Republicans & Conservatives Archives

Reagan told us what he was going to do; then he did it

Then he backed up and did something that made more sense (Lebanon), or admitted he only did the right thing in his heart while actually breaking the law. But his intentions were good. No. Really. (Iran-Contra).Then his wife told him the stars were properly aligned. Then he drooled on his desk.

Gergle

Planning works but plans never do. It is a sign of both intelligence and character to change when circumstances change. And it is refreshing to remember a time when a leader could admit a real mistake w/o shifting the blame.

After he left the presidency, Ronald Reagan’s mind died before his body. That is the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease.

Christine,

In my opinion, his mind died before taking office. He WAS a great actor, though. He could deliver a line.

Gergle

If a man with no mind can accomplish such great things, where can we go to find such people?

The American nation is greater than the American government. Ronald Reagan understood that. Maybe indeed doing less was doing better.

Gergle

Let’s see how Obama does. So far, he is less impressive than his promises.

As Reagan said, they used to call it Reaganonmic until it started to work. After that, they just said it would have happened anyway.

I agree that presidents don’t create economies. Good policies work in the long run. In the short run, governments can do things like increase liquidity, which I suppose can be called rescue, but doesn’t lead to sustainable growth.

FDR “saved” the economy by benefiting from the demand created by WWII. Until that time it didn’t post sustainable growth. One of the worst depression years was 1937.

Obama took some good action. SO did Bush in October. Those things added liquidity. I think saving government “saved” the economy is a bit much. Maybe if they would just have not forced loans (such as Barney Frank did) things would not have fallen apart so much.

Christine:

Reaganomics, supply side, and trickle down economics was a bad joke, unless you happened to be wealthy. Even his own economics adviser admitted as much.

You are correct about FDR, but there was still a learning process going on in the world. Very few people accepted the impact of Keynes ideas.

The thing that most people don’t get is the psychological component to an economy. Both FDR and Reagan can be complemented for helping to turn American pessimism around. I often wonder if the distraction of WWII wasn’t as important as the massive money supply infusion it created.

WARTIME PRESIDENT WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

This has to be one of the funniest and most outlandish headline I have ever read.

However, one can glean from this simple statement the crass and hypocritical nature of liberalism.

EARTH COOLS AS GLOBAL EFFORTS TO CONTROL WARMING CONTINUES

I expect to read this headline in the very near future.

Royal Flush-
It’s been the Warmest decade in terms of global temperatures in human history.

Only our neck of the woods has cooled. Variability sometimes occurs regionally, and there’s no requirement that global temperatures always beat the previous year’s warming to establish a long term warming trend.

Christine and John-
Why this obsession with polling? When I argued Bush was a bad president, I only argued the polling to say to people that Bush was plumbing the depths of support.

Meanwhile, he’d screwed quite a few things up.

Republicans argue that Bush’s reputation will improve when history takes a second look at his administration.

But when it comes to Obama, they argue that a year into things, he must be a horrible President because he’s gotten to 47% so fast.

Never mind that they’ve been attacking him viciously for the last year, alleging his illegitimacy as president, alleging that his health bill would actively seek to kill seniors and euthanize babies, alleging that his emergency measures to save the economy from a Depression will endebt our children forever.

Never mind that they’ve undertaken an unprecedented blockade of Congress that has impeded the normal passage of legislation by majority, and therefore skewed any sense of the accomplishments Democrats have been capable of.

The Republicans do their best to hobble and insult the man, and then point out how degraded his public image is, as a means of telling the rest of us how terrible he is as President. That’s not just a no-win situation, that’s the mother of all circular arguments. The Republicans are doing their best to make him ineffective, to create deep swells of hatred for him, so they can criticize him as ineffective and unpopular.

Meanwhile, He averted a Depression.

Meanwhile, The Stimulus worked, saving and creating millions of jobs and raising economic growth.

What policies he has gotten past the blockade have worked, if not perfectly so. Can we say the same about Bush’s policies? He did his tax cuts, mainly did his stimulus, and all of those things did little to nothing to actually improve the economy. Why?

Because the essential problem in the economy that Republicans are trying to solve is the problem of the Rich not having enough money to invest or freedom to invest it.

How can we look at what happened during the last decade, in terms of the rise of income inequality and say that the Rich have been deprived by current policies? Yet the Republicans say we should cut their taxes even more! This for people who are currently accumulating greater shares of the economy pie than in years!

How can we look at what’s happened in the capital markets, and not say that these people had great freedom in investment. In fact, it’s arguable they had too much freedom, and that’s what got us into this situation.

The Republicans, whether they realize it or not, have an elitist bias when it comes to economic. They see the problem as being an upper class, an investor class that are being held back from making money in a way that brings prosperity to everybody.

But reality has defied the prediction that come with that bias, things getting worse as things got better for the very people that the Republicans sought to help. Reality defied the expectation in no small part because our current problem is one of a consumer economy in which consumers have been crippled in their ability to buy, by loss of jobs, loss or stagnation of wages in the face of rising costs, and by a credit market that’s hardly moving at all, despite all that was done to unlock it.

How many times do we have to beat our heads against this particular wall before it becomes obvious that the Republicans are in no condition to rise to this occasions?

Poor Mr. Daugherty, his writing in praise of Mr. Obama and the liberals can only come by bashing Mr. Bush and conservatives.

And yes…I have read much of the material presented in favor of the opinion that the world is warming by reason of man’s activities. And I have read many of the recently disclosed emails, by those who supposedly provide the evidence, as having lied and manipulated this so-called evidence.

There are laws of nature and theories about nature. My friend, you are confusing the two.

States Spending Less to Fight Smoking

“State governments are collecting record revenues from tobacco companies but spending less and less of it on antismoking programs, especially in New York, a group of health and advocacy organizations said in a report released Wednesday.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/us/10smoking.html?th&emc=th

Isn’t this interesting. Legislation was used to levy heavy taxes on the nation’s smokers in an expressed desire to help them stop smoking. Well…that’s not important now…but, keep the tax money coming. Just another example of government hypocrisy, greed, and appetite for our money. I wonder, are we still using the gasoline tax for road building?

Royal Flush-
I provided two examples of programs that worked, two programs that Republicans have been bashing in ideological glee.

I compare to contrast, to highlight what incredible differences there are between Obama’s policies and those of his predecessors.

As for Global Warming, you lack perspective on those e-mails.

To get a good, scientifically based handle on how climate responds, you need more than just the 150 years of direct temperature measurments. You need to find proxies. That can be tree rings. that can be sediment cores from lakes, or ice cores from glaciers.

However you do it, the measurements of atmospheric composition, plant growth, organic materials, and other things need to be calibrated and interpreted to mean something truthfully. You can’t simply let the data speak for itself, because the data speaks for something else. Thankfully, the disciplines of science allow one to establish mathematical relationships that hold true to reality.

However, we’re not dealing with tame lab science where variables don’t confound each other, where accidents and catastrophes don’t mess up the clean little records of Climate Proxies.

And of course, climate varies locally, as well as globally, so you must take that into account as well.

What the contrarians and their followers regard as cooking the books, they do so out of ignorance and reckless disregard for the science. There are some proxies that should not be used, becaue their records are so confounded. The paper referenced in the e-mail tells the researchers so. But this is ignored, because many contrarians seek rhetorical advantages, firs and foremost. They ignore the facts, except where they help to make a compelling argument.

But the whole reason for science, for the use of reason and logic is the fact that compelling arguments can be dreadfully wrong, despite their quality.

The arguments for global warming have not been some reckless and misinformed quest for the rhetoric to scare people into socialism, or some garbage like that. They are the carefully managed result of years of disciplined observation, studying, and modelling, and those who know their science stand by the theory.

While they could be wrong, they have done much to weed out the theories and explanations that are not backed by the evidence, and have done far more to establish the crediblity of their science than their critics in the media and pop culture have.

You can tell me I have the laws of science confused with the theories, but in truth even the supposed laws are theories themselves.

What allows us to get beyond the endless cycle of argument and counterargument is not some magic rhetoric that solves the problem, but a reliance on evidence and discipline examination of that evidence in order to discern the explanations that fit the facts, and those that merely fit our imagining of what the facts should be.

It is you who are confused on what constitutes a scientific argument. It’s not merely about competing scholarship, or politics. It’s about checking the truth of your explanations against the real behavior of what you’re explaining.

Mr. Daugherty writes; “You can tell me I have the laws of science confused with the theories, but in truth even the supposed laws are theories themselves.” He then states that I am confused.

I have a BS…and like other scientists, know the difference between theory and Law. Perhaps you can cite some references to bolster your contention.

Royal Flush, but you do confuse the entire issue with ignorance of facts born out by empirical methodology.

From Fact Check just today:

In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded:


* The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.

* Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.

* E-mails being cited as “smoking guns” have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to “hiding the decline” isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The “decline” actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

Your commentary appears to buy into political and greed motivated interpretation of so called evidence, instead of empirical data and consensus regarding the interpretation of that data. NASA’s data from their multiple orbiting satellites, even when adjusted for slight miscalibrations, demonstrate global warming accelerating over the last decade. The data is what it is. The average global temperature is rising.

Spin it however you will, but, policy makers will eventually be forced by the data and consensus of shared experience by the majority in the scientific community as well as populations around the globe, to accommodate that data in their policy. Later only raises the cost of dealing with it. That is where your contribution to the debate comes in, and those indiscriminate consumers of all anti-Obama, anti-government , and anti-Democratic politically based dis and misinformation campaigns.

Thank you Royal Flush for leaving the B.S. open for interpretation by readers as their assessment of your arguments warrant.

And education does not necessarily an educated nor wise person make. But, it helps, in a majority of cases. There are people with Bachelor’s degrees who claim divination through snake handling is a demonstrably better form of medicine than found in our hospitals and clinics.

Supporters of such crackpots would argue snake handlers don’t have a record of malpractice deaths and wrong medical procedures America’s conventional health care system has attending it. But, it is just an argument. It has no substance or merit as either logical or valid, and lacks any foundation in empirical science controlled comparison with equal sample and population size.

Even logical arguments are in no way assured of being valid or realistic in their conclusions when proffering conclusions based on real world empirically measurable data. Gremlins farting as an explanation for how internal combustion engines work, is an example one professor put forth that I can never forget. Entirely logical argument, with entirely and demonstrably false conclusions deriving from false and non-empirically verifiable premises, that 1) Gremlins exist, 2) Gremlins fart copiously creating the pressures to drive the pistons, and 3 that their preffered food is gasoline which they consume so fast as to force them to ingest copious quantities of air into their rapid digestive systems as well, creating a highly flammable methane mixture.

Usually, the simplest and most elegant explanation which can be verified is the right one. Cut the complexities of introducing Gremlins, and gasoline as an already flammable liquid and oxygen in the air are all that is required to explain combustion.

OH please…perhaps you still believe in the ALGORE proof as well. Have you not found in fact check anything to back up your contention that scientific theory and law are the same? Just curious.

It is not deniable that the world climate changes. And any fool knows the globe cools and warms. Please explain past sustained warming of the planet in terms of human activity.

One would almost believe that Mr. Daugherty finds scientist incapable of lying, greed, or publishing false papers.

Those who would spend the world into poverty for a an almost religious-like belief in MMGW gloom and doom are pathetic.

Can anyone hear God laughing at the self importance we humans have awarded ourselves? I’ve got to find me a gig like ALGORE to enrich myself at the expense of idiots. On second thought, I couldn’t do that as a Christian.

All these politicians gathering to find a way to stop MMGW is humorous. They will place a tremendous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just going there. Apparently they have not heard of “go to meeting”.

It’s as sad as these same political types spending millions to gather and talk about world hunger or world poverty.

Scratch any one of these political types and you will find a greedy, self-absorbed, puffed up and worthless socialist.

As usual, they all wish us to do as they say…not as they do. If any one of them believe in the garbage they are peddling would they not be spending their own money to avert catastrophe? Show me just one gloomer and doomer who is spending a cent of their money to prevent the end of the world. It’s baloney, designed for just one thing. To separate the idiots from their money.

Keep you eye on the ball in the air while I pick your pocket. Flim Flam and nothing more.

Mr. Remer, don’t quit your day job to become a full-time humorists. You are correct…crackpots abound and many are educated. I would give you ALGORE as one example. The climate scientists who gave us global cooling a few decades ago might qualify as well.

I understand that those who have no religious faith tend to place all their faith in science. Sadly, they have nothing else they can believe in. I also understand that in times of great peril many unbelievers quickly find God. Does anyone remember how church attendance shot up immediately following 911?

I appreciate all the worrying that Mr. Remer and Mr. Daugherty do for me. In return, I will pray for them.

Here’s a good one, btw:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/09/obama-nobel-peace-prize-snub

Apparently the Norwegians are none too happy…

BTW, did Obama just violate the constitution when he accepted the award?? I wonder if we will be able to bring it to the supreme court to find out…

I knew a guy who used to drive a farting Gremlin. :)

(made by AMC for those too young to remember)

BTW, I doubt the Supreme court is interested in overturning precedent:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/speedread.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/obama-will-donate-nobel-m_n_315770.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laureates Quote by Rhinehold,”“did Obama just violate the constitution when he accepted the award?? “”” 1906 Nobel Peace Prize went to President Theodore D. Roosevelt, 1919 Nobel Peace Prize went to President Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

Royal Flush-
Your problem is your unfamiliarity with the complex way in which scientific laws are arrived at. Let’s take Gravity, for instance. Ironclad law, right? Well, Newton’s gravity was superceded by Einstein’s and Einstein’s will be superceded by whoever successfully figures out how to merge Quantum Physics and General and Special Relativity.

And nobody knows for sure why objects have inertia. They think it’s got something to do with something called a Higgs Field, and is mediated by the Higgs Boson, but that could all just be a result of funky math.

That, indeed, his why CERN, the European Nuclear Research Agency, has built the Large Hadron Collider. Certain particles don’t show up until you get up to certain energy levels, which the collider is designed to do. Then, with those experiments, the physicists there can determine what theories are mere fantasy, and which ones hew closer to facts.

They may, indeed, be able to find a better theory that explains why things have mass. But these theories will not depend on unquestioned principles, but well-tested facts.

Rhinehold-

The Norwegian Nobel committee, which awards the peace prize, dismissed the criticism. “We always knew that there were too many events in the programme. Obama has to govern the US and we were told early on that he could not commit to all of them,” said Geir Lundestad, secretary of the committee.

Although Obama will not lunch with King Harald, he will see him on a visit to the royal palace.

It helps, sometimes, not to jump to poorly supported conclusions. Obama’s not your everyday peace-prize winner. He’s a working head of state.

“”I knew a guy who used to drive a farting Gremlin. :)

(made by AMC for those too young to remember)”“
Said gerg, I sure do remember them, Not a bad car if you could stand to look at them , For a few years they had a V8 ;)

Mr. Daugherty wrote; “They may, indeed, be able to find a better theory that explains why things have mass. But these theories will not depend on unquestioned principles, but well-tested facts.”

That makes sense. And, I expect someday “they” may be able to find out how liberals function with their brain missing. I wonder what a “well-tested fact” is? Are “facts” tested? At what point does a fact become a “fact”? Hmmm…did I miss that day in school? Are there false facts as well as true facts? How do we tell when a fact is false?

I wonder…do scientist ever look for the sun to rise in the western sky on earth. Have they seen any pigs flying recently? Could Mr. Daugherty find just one scientist living today who considers the existence of gravity just a theory.

Apparently Mr. Daugherty has never heard of the “Laws of Physics”. His grand explanation in the post above is not a refutation of the known laws of the Universe, but instead, are attempts to explain them.

There are many “theories” abounding to explain why women are so hard to understand. It is a “fact” that we still love them dearly.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Economic-news-raises-hopes-apf-1543887522.html?x=0 The encouraging retail sales report for November was a surprise. U.S. retailers have been reporting generally lackluster results for the start of the holiday shopping season. But sales rose 1.3 percent last month, after a 1.1 percent October gain, the Commerce Department said. It was the healthiest advance since August. And it was more than double the increase economists had expected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
Don’t know how to link, but I think Stephan is closer to the truth.
Take a quick look as Wiki
Thanks,
Rich

“Physical laws are distinguished from scientific theories by their simplicity. Scientific theories are generally more complex than laws; they have many component parts, and are more likely to be changed as the body of available experimental data and analysis develops. This is because a physical law is a summary observation of strictly empirical matters, whereas a theory is a model that accounts for the observation, explains it, relates it to other observations, and makes testable predictions based upon it. Simply stated, while a law notes that something happens, a theory explains why and how something happens.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law

I would ask, where are the “testable predictions” based upon the theories of MMGW?

It helps, sometimes, not to jump to poorly supported conclusions. Obama’s not your everyday peace-prize winner. He’s a working head of state.

I’m sorry Stephen, but nothing I said wasn’t true. The polling in Norway was decidedly against the president as they felt snubbed because he didn’t attend the usual grandiose that surrounds the award. *I* wasn’t saying it was a snub, THEY were.

Perhaps you are the one who hasn’t looked past the fold, Stephen.

There’s the question, isn’t it gergle. Were they violating the constitution or is the constitution wording flawed? Or did he get approval from congress as the constitution states? If so, why didn’t Obama? He would have easily gotten the approval, why not do it and take away the appearance? Or does he think the constitution doesn’t say what it does?

Apparently you’ve made up your mind, you must have the answers to those questions I see, do you mind providing me with those answers then?

Rhinehold,

Or did he get approval from the congress?

To whom are you referring Wilson or Roosevelt?

Since Obama is giving the prize money to charity, unlike Roosevelt, I think the point is moot. Wilson I’m not sure about. He supposedly set up a charitable trust, but then reneged on it. I could not find a good source on either of these.