So some cites. I went to the front page of American SPectator, and found an article with these quotes:
At National Review, we get this gem:
And others have pointed to Rush Limbaugh’s statements.
The NRO and Spectator were the first links I clicked on, and they’re the first right-wing opinion-makers I thought of. Are there others that are more influential?
Not once did I say I believed that to be the “conservative position.” In fact, I believe I went to some lengths to say that I did NOT expect that to be the conservative position. Speaking of latching onto something uncritically… :rolleyes:
An exercise in futility, or blind hope. Ah, well, its what we do, isn’t it?
American “culture” has turned into a consumerist pit, a huge machine that grinds up natural resources at one end and produces loud, shiny crap at the other. We don’t need this shit, nobody needs this shit, we just think we do because the people who make a living selling this shit have conned us into thinking we do.
As a classic example, passing tax breaks through Congress so that SUV’s can be sold more readily. Monumentally stupid, short-sighted, and wasteful. We screamed our heads off, nobody listened.
Bad news is someday we will really regret it. Good news is, we probably won’t regret it for very long.
I didn’t mean to imply that you had.
Again, I don’t know what a “money quote” is, and I don’t know that there even has to be one in every article, or this one for that matter. The article doesn’t appear to be very well written, as far as I can tell.
I think I made it clear that I was taking a stab at what the conservative position seems to be. In fact, I would say that it’s too early to figure out what the conservative position will be (we’re still in the midst of this crisis), and it might be that there isn’t any one position that we can point to.
I guess I must’ve been confused by the title you chose for your thread.
And yes you did clarify later, but I was talking about what reaction we’d get on this MB.
And, as I think about it, what actually is the debate here?
Maybe in a campaign song. Other than that, Republicans are the big business guys and Democrats are the supporters of the small business folks. Remember that Cheney resigned as the CEO of Halliburton Oil before becoming Vice President of the United States. Bush was (is?) also an oil man.
It may not happen in all parts of the Gulf Coast, but around Galveston, there’s been natural tar balls on the beaches for a very long time. Apparently the local Indians used them, and so did some shipwrecked Spaniards in the 1500s.
Here are some cites for both the tar balls and natural oil seeps in the Gulf.
Great! Where can we sell tar balls? Will it sell better than chocolate covered cotton?
Well, sure–it may well happen in certain places (and FWIW, I appreciate your teaching me about this phenomenon). At the same time, some folks are using natural oil seepage to suggest there’s no harm in artificial seepage. This is akin to suggesting that, because the Sahara has an ecosystem that requires very little rainfall, it’d be okay to drain wetlands.
Natural systems develop ecosystems around them, and when humans come in, we tend to develop industry around those ecosystems. Disrupted ecosystems can fall apart until a nice chunk of time elapses, and in the meantime, industry that depends on that disrupted ecosystem also falls apart.
John, sorry I got my back up at your post.
That one had an interesting quote in it:
Ah, well now there are 601 areas where oil seeps into the Gulf, only the latest is a bore hole that connects an oil reservoir with the seabed, creating a 130- by 30- mile slick (or what is it now?) that has recently tripled in size and which shows no signs of slowing down…
I didn’t answer the question because it’s not a well-formed question. I don’t think there is any news outlet that speaks for “conservatives.” The idea that there is a “conservative” position on this oil spill is preposterous in and of itself.
Have you ever notices that liberal SDMB posters are forever talking about the conservative position and that a certain person is the face of the conservatives? Do you see conservative SDMB posters doing that? I am ready to stand corrected, but I really don’t see that.
You can’t just pick one guy and see he’s the face of the conservatives. And if you do that, you sure as hell can’t pick different guys on different issues depending on what they say. I bet I could google up something that Gingrich said sometime about something that you would not think represents the conservative position.
Yeah… one real practical problem with the DFH movement is that they don’t have a very good military. So ultimately, what are they gonna do about it?
Elect a hippie as CIC is probably your best bet dude.
That’s more an exercise in stupidity than futility. It’s the last gasp of people so desperate for what they think is economic equality that they want to pull everyone down to their level, and they have religion (i.e., AGW) on their side.
In elucidator’s defense (not that he needs it from me), I think you are distorting his motives. I doubt he is about ‘pulling everyone down to his level’.
:Sigh:
It is not religion, stop spewing ignorance Rand Rover.
There may not be a Conservative mouthpiece that you like… but that doesn’t mean that that Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity don’t speak for many Conservatives. Or is there No True Conservative in your book?
I’ve certainly noticed Conservative posters pointing to the occasional left-wing loon and saying that he’s indicative of the entire Liberal movement. I’ve also noticed that Conservatives like to generalize the actions of Liberals… and then immediately accuse Liberals of doing the exact same thing.
Oh, yeah, it definitely happens. There are clearly more liberals than conservatives here, but there are a number of conservatives who routinely post what the “liberal” position is, or how “liberals” think. I can easily think of half a dozen posters who do that, and that’s without even thinking very hard.
OK, pick a representative group of a half-dozen of them, or whatever. We’re not that particular with respect to your choice of integer.
elucidator’s given his take, but let me give mine too, since I also consider myself part of that group.
We really could get by with a lot less oil than we currently consume, without a substantial sacrifice of wealth or comfort. (It’s just a matter of time until peak oil kicks in and forces the issue anyway.)
We currently consume about 20 million barrels of oil a day, and only 5 million of that is domestically produced. It’s not like our offshore oil production is somehow making that much of a difference. All it does is have a modest effect on the global price of oil. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ is as stupid an idea as there is: the U.S. hit peak production 40 years ago, fercryinoutloud, and has been in steady decline ever since. There’s really little we can do about that.
The oil companies, like pretty much any big and influential industry, have been able to defeat efforts to improve the safety of such drilling operations. Of course, during the eight years preceding January 20, 2009, George W. Bush was in the White House, giving the oil companies whatever they wanted. But even now, a combination of Business Dog Democrats (who give big business what they want because they know where their bread’s buttered) and Republicans (who’ll give it away for free) makes it hard to change the status quo without a major disaster like this. And after GWB’s been fucking up the country for eight years, it’s not like deepwater drilling safety was near the top of either Obama’s or the left’s to-do list.
The Republicans are obviously a much bigger part of the problem than the ‘centrist’ Dems, but the real problem is that political power follows economic power a bit too closely in our political system.
So in an ideal world, we’d be phasing out offshore drilling, and insisting on much more stringent safety measures where we’re doing it: if Brazil and Norway can have remote-controlled shutoff switches down there, surely the U.S. oil companies can afford them too. But we’re not in that world, because of a combination of power, stupidity, and malevolence.
Just thought this quote would be a ton of fun to throw into the conversation:
Looks like you are gonna have to unwad your panties all right… to mop up the oil spill that BP is not going to be reimbursing you for.
There is more money to reimburse people affected by the spill, just not directly from BP:
But sheesh, I’d want the drillers to be on the hook for amounts over and above what the fund can’t pay.