I have something to say here but it will have to wait for tomorrow. Posting this now is a substitute for the “SUBSCRIBE” option. - “Jack” 
We’re all on tenterhooks, Jack.
I’m sorry, you’ll have to help me out here, please–where’s the ad hominem attack in the snippet you quoted? I think I understand you, or what you’re trying to suggest, but I’d like a little clarification before I answer. Thanks.
It’s the part where you showed him he was wrong, and he couldn’t immediately find a Fox/RNC talking point to refute it. That’s the excuse Sam generally uses too - he won’t admit being proven to be full of shit no matter the evidence; he’ll just claim he’s being “personally attacked”. Even Bricker and Shodan will just shut up.
This is incredibly disingenuous. Of course the positions will reverse to some extent. We all of us(Americans) should question our leaders and pay attention to their actions and words. Who here expects them not to? Of course the world is not perfect and any oppositional group can and will find legitimate gripes against any current administration. I am not sure what you are saying with this remark: do you think it doesn’t apply to Dems re Bush et al? Do you think we don’t remember the evisceration of Clinton and the smears etc? Have you ever thought that having Bush(or McCain or Ashcroft or Gonzalez or Rumsfeld or Cheney)held up as good examples of moral leadership could be galling to those of us who have moral compasses?
My question is this: how do you defend policies such as those at Abu Graib? How do you defend refusing to even talk to other global leaders? How do you defend dismissing and redacting studies by your own administration of choice regarding climate change? How do you look your children in the eye and say “I helped cripple your generation with debt for an unnecessary war that caused more problems than it solved.”? How?
How? He already said. In effect, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
How do you figure? Pls explain.
I’ve always wanted to say this: my post is my cite. If anything, the onus is on you for asking why I deserve respect. Why do any of us? Why do you? (that one could be tricky…)
And then there is that whole Jesus thing that the social conservatives are always on about–that whole turn the other cheek bit. Oh, wait–that only works when it’s YOUR cheek they’ve been slapping. Silly me.
[conspiracy theorist hat] Rebuplicans seem well behaved this time around. I wonder why that is? Maybe because they’ve had 8 years to fuck things up and they’re tired. 30 seconds after O takes office Fox News can light up blaming Dems for everything and demanding “why can’t they do anything?!?” Given the average American’s attention span, this will play perfectly into the Repubicans’ hands, and we’ll hand them the office back in four years, while Dems take it in the shorts for four years.[/CTH]
wrong. you said you deserve respect. Why?
Well, have *you *been immortalized in a Beatles song, Little Miss Snarky Pants?
I said I’d play, but this isn’t play. This is trolling. Reread my post(s) in reply to yours. And move on from there.
Lucy–not many people keep their face in a jar by the door, but mine is here and ready! (well, if you were dead, you’d need a spare face, too!). 
It’s okay, Rigs, I got this one.
Ahem
Shut the fuck up, you fucking troll.
And here I thought the probing for weakness in someone else’s argument, and firing salvos through the holes, required actually reading and understanding their argument. Have I been doing it wrong all these years?
You know, there have been dozens of major hurricanes since I’ve been old enough to pay attention. Katrina’s the first one where conservatives apparently expected the state to handle the response by itself.
There were several hurricanes in Florida the previous year. FEMA was all over those like white on rice.
No, this is why we have FEMA: precisely because you can’t expect the mayor of a city, or a county executive, to be an expert on disaster preparation and relief.
Speak for yourself, bucko. Mayor Nagin simply didn’t have the capability for an emergency response: his city was under water. This is what we have the Feds for. And the Feds twiddled their thumbs while people died. Every day, we were lied to about aid getting into New Orleans, and after every day, it turned out that aid had been blocked from reaching Orleans Parish. (I’m still pissed at the Red Cross for going along with that charade, but that’s another issue.) Instead, the Feds were worried about looters, not lives, and weren’t anywhere to be seen when people tried to cross the bridge out of New Orleans, and were turned back at gunpoint by some latter-day Jim Clark.
By comparison with other hurricane evacuations, the New Orleans evacuation was remarkably thorough. Funny how you guys always apply a different standard to Katrina.
This is a new one to me, and I was up to my ears in the debates we had over Katrina three years ago.
Cite, please.
You’re losing a debate with yourself, Sam. It can’t be the locals’ fault to a substantial degree and too big a disaster for even the Feds to adequately cope with.
The fact remains that, for day after day after day, no aid reached Orleans Parish. The Red Cross was kept out (but they were willing to take my online donation to help the NOLA people needing immediate relief anyway). People died because no aid reached them.
And - oh yeah - your side has really fought for investigations that would settle some of the debates, right? Yeh, riiiiight.
And we haven’t even mentioned the long-term response to Katrina. I’ve been to NOLA twice since Katrina. The Bushies say tens of billions have been spent on rebuilding New Orleans. Downtown and the French Quarter look fine. The vast middle of Orleans Parish where most of the people live, or rather, lived - much of it still looks like a disaster area. And I’m not even talking about the Lower Ninth, which is to New Orleans like Downwind was to Thieves’ World.
But the response to globalization differs by party, thanks. And the gains of the past several years all went to the top of the economic pyramid.
False.
WTF does it matter if ‘the economy’ grows, but only a few benefit?
Two things: first of all, they’re dropping more or less continuously right now. If you’ve fallen off a cliff and are in free fall, the fact that you’re still higher up than while you were making the climb up the mountain isn’t worth much. Second, if there are few sales, it’s hard to judge what the price of a home is. A year ago, I had a pretty good idea of what my home could sell for; now I’ve got a pretty vague idea at best, because houses simply aren’t selling around here. I have no idea whether my home is worth $40,000 less than a year ago, or $90,000 less.
Have you been reading Robert J. (“not Paul - hell, not even an economist”) Samuelson? A coupla points in this part of your post seem like they came from his most recent column, and this is one of them. Maybe the monetary value of benefits has risen, but the main benefit is health insurance, and most workers are getting less of it, even as its monetary share of their ‘benefits’ goes up. So it’s not an increase in benefits.
Damn, you really have been reading Samuelson. It’s like you’re reading his column back to me. At least you didn’t explicitly make his idiotic 1997-2007, tech-bubble-doesn’t-count, housing-bubble-does argument - I guess I closed the door on that one in advance.
“Excessive union power”? During the Bush Administration??
Gimme a break.
Now, I could make the argument that illegal immigration has been depressing wages because, whenever the illegal workers try to unionize, the employers call DHS, which raids the workplace and sends 'em back to Mexico.
Business taxes in the U.S. as a share of GDP are pretty much in line with those of the other advanced democracies.
But I do have a monopoly on the fact that all the economic gains during the Bush Administration went to a very small sliver at the top of the pyramid. That wasn’t nearly the case during the Clinton years, despite all the tales of dot-com billionaires.
You can make whatever excuses you want for it, but it’s still there.
Oh, really? Does it say that if we keep on relying on carbon fuels for electricity and transportation, that in fifty years, the consequences will be more on the level of inconvenience?
Really? I don’t see how that follows.
What does follow is that, as a consequence of eight years’ procrastination, our response will have to be considerably quicker off the mark than it would have been if we’d started earlier.
Oh really? You mean like our European allies with their excellent public transportation systems and high gasoline taxes? How’s that ‘doing nothing’? Plus there’s Kyoto. Sure, most nations didn’t meet their targets, but are they standing still?
Not to mention, there is the little matter of the U.S., with something like 4.5% of the world’s population, generating more like 1/4 of its carbon. Maybe we should, like, take the lead? Certainly conservatives expect us to lead the way in the world in other respects.
OK, but we do understand (a) that AGW is real,
and (b)while there are a range of possibilities, we don’t really know what’s going to happen, and the downside risks are really quite spectacular.
Does anyone who knows what they’re talking about with respect to global climate change really believe that we should take a wait-and-see approach? Maybe a gadfly or two, but that’s about it.
That’s what we’re talking about. The GOP has been busy denying, and delaying. It’s one thing to differ on degree of response, but the conservative tack has been to play stallball for as long as possible.
That’s what you’re defending, and all the ‘science is poorly understood’ and ‘opportunity costs’ and all that won’t change that fact one bit.
Meanwhile, we’re at a point where the consequences of global warming are becoming all too dramatically visible.
It demonstrates that conservatives can win arguments on this board when the facts are on their side. (I don’t see the shared goal: conservatives simply want more nuclear power, just like they want to drill. It’s hard to find conservatives who give a shit about global warming.)
This part doesn’t even make sense to me - you have it backwards. Claiming less ground in an argument means your claim on the ground you do claim is at least as strong as it was before - usually stronger, because you can prove a weaker claim with the same facts that won’t sustain a stronger claim.
The problem of trolls and hostile commentators is one encountered by sites on both sides. Don’t ask me why Republicans and conservatives find it an obstacle that can’t be overcome. Maybe all the good tech geeks are libruls? 
Possibly.
I doubt it. Anger levels often don’t have anything to do with reality. Last week, Republicans wanted to be angry about lefties and/or the media attacking Bristol Palin, and chose to be so, regardless of the absence of any such attacks to point to. And a large part of the motivation for the conservative disregard of global warming seems to be about pissing off the left.
Can’t say I’ve noticed much of that defensiveness out there, until just the past two years.
I disagree. The right was a bunch of sore winners in 2005, and they’re still as pissed as ever, now that they see their hold on power going down the tubes.
No, we’re angry because conservatives have been in power for eight years, and the consequences of their particular areas of action and inaction has been remarkably destructive. We’re angry about Iraq, New Orleans, the absence of action on global warming, the way the U.S. economy seems to be only benefiting a few at the top, how the U.S. is the only major developed nation without universal health care, despite spending a much bigger share of GDP on health care/insurance than anyone else, we’re angry that the right keeps on trying to ‘fix’ a Social Security system that isn’t broken. We’re angry that income from not working is taxed at lower rates than many people pay on income they work for. We’re angry about people getting tortured to death in the name of America, because they drove their cab to the wrong place. We’re angry that we’ve turned into a surveillance state. And it’s vitally important to us to start fixing some of these things.
No, we aren’t like you: if Obama makes mistakes, why should we defend them? We weren’t exactly quiet when Clinton did things we didn’t like; there just weren’t blogs yet.
Obama’s far from an ideal candidate, and he’s going to hear from many of us when he lets the home team down. But he’s still infinitely better than McCain.
What’s theoretical about the things I just said we lefties are angry about? They’re all quite real.
You know, some things don’t need testing. Not invading Iraq would have been far less disastrous than invading Iraq. Having people who knew their shit running FEMA and DHS (like I said, Chertoff is still there) would have been infinitely preferable to having people who didn’t know jack shit in those jobs. The threat to Social Security is actuarially measurable, and only rates a wait-and-see: the trust fund is supposed to run out in 41 years; when was it supposed to last for 45 years? (Never, IIRC.) A whole bunch of countries have universal health care already (including your own), and that actually helps them contain health care costs much better than we do. The Clinton tax hikes didn’t hurt the economy, and the Bush tax cuts haven’t helped it very much, but have helped rich people a whole bunch.
Some stuff is in plain fucking sight.
Yeah, that’s the Bush years: not perfect enough to keep liberals from finding a few things to carp about.
We’re in completely different realities here.
So once again, no answer. There is no reason to “respect” someone’s opinions, just because s/he spouts them on a message board.
Thankee kindly Ms Smarty, but it’s about what I expected. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel: it passes the time, but where is the challenge?
Are you sure you want to thank me?
Anyway, I think communication is good. I’ll admit to thinking that common ground between defenders of Bushism or any close equivalent, and those of us out here in the real world, is going to be restricted to fairly minor issues. The philosophical chasm between Bush-McCain Republicans and the rest of us is vast. I fully expect the Senate GOP to try to filibuster anything important that Obama tries to get through Congress, just the way they demolished ClintonCare 14 years ago - not because they thought it wouldn’t work, but because they were afraid it would.
You haven’t always been conscientious about that yourself, to put it as kindly as possible, ya know?:dubious:
Absolutely. Your came back with reasoned arguments offered in good faith. Even if we’re on completely different planets and can never agree, the attempt is worthwhile.
I’ll respond to your longer message after I’ve put my daughter to bed.