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US Government Restricting Research Libraries
An anonymous reader writes: "In a move that has been termed 'positively Orwellian' by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch, George W. Bush is ending public access to research materials at EPA regional libraries without Congressional consent. This all-out effort to impede research and public access is a [loosely] covert operation to close down 26 technical libraries under the guise of budgetary constraint. Scientists are protesting, but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006."
Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the US as Bush has?
I believe the article and editorialization need to be marked (-1, Troll)
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
the u.s. government over the last several months has been a massive binge of re-classifying previously declassified historical documents. i think they've done maybe 50,000 of them. this administration has a culture of secrecy and limit of access to information and this move is nicely in keeping with that ideology. my source on the document reclassification is here.
2 1337 4 u!
There's something positive about being Orwellian?
Developers: We can use your help.
For a more useful story, please see http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365379.ht ml
Some points:
- The information will be made available online
- The information will be available through library loan
- Not all the libraries are closing
- Bush is not defying Congress. He sent them a budget which they either approve or amend
Boy, it certainly made for a good story though! For about 2 minutes... *sigh* Do some research before posting or blogging next time.
The Republican War on Science
Despite the inflammatory name, the book doesn't assert that Republicans are inherently anti-science, but it is a chronicle the past few decades of politicization of science, and how even though Liberals do their own part to misrepresent science, the overwhelming lions share of open distortion percieved by the overwhelming majority of scientists has been unfortunately solidly Republican. It's a rather impressive, well-documented book that I highly recommend showing a trend of scientific limitations and games like today's story.
Ryan Fenton
Could we arrange an information exodus program -- sending in people with scanners to go in and copy all of the data possible in the next 15 days?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
As a fellow government worker, I can attest to the fact that all this "consolidation" stuff is not just restricted to the Libraries & EPA stuff. We're feeling it in pretty much every branch, some worse than others.
Wars are expensive.. And the money's gotta come from somewhere.. Rather than raising taxes (which I'm sure they'll do anyway), they're cutting expenses elsewhere... Rather than fire people, they're "consolidating". Sounds better, but it's the same thing.
Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the institution of science in the US as Bush has?
The always progressive and forward thinking Bill Clinton has proposed legislation that will modernize the nation's research libraries by making all of the information contained in the libraries available online, eliminating the wasteful need for old-fashioned brick-and-mortar facilities. At least some people in the federal government are embracing technology. Kudos, Bill!
Am I wrong?
This is getting really old, too. This marks about the sixth time I've seen someone trying to compare Bush's presidency to Carter's. There is NO comparison. Carter was a nauseatingly honest individual who was elected largely in response to the nauseatingly dishonest Nixon administration. He entered the political game playing it straight at a time when the opposition was patently playing it crooked, and inherited (as another poster has mentioned) a terrible situation at a terrible time. What he didn't do was leave a huge mess for future generations to clean up -- most of the situations of Carter's presidency that people didn't like were strictly temporary.
On the other hand, Bush has destroyed a huge budget surplus and left trillions in debt to my kids. His deliberate neglect has more or less wiped one whole American city right off the map. He has ruined America's standing as the leader of the free world with his farrago of lies on Iraq, and he has opened a gaping crack in the Middle East which seems destined to consume innocent lives for decades to come. He has fundamentally damaged the conscience of the nation by actively condoning torture, and actively assaulting our cherished civil liberties -- the one aspect of America that truly makes us American. He has starved the middle class and pushed millions into poverty with his patently worker-unfriendly policies (better known as his "Ownership Society" initiative). He has contributed to the further decline of public education, ensuring that millions can't compete in a modern job market, through his unfunded No Child Left Behind. He has bitterly divided America with his lies and hateful, cynical rhetoric. He has flaunted his authority recklessly and led with all the gravitas of a 21-year old fraternity prankster. In a simple character evaluation of Jimmy Carter versus George W. Bush, there is no question who I'd rather have in charge.
My book, podcast
What came into my mind as i read this was a documentry i once saw on Discovery channel which talked about china.
China used to be one of the most advanced civilisations in the world. They developed so many stuff before any other country. Then suddenly some idiot in there decided to cut off china from the rest of the world and not only stop building technically advanced ships but actually destroy its unmatched fleet of ships. Shortly afterwards Britan was able to conquer the country using the technology that chinese themselves invented.
The fact that US seems to be closing libraries makes me wonder if its another version of the same events.
In France, one of our best (but dead) comics, Coluche, said that politicians spend more public money for building jails than schools because they know they won't go to school again.
I am no Bush apologist (please read that again before modding me flamebait), but I was more than a little perturbed by the editorial tone of the article. So, I Googled the subject and I can find dozens of blogs and opinion pieces dating back to around March or so on this, but nothing from a traditional news source (I gave up after about 5 pages of search results).
I would like to read an objectively written fact based story behind this and not just a lot of reactionary Bush bashing.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Doesn't anybody bother to look at the source data before flaming? Or is this news "too good to check"?
This is the EPA engaging in political tactics. To begin with, they haven't yet been asked to cut their budget, and they may never be. The closing of libraries is not Bush's idea--it's EPA bureaucrats saying "Look what you made us do!"
The proposed budget cut constitutes a fraction of of a percent of the EPA's budget, and it could be achieved with a minor reduction in the EPA's bloated administrative costs.
This is a standard tactic in every government in the world. Faced with budget cuts, the bureaucrats respond by threatening to terminate one of the few things they do that actually provides a service. The mystery is that they often get away with it.
The special irony in this item is that the EPA isn't planning to cut the service—just the way it's delivered.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If you think that because an article attributes a decision to "the EPA" that means that the decision was not made by political appointees implementing administration policy, you're incredibly naive. Bush may well not have been personally involved in this decision, but it sure looks like a political decision, not something that EPA scientists and lawyers have come up with.
Yep, I missed it because it isn't in the article. What the article says is that "all EPA-generated materials will continue to be available by inter-library loan. That excludes material not generated by the EPA. You need to be more careful about accusing people of not reading the article. I've obviously read it more carefully than you have. Furthermore, even if this does mean that the boxed materials will be available by interlibrary loan, how easy do you think it will be to find what you need, and how long a delay will there be in getting the boxed materials out of storage? I know from personal experience that it can be a real impediment to research to have to wait several weeks or even days to get something out of storage, and that often it is difficult to identify what you need if you can't go look at it on the shelf online.
...there is a limit to the amount of criticism that can be heaped on a president who puts on a sweater to cut down on the White House heating bill. Just PR, maybe, but my kind of PR.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Am I wrong?
Yes.
Clinton got bashed back in his day. The reason it seems we bitch more about Bush than we did Clinton is because Bush is a big fuck-up.
Bush supporters get a little tetchy about criticism of this administration, forgetting that all administrations are taken to task when watchful (and slightly paranoid) people catch them with their hands inside the cookie jar of liberty. The Bush administration just happens to be raiding it a lot more than previous administrations, and a lot more blatantly.
As has been pointed out by others, this story is potentially misleading. I'd write that off to many of us being a bit jumpy around Bush. When the school bully tends to walk up behind you and smack you on the head, you start jerking your head around at the oddest moments. It might look silly when the bully isn't behind you, but it might just save you a few headaches.
But, had Clinton tried doing this, he would have received much the same treatment.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I'm one of those "libs." Actually, more socially libertarian and fiscally somewhat liberal. We need to *get the hell out of Iraq*, stop involvement in the Middle East (which is a lost cause IMHO) and concentrate on our own New Deal. Massive government subsidies for energy conservation, clean energy production, environmental, space, and automation research are in order. We need to reduce our dependence on countries that are poorer than us and have laxer environmental laws for manufacturing while maintaining our high standard of living. This can only be done through automation of manufacturing so that high-value workers can produce more. The environmental stuff is self-explanatory. First, it'll reduce our dependence on foreign oil, which has been one of the driving forces of our worst foreign policy decisions over the last 30 years. Secondly, there's a very high liklihood - I'd call it a certainty - that global warming is real. Enough said.
Why space? Humankind needs breathing room - somewhere for the born adventurers to go and explore. In addition, the Earth won't last forever, and humankind should continue on even in the case of the worst happening.
Cheers,
-b.
Let's see. The "War on Terror" has cost about US$430,000,000,000 so far over the last 5 years. This figure only takes into account the US investment, and does not include the cost to Iraq.
So, let's assume that money has been evenly spent over the last five years (it hasn't, as the first year or so were taken up by fabricating a reason to go into Iraq, and operations in Afghanistan, which had been hiding bin Laden, have always been secondary). So, that gives us a per-minute estimated cost of:
430,000,000 / ( 5 * 365 * 24 * 60 ) = 163622.526636225 or so.
So, US$2,000,000 would give us about 12.2 minutes.
That's an interesting way to break down the cost of the "War on Terror."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Um, no. That honor belongs to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1953 changed the standing policy established under Truman that the U.S. would not back extra-diplomatic actions against secular and democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq in the oil field dispute between Iran and the U.K., despite British pressure to do so. Eisenhower changed the policy, the CIA and MI6 funded the coup, and the Shah was installed--thus neatly setting the stage for the Islamic Revolution a generation later and empowering a fundamentalist jihadist movement.
You can bet the Iranians haven't forgotten this, even if we have.
Eisenhower was a Republican, in case you didn't know.
-- Cerebus
Ingredients: 1 Potato, 1 Pat of butter.
You place the butter in the middle of the potato. Lots of butter on that one spot, but wouldnt you prefer to spread butter all over? Try it, and find that one spot now has a lot less butter than it used to.
Everyone knows butter doesnt just spontaneously appear, if you want to spread something to another area, you need to reduce it in some other area!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
How on earth do things like this get posted? The first link is to an "op-ed" site that is so obviously anti-Bush that it defies credibility. The article itself is a hysterical mish-mash of fact(?) and opinion that exists only to throw around needlessly inflammatory catchphrases. "Orwellian?" Check. Reference to "Fahrenheit 451?" Check. "Who could have ever envisioned that Ray Bradbury's vicious, futuristic, dystopian society would ever come to fruition; but it may indeed have done just that!" Yeah, it MAY have! Or maybe not... Dude, chill out.
At least the link from PEER is more factual. And of course the facts aren't all that exciting, at least compared with visions of vicious, dystopian futures:
1. Nowhere is George Bush mentioned.2. PEER seems to be mainly concerned with being able to use a library "to locate [...] information and have it produced to a court house in a timely manner." No impression is given that, as a result of these budget cuts, access to all important materials is going to be forever lost. It just sounds like it might be a bit harder to get it in certain cases, hence their concern.
3. The summary of this story makes it sound like this is a grave issue for members of the general public, and said public's access to information of general utility will be severely curtailed in the near future. However, the PEER summary clearly states in its headline: "Prosecutions [of polluters] at Risk from Loss of Timely Access to Key Documents." That is, the usefulness of this information is limited in scope to certain legal proceedings. Of course these cases are very important, but it's not like the libraries that you and I visit all the time are closing their doors.
I know I'm going up against a bunch of knee-jerk leftists here (wow, look at some of these comments!), but I had to at least try and appeal to reason. Slashdot, please stick with tech and science news. If you're going to delve into politics would it be possible to at least provide the most basic quality control to stories that get posted? This story isn't inherently biased, but the way it was presented is just appalling.
It's Godwin's cousin, only about 1984 instead of Nazis?
While this is obviously a bad thing for science and public education, any similarity to 1984 is sketchy at best.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
"In a move that has been termed 'positively Orwellian' by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch, George W. Bush is ending public access to research materials at EPA regional libraries without Congressional consent."
If you voted for Bush, this is your fault.
God is real unless declared integer
Every economist worth their salt will tell you that soaring debt is the sign of a great economy. Debt is good, because it means we're spending like crazy and our kids will pay for it and not us.
Carter refused to nuke the Middle East by Gawd and he even suggested we go all flowery and stop being so dependent on oil and stuff.
Now excuse me while I gas up my 20 foot long stretch SUV, yeehaw!!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
When you are a world leader, you are supposed to lead; if you aren't capable of handling the existing situation, please don't run for office. With the cold war, Watergate scandal, oil crisis, and post-Vietnam situation, those were difficult times, it's true. But Carter managed to make it worse by his weakness.
His one great achievement was the signing of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt, but why couldn't he have followed it with other diplomatic accomplishments? It was while he was in office that the civil war in Lebanon began, the Iranian Islamic revolution happened, and Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was arming at such a rate that most experts predicted they would be able to invade Western Europe around 1985.
If you think about it, a US president who inherited a messy situation was Nixon. Vietnam was the biggest blunder in US history, Nixon (and Kissinger) had to accept some very bad compromises to get out. The political defeat caused by the impossible military situation presented an image of weakness, which the Soviet Union used to create the largest expansion of communism after the 1945-1950 era. The "domino theory" used to justify the intervention in Vietnam proved true, since not only the neighboring countries, Cambodia and Laos, fell to communist dictatorships, but distant countries such as Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia as well.
Presidents such as Ford and Carter, like Daladier and Chamberlain, show how much damage can be done by leaders who may be well-intentioned, but are weak and ineffective when confronted by determined dictators. The same thing can be said of Bush Sr. too, had he done the right thing and taken Saddam out in 1991, the world would be a different place today.
First Bush stole the elections... twice. Next he steered Katrina right into New Orleans and blew up the levies to flood the black parts of town. Now to complete his evil hat trick, Chimpy McSatan is closing down all the libraries!! I am IN SHOCK of this man's evil doing. There is no other explanation for his actions other than BUSH IS THE DEVIL.
He should have gone off to hide at Camp David and play golf like Dubya did after 9/11.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Or perhaps scientists just don't like it when some politicians are telling them that yes, why, the bible is a perfectly truthful historical recording, and yes the earth is 6000 years old, and yes evolution is just a figment of your imagination and you were created out of dirt by a bearded old man sitting on a cloud, and yes it should be taught in school, and no, no one cares about the difference between the notions of "stupid bigotic retardation" and "scientific theory".
Funniest part is that people always quote that education is left-winged, but no right-winger ever wonders why it is so.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Carter didn't inherit the Iranian hostage fiasco from anyone.
I suppose you'd rather he have appeased the terrorists with weapons. Why, they'd put you on the ten-dollar bill for that, I'd bet.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yes, President Carter. Double-didgit inflation, taxes so high that they broke the econom, etc.
I remember this period well.
Note that legally there is not much effective that a President himself can do about inflation, as the most critical factor involved is the money supply, which is controlled by the Federal Reserve. In addition, the economy was still reeling from the impact of high energy prices on entrenched energy inefficiencies. The result was stagflation: a brutal combination of economic stagnation and inflation.
There's not much you can do to make an economy energy efficient overnight, but what Carter did about this was appoint Paul Volcker as Fed chairman, who proceeded to change the one variable that could be changed quickly: the money supply. Volcker who took office in August of 1979, proceeded to attack inflatoin vigorously, at tremendous political cost to Carter.
Check out these graphs: prime rate, Consumer Price Index, and unemployment.
This is the story they tell. Roughly in the middle of his term, Carter hires Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman, with the job of stopping inflation. Volcker starts the cut off the money supply in order to break the back of inflation. Immediately, the rate of inflation starts to drop, economic growth stalls, and unemployment begins to rise.
Right around the time of the 1980 election, the prime rate is approaching it's historical high of 21.5. This continues to strangle economic growth and drive rising unemployement.
But inflation IS responding to Volcker's shock treatment. Carter gets no political boost from this, becuase he's only succeeded thus far to change the second derivative of prices. Which is to say that prices aren't dropping, they are continuing to rise at historically high rates. But the inflation rate is moving rapidly in the right direction, something that is only apparent when looking at data graphs, not when you go to purchase a quart of milk. What ordinary people see is high prices that continue to increase at a high rate, reduced economic growth, and decreased job security. This experience of economic insecurity creates a new class of voters: the Reagan Democrat. Ronald Reagan successfully argues that Carter has mismanaged the economy, and the voters buy it because everywhere they look, they see pain.
In the first half of Reagan's term, far too early for his economic policies to have had such a dramatic effect, inflation returns to its approximate historical average. Immediately the Fed release their death grip on interest rates, and economic growth ensues. Unemployment continues to rise for a short time as weak companies shed workers, but overall in the context of an economy poised to resume growth, this is a good thing.
Unemployment hits its peak in 1983. By this time, Reagan's fiscal policies are having an effect as well. The biggest thing he can influence strongly is federal spending, and he has embarked on a program of unusually high levels of peacetime deficit spending. Wikipedia does not have a nice graph but you can look it up from the CBO: The last Ford budget had a deficit of 4.1%; Carter's budgets had deficits of 2.7,2.7, 1.6, 2.7 and 2.5%. Reagan's first term budgets had deficits of 3.7, 5.6, 4.7, and 5.1%. An economy is primed for rapid growth responds rapidly to the stimulative effects of federal spending unchecked by offsetting taxes. When the 1984 election rolls around, Reagan looks like an economic genius: inflation under control, economic growth back on track, unemployment rapidly dropping.
Carter of course looks like an economic idiot even though arguably Carter's fiscal restraint and Volcker's severe anti-inflation policies made the strong recover of the 80s possible. Reagan's spending policies would have be
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Technically
We've had Reagan talk about "The War on Drugs" and Bush talk about "The War on Terror" and the media LOVES to talk about "The War in Iraq", but none of these are "Wars"
In some ways I think his current actions with the libraries and Iraq are good examples of Bush's presidency. Using Executive action and Executive order to create sweeping changes in the way things are done.
The framers of the Constitution wanted the ability for centralized control in times of crisis (instead of relying on congress to do anything rapidly), but feared centralizing too much power. Bush has been running roughshod over the Checks and Balances that are supposed to be in place to govern these sort of actions, when there ISN'T a crisis (and not every day after 9/11 is a crisis).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Much to my surprise, most Americans don't equate Iran Contra with the hostage crisis even though they are one in the same. President Elect Ron Reagan should shoulder a significant amount of the blame for the length of the hostage crisis.
After being elected in November, he opened back channel negotiations with the Ayatollah. The gist is Reagan offered to supply Iran with arms on the condition that Iran held our hostages until he took the oath. That's two months those innocent people had to live in captivity so Reagan could score political points.
The only justice in the whole thing is that Reagan is forever stained by Iran-Contra. That's little consolation to the hostages, I'm sure, but it's something.
Carter worked tirelessly in the months before leaving office to secure their release. There was little he could do outside of ordering an invasion of Iran. I think we can agree that would not have been a good thing.
I'm reading these articles, and the only occurrance of the word "Bush" is in a deragatory comment. This looks like it is something the EPA is doing, but the articles are too inflammatory to explain why they are doing it. I've never heard of these libraries, so I don't know who has access to them or what is in them or what the real impact is. Was the problem that these were not used by anyone? Or is the information redundant and out-of-date? Is it already in other libraries? The article doesn't even bother to answer the who/what/where/why/when so it is impossible to make a judgement.
This reminds me of a chain-email I got a few months ago about how George Bush Senior was working with some company to try and strip-mine some place in Brazil. I was enraged - then I read the article and realized it isn't a strip-mine, it doesn't involve George Bush, and it isn't an American company, and that the local supported the effort. I don't know if this is a competitor trying to start fake grassroots efforts by using anti-Bush sentiment, or if it is political enemies, or if there is something real happening here.
Getting vaguely back on topic, the US federal government has imposed an anti-R&D approach for decades.
Ask anyone in the US trying to do medical cannabis research if they've had any luck obtaining research materials, permits, or approval to do useful studies. In the meantime, the federal government denies the validity of all "foreign" research in Canada, the UK, Israel, Australia, etc.
What was the purpose of the IBM breakup a few decades ago, if not to stop a company from leveraging their own investment in R&D to continue growing their business? In theory it was because IBM had grown to a near monopoly, yet no action is taken against Microsoft when they are far closer to a monopoly than IBM ever was. Obviously market dominance was not the reason for the breakup.
Pharmaceutical research is often forced offshore because US regulations don't permit the kind of testing that would be needed to determine the efficacy of some drugs. Plus that means the US government and US pharmacorps don't have the embarassment of another national Thalidomide debacle -- future mistakes will be kept out of sight in foreign nations.
Bottom line is the US government has done a great deal to ensure that true R&D doesn't happen, because what is a great new product/service line to the owner is a huge threat to the status quo that pays the lobbyists and thereby the government's members. R&D is profitable for new companies, but it's a loss for the ineffective and staid "competition" that cuts R&D budgets in favour of short-term profits to satisfy the stock market.
Therein lies the crux of the matter: The US corporations and federal government, or rather their management, will happily let anything crumble and die, provided they can turn a profit now.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.
While some who care about the environment would, and did, dump stocks in corporations like Oxy, there is something stockholders can do that others can't. Stockholders can put pressure on the corporations they own stock in to cleanup their act. This is one of ideas behind mutual funds, funds pool money from many people and invest in corporations. With stock in hand they have more clout with the board of directors and ask for changes in how the business operates. Now whether Gore does or did this I don't know but just because someone owns stock doesn't mean they aren't doing anything to clean up the environment or other sri issues.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Take a look,_ cheney/
http://money.cnn.com/2002/08/07/news/economy/bush
This was the *revised* numbers, he had them reestimated when it showed he plunged the economy into the ground.
I for one wish a better Republican had been elected.
I was wondering when we would get our daily two-minute Bush-hate
What?
Ah, Zheng He's fleet. If the Pacific weren't so darn wide, maybe Columbus would have run into Chinese colonists when he reached the American shores, eh? But the dissolution of the treasure fleet was motivated largely by economics. The voyages didn't pay for themselves; they were funded by the sale of an enormous tract of land that the Mongols (the Yuan Dynasty) had turned into a park. When the land had finally all been sold, the federal budget shrank, and it ended up as a historical blip and not much more.
I'd consider Japan's isolationism policy, which lasted over two centuries, to be a more striking example.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Let's break down the posting.
"In a move that has been termed 'positively Orwellian' by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Executive Director Jeff Ruch,
The post directly quotes and attributes the quote correctly. You might not like the piece it's quoting, but the post accurately represents it.
George W. Bush is ending public access to research materials at EPA regional libraries
His administration is doing so, not him. Being as Presidents do almost nothing personally--the bulk of their work is accomplished by staff and appointees--it's a little unreasonable to expect to trace every decision all the way back to him. As Eisenhower said, "The buck stops here." I would not call this totally inaccurate. Give it 1/4 accurate.
without Congressional consent.
The action is being taken prior to Congressional review of the EPA budget. Accurate.
This all-out effort to impede research and public access
The degree to which this is the intent is a matter of opinion. Certainly EPA would never admit this whether or not it were true.
However, there is simply no question as to whether this will impede research and public access. It will. It will now introduce a delay and review process to accessing information that did not previously exist. Rather than walking in and copying a document, a person would now have to wait either for an inter-library loan delivery, or a no-deadline-defined scanning process to complete. This delay substantially reduces the capability for quick-response litigation. And since I'm guessing you think I'm a "knee jerk leftist" now (since I disagreed with you), I'll point out that this also impedes the ability of businesses to quickly access research materials to fight EPA regulation changes, fines, or stays. The business community is just as interested in EPA transparency as the enviros are.
1/2 accurate.
is a [loosely] covert operation
Accurate--the import of this decision was gleaned from a leaked internal EPA memo, not a public communiction.
to close down 26 technical libraries
Accurate--this is the plan.
under the guise of budgetary constraint
Budgetary constraint is the reason given. The degree to which that is a guise is up for debate. 1/4 accurate
Scientists are protesting,
Accurate.
but at least 15 of the libraries will be closed by Sept. 30, 2006."
Accurate.
Of 9 assertions in the post, I scored it about a 7, so about 77% accurate.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
That would be a cogent and valid point... if the "middle" could, by acquiring money (and where did you get that the same people trash-talk the rich as tell the middle class to mindlessly accrue wealth?) become rich. To put it in perspective, consider the top 1%, the truly rich, the "creamy layer", who had a quarter of the assets in this country in 1995. (I'll eat a lot of crow if that number's gone down since then, but let's say it's still that.)
Average income (the table breaks down the averages into two segments; I'm recombining them) is about $500k per year. Why, that's only a bit more than ten times what the median family makes; all we middle-class folk have to do is work ten times as hard!
Oh, wait, the assets average $6.8 million. So given that the median lifetime pre-tax income is about $1.8 million (wild guess there, $40k, working from 20 to 65)... hey, all we have to do is work for nearly four lifetimes without spending a cent. Eminently reachable! I have a hard time seeing the difference between the rich and the middle class sometimes myself!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Totally wrong. The fighting started against the French colonial domain, in 1946, and lasted until 1954, when the French suffered total defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The war between North and South started gradually, as a guerilla war, shortly after the country gained independence. The USA sent some military personnel to the South during the Eisenhower government, but they were training the South Vietnam military and weren't directly involved in combat.
The actual fighting between USA and Vietcong started after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, during the Johnson government.
Yet it was another Republican president that started the fighting in Viet Nam, Eisenhower.
Totally wrong. The fighting started against the French colonial domain, in 1946, and lasted until 1954, when the French suffered total defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The war between North and South started gradually, as a guerilla war, shortly after the country gained independence. The USA sent some military personnel to the South during the Eisenhower government, but they were training the South Vietnam military and weren't directly involved in combat.
Yes, the fighting between the French and Viet Namese started years before EIsenhower was president but he sent the first military personel to Viet Nam. By that tyme there were ongoing peace talks. An agreement, the Genevas Peace Accord or Geneva Conference I believe, was made in which the people of North and South Vietnam would vote to decide if the north and south would reunite. Eisenhower was against this, so he sent in a team of military advisors led by Colonel Edward Lansdale to arm, gather, and train those from the south who were also against the vote for or against reunification. As tyme went on Kennedy sent in more and more advisors. Then as president Johnson used the falsified Gulf of Tonkin Incident as justification to send regular troops to Vietnam.
FalconShould there be a Law?
While it may be true that we now know Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction
It was known before Bush Jr order the invasion that there were no WMDs, the chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter kept stating this. However there were some in both the White House and in the press that did what they could to discredit him because they wanted the invasion to take place no matter what the truth was. As early as 2000 the PNAC had plans on it's website with the plans for the invasion.
had no ties to international terrorism
Saddam did have ties to "terrorists", Palestinian terrorists, but not with al qaeda or bin Laden. Saddam knew bin Laden wanted him dead as his government was sectarian not religous based, a theocracy, and because he persecuted Muslims in Iraq. In the December before the invasion bin Laden in a radio broadcast talking to Iraqis said they should rise up and overthrow Saddam and to fight invaders when invaded. To bin Laden Saddam was worse than the US because whereas the US wasn't Muslim, Saddam was.
FalconShould there be a Law?
As anyone that watches B-grade action / adventure / martial-arts / etc. style movies can tell you, evil can't shoot for a damn.
As we know, Cheney seems to be quite the ferocious killer with his 'shotty' at his side. So, Cheney can't be pure evil. I do believe, however, that Cheney still consumes one live baby every morning to replenish his fuel reserves.
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?