’s nothing more then a misbegotten religious belief born out of a misinterpretation of Genesis. Creationism is the mutant bastard child of the Creation account and any Christian believing in Creationism is engaging in hearsay.
Because Creationism at its most basic says that God is a sociopathic liar.
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To quote:
Over 70 percent of Republicans and Democrats belief in creationism- either the extreme young earth version or the ID version.
Yeah except for that figure is wrong for Democrats. We’re not so stupid.
As for the 70% of Republicans believe in Creationism..yeah that really just proves the adage about if 50 million people believe a foolish thing…it’s still a foolish thing.
Sorry, this is not a game of popularity. This is a game of facts and there simply are none to back Creationism and quite a lot to back evolution.
To quote:
Obama did it to Kaddhafi , who was on cordial terms with the US , and let the mob rip him apart. A drone stopped Kaddhafi from fleeing and directly resulted in his death
You mean the Kaddhafi that was as much a mass murderer as Saddam Hussein that your side insisted we had to take out no matter what? Even if the result was a cesspool of terrorists and the Islamics taking over? At least what Obama did didn’t bankrupt the country and cost American troops their lives in a pointless war. that by itself puts him leagues ahead of Bush and the GOP.
Same goes with Egypt.
Kaddhafi was done whether or not we did anything to help or not. So sitting there bitching at Obama when we had no real power to affect the outcome is nothing more then the whinings of a party of petulant children who are still pissed 4 years later the American people put the “scary black man” in the White House. And who are even more pissed that they’ve lost their supposed national security cachet to the Democrats. And what does your side have to show for it? A crazy crackpot dimwitted Congresswoman from the 6th district of Minnesota who is currently channeling Tailgunner Joe and believes that she gets to define treason and patriotism all by herself.
To quote:Either way the result isnt going to be a democracy in Egypt, Libya or evenually Syria…it will be the stated aim of the Brotherhood – an Islamic Theocracy
You may very well be right, David. Or it might turn into a version of Turkey. Time will tell. But short of invading those countries, David, we have no real ability to stop the process that is going on. And if the President ordered the invasion of those countries your party would within the immediate 10 seconds afterwards decide to attack Obama for invading those countries and squelching the nascent democracy in those countries.
WIth you and your party this isn’t a rational discussion, as much as you and your party want to claim otherwise, this isn’t about the national security of the United States or whats best for this country and the rest of the world.
With you and your party this is about one thing alone: Your party’s visceral hatred of the President and your party’s willingness to take any position whatsoever that allows you and your party to attack the President no matter what.
as for the Brotherhood’s aim of a Islamic Theocracy and your fear of them…let me know when you’re going to start being concerned about the stated aim of more then a few Republicans of turning the United States into a Christian theocracy.
Which is half the reason your party created such a hullabaloo about the Democrats supposedly removing God from the party platform.
Your party whores out God on an amazing level. Especially considering there is so little actual Christianity coming from your party.
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David: now we have a decade of non-warming and the travesty is that they, the warmists, can’t explain it.
A decade of nonwarming? What planet are you living on? Lets see..the Arctic is still melting and we’re in the middle of a very bad drought. And my state, Minnesota, has had nothing approaching a normal winter in the last decade.
You, David, live in fantasy world.
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About global warming, David xavier said:
I mean, seriously, Rip: Can you at least read a newspaper from the past ten years before you make statements that would make any informed person blush?
o Annals of Global Warming: 2011 comes in as 9th warmest year ever recorded
o Annals of global warming: NOAA calls 2011 year of climate extremes
o Annals of global warming: Decade from 2000-2009 warmest on record, NASA found
We have crises in the changed monsoons in India, which may significantly increase starvation, soon. Drought in Africa, drought in almost all of the U.S. this year (relieved a bit by tropical storms, but oo late to save the beef industry, or pork or corn or soybeans or wheat). If you’ve bought fresh beef — or hoped to — over the last four weeks you’ve witnessed the effects of the crisis.
Across the U.S. we’ve had record wildfires over the past decade, in some cases eclipsing the record fires of 1908.
Migrating birds have changed migration patterns. Migrating fish have change their patterns or disappeared, ruining a lot of fishing boats and some packing companies, and making fish much more scarce across the world.
In the western U.S., weeds like cheat grass (Russian brome, Bromus tectorum) spread as warming disrupts the rain cycles. Cheat grass is particularly nasty because it’s wholly useless to any American wildlife, and to any domestic wildlife, andit crowds out all beneficial species and burns like a Roman candle when lit, which increases wildfire dangers of frequency of fires, speed of fires and intensity of fires.
You’re right: No computer model accurately forecast these global-warming caused disasters.
No, I was a professional botanist for few years in the 1970s, and we tracked the effects of global warming then, though we didn’t have a cause. Crop losses, livestock losses, wilfI’ve stayed relatively current with old friends and professional work on public lands use and environmental impact statements. In a period of 30 years, botanists have gone from “what in the world is causing this?” to “We’ve eliminated every other potential cause — and warming is the cause.”
It’s not a belief. I’ve seen the data. I’ve checked the plants, along the Colorado, San Juan and Green Rivers, down the canyons of central Utah; I’ve seen the damage along the Susquehanna and down through Chesapeake Bay. I’ve charted the timberlines of he Wasatch and Oquirrh ranges, and sat with the rangers who plot the annual changes along the upper glacier valleys of Glacier National Park. I’ve listened to hours of testimony from the fisherman of the Gulf of Mexico, and the chefs who depend on the catches of those fishermen. I’ve seen the damage, and I’ve seen the charts that show it spreading, year by year. It’s been in your newspapers. It’s been chronicled in your newspapers over the past 30 years.
I don’t believe. I know the evidence. It’s not a case of belief, as a religious faith. It’s a case of paying attention to just what the evidence shows. Evidence first. Years of pinning down the causes of the effects. Conan Doyle put it best, in the words of his character Sherlock Holmes: You eliminate all the things that are impossible, and then what remains, no matter how improbable, is the cause.
Add up all the evidence. Changing rain patterns. Rising temperatures. Changing migration patterns, in plants and animals. The earlier arrival of spring, incrementally, over more than 30 years (more than 100 years of records from the USDA). Changing frequencies of el Ninos and la Ninas. Rapid escalation of glacier melt, all over the world. Escalation of the rising of seas. Coral bleaching. Rising timberlines. Rising greenlines. Fish kills from warm, and hot water. Untimely flows of rivers (Mississippi this year being a chief example).
None of that involves any modeling, none of that involves any computer work.
So, what computer models do you complain about? The most famous is Michael Mann’s “hockey stick.” It took actual data from as far back as we can get data, including dendrochronologies, and projected past 1990 the trends then-observed. Were those projections inaccurate? Not happily, at all. They were inaccurate because they failed to predict how rapidly temperatures would actually rise! In short, the models sided with you on disbelieving the warming would continue.
For 20 years now, warming has continued much faster than the computer models predicted.
Were you aware that the models were too conservative when you impugned their accuracy?
Contrary views are discounted only after disproof. It’s not a bias thing, it’s an accuracy thing. When I started out in botany, we were chasing air pollution effects and measurements. Everywhere we went in the wild, we found rising temperatures (something we were checking to see when crops and wild plants would be most vulnerable to damaging gases); we found increased weed competition over what the texts said. We found plants outside the areas they should have been, shifting northward and upslope. Back then we worried a lot about particulate pollution, which had not yet been controlled well. Particulates block out sunlight and cause cooling on a grand scale. Often we discussed what could be predicted, were particulates to be controlled, and greenhouse gases not. We also looked at predictions with partial and no particulate control. Big debates occurred over whether human-caused emissions could really affect weather over big areas. Some botanists specialized in sunlight effects, some in rain effects, some in temperature effects. Massive studies were done by meteorologists, and climatologists; dozens of hypotheses were thrown up in the air, and examined. There was that one guy out at Mauna Loa who had 20 years of data on CO2. Textbooks speculated about what might happen if the competition for effects from the cooling particulates were ever removed. Warming on a grand scale?
Here we are a few decades later. Various hypotheses have been dismissed as impossible. The one remaining hypothesis that explains almost everything is rising CO2 from human emissions.
You don’t know the issue. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Alas, perhaps, the sky isn’t falling. Particulates, at least, came down after a while, and captured various gases with them when they fell, including a tiny percentage of CO2. We’ve very well controlled for particulates in most of the industrialized world. Greenhouse gases, on the other hand, have not been controlled.
And we have warming.
Galileo is an object lesson. Those who clung dogmatically to old beliefs — like religion — and who refused to look at the data, now look like fools. Your political church keeps insisting warming can’t happen, never mind the dead crops, the rising oceans, the declining glaciers, the rising actual temperatures . . .
Galileo’s story involved only whether the planets are pushed by angels, or by some other more natural source. It didn’t predict disaster for the human race, so ignoring Galileo was a matter of history and theology.
You might want to pay attention to the predictions of the prophet Joseph, and seven bad years. The Bible warns us not to mock those who have the data, and to pay attention to those who have been accurate in the past. Maybe Galileo isn’t the story you need to pay attention to.
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JamesK
“Let me know when you’re going to drop the stupid racism because you seem to be saying that blacks are more inclined to be homocidally violent.”
That is exactly what I am saying, A mere statement of fact gleened from statistics or….. the actual body count. But the whites a pretty out there as well …
JK
“David asks:7. How is having voter ID racist?
You mean besides the fact that it’s designed to do one thing and one thing only? To make damn sure that as few blacks, latinos and other minorities vote?”
And how does it do that , when the ID requirement covers all citizens? Or do you want to divide America into racial categories…like “stupid Black people who cant get ID”, .. nar that would be racist and the Democractic party has never ever been a Racist entity that traded on race baiting for political adavantage….not ever ever truly
JK
“So I ask my original question. The President should have had the US military invade those countries in order to keep their dictators in power? ”
This is a vexing issue.Which is why I didnt directly comment- yet I still attract a spray of bile from you. Both Obama and the Republicans have the same policy….and its not an easy one. I suspect the Brotherhood was always going to get power, so why not throw steadfast ally / relatively benign dictator ( by midde east standards) under a bus.
Obama did it to Kaddhafi , who was on cordial terms with the US , and let the mob rip him apart. A drone stopped Kaddhafi from fleeing and directly resulted in his death- no trial was ever going happen, hardly an improvement . It was also illegal war conducted by Obama , with consent from Republicians. Democracts protest even legal wars – emocracts must think hypocrisy is a strenght.
Either way the result isnt going to be a democracy in Egypt, Libya or evenually Syria…it will be the stated aim of the Brotherhood – an Islamic Theocracy. Just look at the electrions in Gaza —once in Hamas were never going to allow themselve to be voted out. Just like Hitler got into power through the vote, the end is foreseeable =heck you even have George Santayana quoted on the side bar of this blog.
I guess what I am advocating is support and aid for the only true democracy in the region , Israel. And a policy of Separatism from the rest of the Islam nightmare…..through disengagment , strategic negation of any threats such as nukes , stop all immigration , making the US unattractive for Muslims to want to stay, keep the wolves at arms length with a big stick/gun handy. Is Teddy on mount Rushmore?
You talk about dangerous ideology , to the liberal west , then Islam is the mother of them all. (Well Islam and the DNC – but you knew I was going to say that)
To Ed Darren
What we have here is a failure to communicate….
Intelligent design is “God guiding” the evolutionary process, it is a form of creationism but different as it uses physical evidence of past ages to make sense of how humanity came to be. Creationism is the unscientific extreme position , of a young earth. I believe that this position is over represented in the survey ,as people didnt see the 10000 years they just saw the ” God created humans…” part of the sentence and they voted accordingly – the survey should be rejigged.
Intelligent design (ID) is a form of creationism defined as the proposition that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” In other words God guides the process. Natural selection is in itself problematic for evolutionary theory…but I digress.
Over 70 percent of Republicans and Democrats belief in creationism- either the extreme young earth version or the ID version.
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To quote:
who booed and tried to vote down the inclusion of God in the party platform at the convention
You mean where the Democrats attempted to include all faiths including Christianity by not singling out any religion or deity?
Tell me…what’s your problem in being respectful to people of all faiths and no faith?
Or do you just like whoring out God?
Sorry, the Democrats never tried to exclude God. They were trying to be respectful of everyone. You know..the opposite of the GOP who seem to think that you have to be white, rich and Christian to be a real American.
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So, when one signs up for the Conservative Foreign Legions, did they surgically extract the math and statistics part of the brain?
Look at the poll again. 51% of Democrats are down with evolution; 36% of Republicans.
At least you recognize that ID is a religious belief, though. On smaller outcroppings of sanity great things have been started.
What’s “Soviet style” about Roberts Rules of Order? Is there nothing in American history or tradition or law you will not misrepresent? Is there anything in American history or tradition or law you understand?
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To quote:
Yes ,and specifically Black Americans…. let the truth set you free.
“As for Obama being a muslim, yeah that may be your stupidest statement. And what was he supposed to do when the Middle East had its Arab Spring? Send in the US military to protect the dictators?”
The Muslim brotherhood is not an Arab Spring….to say so is a far stupider statement.
Let me know when you’re going to drop the stupid racism because you seem to be saying that blacks are more inclined to be homocidally violent.
You speak no truth, David.
Oh and by the way..I didn’t say the Muslim Brotherhood is the Arab spring. But the time period when a bunch of Arab countries overthrew their dictators is generally called the Arab spring.
And you’re still ignoring the point that sometimes when a country engages in democracy that means the people you don’t like are going to win. I thought Republicans loved spreading democracy to other countries? Or do you guys only love other countries having democracy when they choose the people you tell them to choose?
So I ask my original question. The President should have had the US military invade those countries in order to keep their dictators in power? You’re aware that would have us even more hated in the Arab world right? Not to mention the fact that it would have wasted even more money and even more American lives on a big giant quagmire.
Oh wait..I forgot…you Republicans just love wasting our money on foreign ventures that turn into quagmires that end up getting our soldiers killed for no real reason.
Short of launching several more wars, David, there was very little the United States could do. And then you and your party would be attacking the President for launching those wars.
So really it’s time you start being intellectually honest. No matter what Obama did on that subject, or well any other subject, you were never going to be rational and all you are going to do is bitch about the President no matter what.
Which makes what you say completely stupid, completely worthless and totally irrelevent. And the same goes for your party. It’s time your party crawls under a rock and dies.
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David asks:7. How is having voter ID racist?
You mean besides the fact that it’s designed to do one thing and one thing only? To make damn sure that as few blacks, latinos and other minorities vote?
So instead of reaching out to blacks and latinos and other minorities your party has chosen to try to limit their right to vote as much as possible. Why? Because your party has become the party of the angry/scared white man.
It’s not like you can claim that it’s to prevent voter fraud because there’s very little voter fraud and what little voter fraud actually takes place isn’t going to be stopped by Voter ID.
W had his DOJ spend 5 years looking for voter fraud. In that 5 years and out of millions of votes cast…they found all of 86 examples.
Not 86,000. Not 860,000….86. as in 14 short of a 100. And most of those were former felons voting when they didn’t have the right to vote…which Voter ID will not stop. You want proof of that? Tell me….does your drivers license indicate whether or not you’ve been in prison?
Hm..and gee I wonder why certain areas of the south (ie. the red states) are trying to get out of the Voters Right act provisions…
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How could there are so many American think that Obama is a Moslem. He always states that he is a Christian.
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James said:
6. Gun do not kill people; people do
“Then pray tell why if you take the populations of Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia you have roughly the same population as the United States….. and we have more gun crimes then they do. What? Americans are just more predisposed to homocidal violence?”
Yes ,and specifically Black Americans…. let the truth set you free.
“As for Obama being a muslim, yeah that may be your stupidest statement. And what was he supposed to do when the Middle East had its Arab Spring? Send in the US military to protect the dictators?”
The Muslim brotherhood is not an Arab Spring….to say so is a far stupider statement.
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1. “58% of Republicans are creationist. “Arithmetic,” Clinton said. Get some.”
Actually its “statistics” and over 70% of both Democrats and Republicans believe in intelligent design or creationism. Which means the Democratic convention representatives , who booed and tried to vote down the inclusion of God in the party platform at the convention – are unrepresentative swill. Got to love the ‘soviet’ style way ‘God’ was finally included though….
2. “For all his bluster, Reagan raised taxes at least 11 times, and Trickle down didn’t work — but instead stopped the boom that would otherwise have carried into what we now call the Clinton administration. See Nobel-winner Paul Krugman for the mainstream economics (i.e., not radical) view: “
Clinton got in because Bush was now Regan and Bush broke his “read my lips Promise”. Yes it was a betrayal and he got punished for it. As for Krugman being mainstream…maybe , he’s ideologically Keyensian and a Democratic party partisan so has a bias with regard to Reagan’s policies and legacy. He’s a man who frankly believes that the US should continue to go into debt, to spur a recovery, and if the economy does not recover …then the stimulus package wasnt big enough. How big should it be..we will know when the economy recovers…his perscription is that obtuse.
3. “There is no fraud in global warming, except by those who have hoodwinked you into thinking that this crisis is a hoax. I’ll wager you’re a closet creationist, and you have grave doubts that any human ever walked on the Moon. Am I right?”
Crisis….where? Computer models that predict crises that have continually not happened…now we have a decade of non-warming and the travesty is that they, the warmists, can’t explain it. But you believe , because belief comes first and evidence is shoe horned in. You scream the sky is falling , and you discount any contrary view, there’s no comfort that the AGW theory maybe overstated, just shrill denoucations….sounds like your being the dogmatic Church to the sceptics ( or should that be denier) Galileo.
“The “actual Christian” who wishes to follow Jesus’s teachings has no home in the Republican Party, which believes poverty is a sin rather than the failing to help the poor, ……”
I think the Republicans want to create the jobs first , this is done through building investor confidence, keeping taxation low and cutting regulatory red tape to spur economic activity and jobs grow….all else follows this. What point training if no demand? Obama has failed in adequate jobs growth so he’s on the hand out trail….this will probably will work seeing half country is getting Government handouts of some sort. I do laugh when you try and get Jesus on the side of big Government – no Republicans do not believe that poverty is a sin , but a growing economy is the way to best manage it….how do you propose to fund the programs while in debt and without the tax revenues. Your like a child who thinks money can just be printed forever….opps, thats already happening , goodbye US dollar.
4. “Socialist? Obviously you don’t understand what socialism is, how it works, and it may be you don’t understand capitalism, either, if you think capitalism is socialism. Or were you referring to something else? “
As a political movement, socialism includes a diverse array of political philosophies – how about expanding the welfare state, redistribution of wealth , class struggle(we are the 99% anybody), identity politics and equality of OUTCOMES, and micro managing choices that its citizens can make through a high regulatory environment. See Nordic and EU models .
4.A. —“Favoring Muslims? Are you really that tone deaf and event blind? He attends Christian churches. He says he’s Christian. He’s never studied Islam to …….”
Attending a Black theology church doesnt a Christian make.He made the fawning Cairo speech, he bowed to Saudi oil despots, he has instructed NASA to out reach to Muslims and make them feel good about their small contributions to science. He has allowed the Muslim brotherhood control of Egypt- which will increase the oppression on the Coptic Christian minority and heighten tension with Israel. Guess whose side Obama will take it there is a conflagration between the two nations. He has engaged in an illegalwar , no approval sort from congress, to topple Kaddafi who had reformed himself considerably, but better anarchy and brownie points with the Arabs. Still waiting for Syria to be taken over by the Brotherhood and the massacre of Christians and Alawites to begin. Obama will surely avert his eyes to it so as to not offend Muslim sensibilities as they purge the nation of non Muslims.
5. “Yes, the GOP tried to get Akin to drop out. However, Ryan didn’t renounce his sponsorship of the Akins amendment, to redefine rape in federal law to fit Akins’s odd views. In fact, no Republican did. Several elected GOP people came to Akins’s defense. It’s not that Akins’s views are offensive, stupid, wrong, unjust and expensive to taxpayers, it’s that the rest of the GOP was outed on sharing those misogynistic views.”
Akin’s views aren’t odd, they are quite normal , in the context that all life is sacred. Congress has prohibited the use of Federal funds for abortion for more than three decades – except in cases of rape, incest and physical danger for the mother. That Akins supports this is odd??? Meanwhile Obama’s infanticide belief is in his senate voting record….odd? Obama also believes in same sex marriage…mmmh, is that not odd for a Christian? Then there him sitting in that church as the racist Good Rev Wright denounced white society …mmmh odd? Then there’s his let’s take from the rich and give to the less rich….odd? Then there’s his Affordable health care act which isn’t a tax ..but it is? His bowing to Arabs…odd? Then there’s the fact that he thinks the Maldives are off the coast of Argentina, that he thinks that there is more than 50 States in America and thinks American armies are full of dead people …that is corpses. How about stopping the waters rising…well it wasn’t rising anyhow so I’ll give him that foolish grandiose promise anyway. So if you obtusely come to the conclusion that Republicans are misogynistic drawn from some desperate need to assume some moral high horse then Obama is a bumbling , racist , anti-Christian, anti-marriage, socialist, lying, delusional, also misogynistic, child killing Muslim …to be consistent with your hateful disparaging reductive style.
6. “Crazy people with guns kill lots of people. Alas, the GOP wishes to do nothing to stop crazies from getting guns. Many Americans die. It’s a tragedy.”
Supreme courts have re affirmed the right to bear arms….silly billy. So tell us how to stop the crazies from getting guns? Then knives like in Britain? If your party had balls they would go for a constitutional amendment…..
7. “Everything you claim on voter fraud is dead wrong — plus, voter ID laws do absolutely nothing to stop any voter fraud found in the past 30 years. “
How is having voter ID racist? Wow …driving a car, means getting a license , is that racist? Is providing ID for a credit card racist? Play the race card and it gets so boring. by getting ID actually improves a person’s prospects…it allows them entry proper into society…but the DNC wants them to be “Brown and Down” just like in the Democratic glory days of Jim Crowand the KKK. What did your great grand dady do? Still got the sheets? A cheap shot yes, but when your party specifically makes whole racial/ethnic groups clients of the government , you are disempowering them , for misguided or cynical political purposes.
Enough for the moment. Gotta go.
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TO quote:
6. Gun do not kill people; people do
Then pray tell why if you take the populations of Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia you have roughly the same population as the United States…..
and we have more gun crimes then they do.
What? Americans are just more predisposed to homocidal violence? Or do gun control laws actually work?
As for Obama being a muslim, yeah that may be your stupidest statement. And what was he supposed to do when the Middle East had its Arab Spring? Send in the US military to protect the dictators?
Sorry, child, you’re still an idiot.
The Middle East was lurching towards democracy during the Arab Spring and sometimes in a democracy the people who you don’t necessarily like win.
Thank you for proving that you have a problem with democracy.
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Child, if you think we Catholics are going to abandon the Democrat party because they tried to put into federal law a rule that has existed as a rule of the EEOC for the last 12 years and then when the church for some stupid reason objected then you are in for a rude surprise. If we Catholics really had such a problem with the rule then why didn’t we Catholics object to the rule existing for 11.5 of its 12 years existance? Sorry, that whole hullaballo is nothing more then one more example of the church hierarchy trying to jump the church into the bed of the far right wing. You’re not going to see Catholics abandon the Democrat party, you’re more likely to see the Catholics abandon the GOP for their anti-Christ like behavior when it comes to the safety net of the middle class and the poor.
And yes..exactly that much of the GOP opposes evolution and yes the religious right is one of the groups that controls the GOP.
Then there is the fact that the GOP during the 2004 election got 40% of the hispanic vote and I’d be surprised if they get 1% of the hispanic vote this year. Why? Because while George W Bush was smart enough to do outreach to the country’s hispanics the rest of the part was stupid enough to do nothing but insult them at every turn since then. You guys have 0% of the vote among this country’s blacks and I’m willing to bet it’s going to be a similar percentage with this country’s hispanics.
Secondly no Obama and the Democrats are not socialists. You have no idea what the damn word means. But thank you for proving that you and the rest of the GOP are nothing but fascists and wannabe Nazi’s…
No trickle down did work at any point in time. All it’s done is create massive debts and that is all its done for 40 years now. Meanwhile it’s given massive tax cuts to the 1%, screwed over everyone else, and let the rich massively enrich themselves by stagnating the wages of everyone else.
You simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
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Toofiunny:
1. 58% of Republicans are creationist. “Arithmetic,” Clinton said. Get some.
2. For all his bluster, Reagan raised taxes at least 11 times, and Trickle down didn’t work — but instead stopped the boom that would otherwise have carried into what we now call the Clinton administration. See Nobel-winner Paul Krugman for the mainstream economics (i.e., not radical) view:
3. There is no fraud in global warming, except by those who have hoodwinked you into thinking that this crisis is a hoax. I’ll wager you’re a closet creationist, and you have grave doubts that any human ever walked on the Moon. Am I right?
http://assets.amuniversal.com/ba43ec80c535012fdf00001dd8b71c47
The “actual Christian” who wishes to follow Jesus’s teachings has no home in the Republican Party, which believes poverty is a sin rather than the failing to help the poor, and who wrote a platform designed to increase the ranks of the poor and stifle anyone’s rise out of poverty, calling for cuts in job training, job stimulus, health care designed to make healthy workers, child care to get parents to work, college funding for good jobs, and primary and secondary education designed to make good workers and taxpayers. There is nothing in the GOP platform about clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless or feeding the hungry (go look and show me, if you disagree; we’re all from Missouri, here).
4. Socialist? You mean, like how the stock market is at highs for the past dozen years? You mean, like how corporate profits are setting record after record? Socialism means, in the definitions of the Conservative God economists von Mises and von Hayek, that government owns and controls the means of production. You mean, like how the Affordable Health Care law leaves the decisions on what insurance to buy up to individuals and individual corporations, leaves the care to be provided by private physicians instead of government employees, in private offices and private hospitals,with medicines and devices invented, designed and manufactured by private pharmaceutical companies, dispensed from private drugstores — and all with absolution no control over any means of production?
Instead of nationalizing industries — the socialist way — Obama had the government buy stock in GM, Chrysler, AIG and other businesses that needed rescuing beyond just loans — stock, the capitalist’s tool.
Socialist? Obviously you don’t understand what socialism is, how it works, and it may be you don’t understand capitalism, either, if you think capitalism is socialism. Or were you referring to something else?
4.A. — Favoring Muslims? Are you really that tone deaf and event blind? He attends Christian churches. He says he’s Christian. He’s never studied Islam to join — though he apparently knew more Moslems as a child than you have known your entire life. Obama made the call to take out bin Laden. But he’s also been tough with sects other than the Wahabis. There is some discussion in the world that Obama’s hunting of the heads of Islamic-claiming terrorist organizations has both slowed the killing of Moslems by Moslems — is that what you mean, by favoring Moslems? If so, of course, you’d have to say he favors Christians and Jews more. What evidence do you have of Obama favoring any religious group over any other in any policy? You’re making wild charges, completely without warrant.
In the Middle East, Obama has earned the respect and cooperation of disparate Islamic groups that previously had expressed nothing but contempt for U.S. actions, and aid. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has pledged to back off of its previous, radically-anti-western policies, partly in gratitude for Obama’s having not propped up the oppressive, nominally Moslem regime there earlier.
Libya, of course, was a brilliant win for Obama — he accomplished what every president since Carter wished, to get rid of Gaddhafi — and without committing any troops (also got NATO to step up and admit they can’t live without the U.S. taking the lead, and that they need to update their weaponry).
You must know that. It can’t be just newspaper incompetence, but your intent to mislead that makes you say those things, yes?
5. Yes, the GOP tried to get Akin to drop out. However, Ryan didn’t renounce his sponsorship of the Akins amendment, to redefine rape in federal law to fit Akins’s odd views. In fact, no Republican did. Several elected GOP people came to Akins’s defense. It’s not that Akins’s views are offensive, stupid, wrong, unjust and expensive to taxpayers, it’s that the rest of the GOP was outed on sharing those misogynistic views.
6. Crazy people with guns kill lots of people. Alas, the GOP wishes to do nothing to stop crazies from getting guns. Many Americans die. It’s a tragedy.
7. Everything you claim on voter fraud is dead wrong — plus, voter ID laws do absolutely nothing to stop any voter fraud found in the past 30 years. It’s a completely useless, expensive, and racist exercise — which is why the courts have struck it down in Texas and Ohio — where the GOP suddenly complains they can’t comply with the law. Fraud? Yeah — the GOP Secretaries of State in Indiana and Pennsylvania, the Governor in Florida, and various other Republicans. I agree we should stamp out election fraud. The problem is, voter ID laws prevent action against election fraud.
Enough for the moment. Gotta go.
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Actually, it pretty much “sums up” Democrat obtuseness and electioneering propaganda (but I repeat myself).
1. The vast majority of Republicans believe in evolution, and no, the so-called “religious right” do not make up the majority of the GOP or the conservative movement. See the Vatican’s take on evolution, for example. It is true that actual Christian have no real home in the Democrat Party, and if you think otherwise, watch the Catholic vote this year, but this is not the fault of the GOP.
2. Trickle down did indeed work. Have a look at the Reagan years.
3. Global Warming is bunk, at least AGW. (boy you alarmist are going to have an embarrassing old age on that score, or you would if you were capable of either shame or embarrassment, but then you are a Democrat.) This fraud has been outed, and the rest of the world knows if even if you do not.
4. Obama most certainly is Socialist, it is absurd to claim otherwise, and he certainly favors the Muslims. His disastrous “Foreign Policy” has undone 60 years of work in the ME to stave off Muslim extremists. Now the Muslim brotherhood rules in Egypt of all places. This cannot be merely incompetence, it is by design.
5. All of the senior GOP leadership tried to get Akin to drop out, and the rank and file GOP turned its back on him. Given the absolutely loony and loopy garbage we have got out of Ms. Warren or Frankle (and really just about any of the more advanced Democrat Marxists), one would think that Democrats would have the decency to keep their yaps shut, but then they are Democrats so decency is beyond them. Warren looks set to lose; what if Akin wins?
6. Gun do not kill people; people do. This is a truly losing argument for the Democrats, and if you do not know it certainly the leadership does.
7. The Democrats cannot win without voter fraud. It is common knowledge that most contested elections require at least %2 margin, and often a %5 one, in order to beat the Democrat’s voter fraud machine, and you would know that if you had any actual involvement with elections. If this were not true than let us go ahead with voter id laws (and yes, those poor people already have ID’s, they have to in order to get the government freebees-in). You evidently do not know your own party. I can tell you that the crooks and liars that run the Democrat Party depend on useful idiots like you to get away with their fraud.
Meanwhile the Democrats have:
1. Unions.
2, OWS
3. Inner city welfare bums.
4. Abortion
5. Sodomy
6. the Nanny State
7. a Rabid hatred of white people
8. An equally rabid hatred of the middle class
9. An even greater hatred for Christian and practicing Jews.
And the fact that they are a bunch of lying, parasitic communists.
(and the list goes on and on.)
As usual, you have a tenuous grip on reality and merely put forward red herrings and straw men, and then engage in insults.
Talk to you Nov 6th. It will be a scream.
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