>>I think I'll take their word for it; they are, after all, the people doing real climate science.
Which is why I called their review an apology for the movie. As pro-AGW people, they are inclined to ignore the errors, or minimize them. For example, even though RC.org itself says you can't blame Katrina on AGW (as you can read in the link I posted), they also make the baldfaced lie that Al Gore doesn't blame Katrina on AGW in the movie, even though the movie has a clip of him flying over the devastation, saying "I warned 'em! I warned 'em!"
My point was that even RC.org noticed errors in the movie, even if they'd rather have their teeth pulled out than say anything truly bad about AIC.
Right, I could have gone more in depth with their other pages on it. For example, RC.org says, as you say, "Nowhere does Gore state that Katrina was caused by global warming" - this is an outright lie. Not only did he make Katrina the poster child for global warming (literally), but in the movie there's a clip of him flying over the devastated city of New Orleans while Al Gore mutters, "I warned 'em! I warned 'em!"
The RC.org apology for Al Gore was actually quite sickening for a group dedicated to spreading truth about global warming, pooh-poohing the outright fabrication of the polar bear photograph used in the movie (the Polar Bears on the iceberg - remember?), which was taken right off shore in Alaska. The polar bears in question jumped off the iceberg and swam back to shore.
>>Conclusion: In sharp contrast to your wild statement, actual climate scientists found no significant errors in Gore's movie.
Which is why I called their review an apology for the movie. They weren't being honest. And even still they grudgingly found a number of errors in the movie, which they then tried to conveniently sweep under the rug.
>>Literate and educated populace is not a function of government, it's the function of a market
If you look back at the Scottish Miracle, it's quite clear that having an educated and literate populace not only is good for the country as a whole, but pays itself back seven-fold.
>>so now, that the market in USA does not require literate and educated populace (because nobody wants to hire in US)
The USA is still the largest economy in the world. It got that way through its education system, which, for all its faults, produces enough smart people and innovators and potentially-trainable employees for the market.
>>The real question is then: why the hell would you be against repeating the same success in health care/insurance and education?
Um. I'm not?
Explaining why the world is a certain way doesn't mean condoning it. Our medical system is fucked three ways from Friday.
As far as college goes, I actually do think having a literate and educated populace is an acceptable thing for a government to spend money on. (I'm just not very convinced the current way we're doing it is accomplishing that goal.)
>>Uh? And this price is already known? Before a long-term disposal "landfill" is operating?
The entire notion that we need a centralized waste disposal center (especially one that can last for millions of years) is misleading.
Dry Cask Storage is doing just fine, and if we ever get our collective heads out of our asses and start burning the 'highly energetic waste' as the fuel that it is, the problem goes away.
>>I, on the other hand, who has seen what a communist society is like, suspect that the failure was more due to the economy being planned five years in advance
No.
Communism is a complete and total failure - economically, socially, politically. The lies of the production rates of the factories was a symptom, not a cause.
Communism makes everyone equally poor, so the poor in a capitalist society are richer than all but the the ruling class in the communist countries.
>>Take a look at landfills: the consumer society is burning through raw materials faster than ever
So?
There's several key takeaway points for you: 1) Landfill space isn't an issue, at all. (Unless you're living on a small desert island.) 2) It's cheaper to make a new plastic bottle than to recycle it. 3) The parts of the oil spectrum that go into new plastic bottles might not be used otherwise, IIRC. 4) If it does becomes more expensive to make new, then the freeish markish will start recycling. 5) This is the reason why most scarcity doomsaying never pans out, because the freeish market can usually find workarounds for scarcity at a higher price point.
>>Except Communism was doomed to fail because it still relied on a currency accounting, and was scarcity-based, meaning that the citizens still consumed all resources at the old rate
I suspect the failure might have been due to people like you for criticizing the kulaks for eating their resources (bread) "at the old rate". Certainly, comrade, we should be able to legislate that they eat less, yes?
>>Really, it's just less hassle and fewer chances to screw up if it is implemented as what you call communism
>>I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
Typical environmentalist hokum. 20 years ago, they also said 1,000 species a year were going extinct, and yet we've only seen a handful of species in America go extinct since even the mid-1960s.
By the Year 2000, we were all supposed to have run out of fresh water, and be eating each other for dessert by now, since all agriculture is supposed to have collapsed.
Is it due to environmental laws? Well, partly. But environmental laws have also made it impossible to build new water reservoirs, or even worse, have been forcing us to flush 100,000 acre-feet of water into the Sacramento Delta (costing, according to wikipedia, 16,000 jobs) in order to keep an invasive fish species alive.
>>But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though.
>>So how many people can afford themselves a daily hospital stay with their daily pay? >>How many people can afford even their daily tuition with their daily pay? (there must be more of these, than ones who can afford daily hospital, but still?)
Hospitals and colleges are both examples of market failure.
If people actually had to pay for doctor's themselves, you'd quickly see more $30/visit clinics spring up (buy them in bulk to get a discount to $20!).
Likewise, how many people pay for their college education? Most just borrow against their future earnings and pay whatever their college wants to charge. $80k, $100k, $120k, what's the difference?
For anything the freeish market has been able to work its magic on, our purchasing power is much higher in the 2000s than ever before.
>>My father worked to help make the green revolution happen in India and Southeast Asia, and he had absolutely nothing to do with oil
The Green Revolution was built on the success of developing a fertilizer (and other chemicals) from petroleum. Fritz Haber and all that.
The GP wasn't talking about the "evil" oil companies doing it, but rather that if we magically lost all of our fossil fuels overnight, our current agro practices would all have to change, too.
>>When a company like Monsanto can turn around and sue a neighboring (small) farmer for copyright infringement when pollinating insects have absolutely no capacity for discriminating between GMO crops and non-GMO crops
To be fair, I used to think that, but apparently it wasn't a case about cross-pollination at all. It might be worth going back and looking at that case again.
>>In the Southwestern US (New Mexico, specifically), it is feasible to purchase 4-6 acres of land, which is much larger than the standard "house sized" block of anywhere from 1/4th to 1/2 an acre, for $75-100k USD. There are some houses in the mountains near here sitting on similar sized plots of land selling for $350k USD
In South Carolina, you can buy about a quarter of Sumter County, and get a pretty sweet house, too, for about that price. And the problem isn't with the land being unfertile, but rather too fertile. Trees grow up like weeds there.
>>Basically, it's not that we can't produce enough food to feed ourselves; it's that we're letting the bureaucrats and lawyers eat us out of house and home.
We do produce enough food to feed ourselves here in America. The problem with rising food costs has everything to do with ethanol, and nothing much to do with anything else.
>>also the average american household is swamped in debt and is therefore living vastly out of their means.
By debt do you mean credit card debt? "About a quarter [of Americans] have no credit cards, and an additional 30 percent or so pay off their balances every month. (Source: Federal Reserve Board survey of consumer finances, 2004)" About 3% of Americans are delinquent on their credit card bills.
So hardly "swamped in debt" and "living vastly out of their means".
If you mean taking a mortgage out, then you fundamentally don't understand how the system of debt works. If you're pulling in $4,000 a month but paying $1,000 on a mortage, you're doing well. The fact that you have a $200k loan doesn't mean you're "swamped" - you've just structured your income in such a way that works for you.
>>No one here is mentioning the fact that many industrialized nations have a steady population.
Actually, the growth rate in almost all industrialized nations is negative. Countries like France have been having to open the gates to immigrants to keep their population growing (and to pay for the entitlements for the old folks). Their growth rate has picked up in recent years, but still isn't enough to even replace the people they have now. And all the immigration is causing problems across Europe.
As you say, countries like Japan and Singapore have a real crisis on their hands with not having enough replacement babies.
Honestly, all the people worried about our growth rates being out of control should be working to provide the world with a middle class existence. Decent income, food, education (esp. for women) and boom - population bomb defused. (And don't give me any of that bullshit about the middle class lifestyle being unsustainable.)
>>Imagine a test tube filled with sugar and water. It represents all the resources and space on earth. Or just think of the earth, it works either way. >>Now place one bacteria in the test tube.
Now replace the bacteria with farmo-bacteria that actively cultivate new food sources. Your analogy begins to fail.
Now replace the farmo-bacteria with birth-control-farmo-bacteria that can limit their population growth. Your analogy then totally fails.
>>The depth of your wrongness is staggering.
The fact that you support Malthus's error even after he was proven wrong over hundreds of years is even more staggering. Malthus was an idiot, you're a fucking moron.
Food prices have not been growing "as the result of global warming" as TFA says. They've been growing due to idiot policies try are using our food supply for fuel - corn ethanol being the biggest culprit. Which even China has banned as being detrimental to human health and happiness. China.
Well, I guess indirectly it is AGW causing the problem, but as the result of shortsighted fucktards like yourself that can't think anything through all the way. The Law of Unintended Consequences always tends to bite hippie policies in the ass, but since their "sustainable" lifestyle is mainly subsidized by their parents, they don't ever feel the pain.
Lol, as soon as I read "Professor Mike Nelson, who spent four years as Senator Al Gore's science advise" all the credibility the article had vanished.
An Inconvenient Truth had so many anti-scientific mistakes with it (the Drowning Polar Bear Myth, the Global-warming-caused-Katrina Myth, and so forth), that even RealClimate.org's apologetic review of the movie had to admit them (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/).
There's all sorts of good sources of information about AGW out there, but Al Gore is not one of them.
>>Actually no, as a Libertarian I don't think you get neuclear power at all. These things only get built with subsides and loan grantees, that we don't support. The free market does not build these.
The subsidy rate for nuclear (20%) is lower than any other green power plant (averaging 50% or so).
>>Spend 5 minutes in a university bar and you'll see all the arts students parroting their lecture notes, or engineers acting like their still high school jocks, and so forth.
I agree with you, except the bit about engineers acting like jocks. (What?)
However, I think the university experience does have a large YMMV component to it. I found my college experience to be very valuable, and everything I'd hoped it to be (except for the whole collegiate sports thing - UC San Diego has no real tradition supporting sports teams). I met lots of smart people, got to interact with interesting professors that, outside of intro classes, were genuinely interested in developing your ability to think and solve problems, and learned the kinds of things about coding you can't pick up from a book. Was well worth the time and effort to get my Master's degree in CS, too.
>>I don't look down on people who've been to university, but I do approach anyone who has with caution.
I'm... somewhat the other way around. While the smartest coder I've ever worked with was a college dropout, a lot of people that don't go to college have bad coding habits that cause problems down the line in terms of bugs, readability, and maintainability. These sorts of things traditionally get beaten out of you in your intro classes in college.
>>I had a great philosophy lecturer that did encourage thinking, advised not to write notes and refused to give any reading material.
By contrast, I had the Churchlands for some philosophy classes, and they were dismissive and condescending to anyone that didn't agree with their point of view. Their goal was to create clones of themselves, I think, since they're so outnumbered in the philosophy field.
>>I'm having trouble seeing your cause-effect argument here. Many of the worst purges (as documented by Solzhenitsyn and others) happened well before the 1950s
Yes, the worse purges. But millions of people were murdered behind the iron curtain during and after the 1950s, too. If we'd had nukes and they hadn't, it's possible we could have pressured them to allow the warsaw pact countries to hold fair and open elections (as the USSR had promised at the end of WWII).
>>Yeah, it's pretty clear that were were much safer after we ran Charlie Chaplin out of the country.
He never appeared before the HUAC. Hoover acted unilaterally in that case.
>>It's always the peanut gallery yelling "Derpa derp she stoopid SHE SO STOOOPID!"
Right. On the NPR thread for this, I asked why people don't go derp derp every time Obama says something stupid. Which he does. A lot. He and Biden are as bad as GWB. But GWB gets labeled as an idiot, and Obama/Biden's mistakes and misspeak-ings get labeled as "funny gaffes".
You might say that Palin is getting all this attention because she defended her mistake on a technicality, but on a technicality she IS right. So it's just mindless hate.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I think I'll take their word for it; they are, after all, the people doing real climate science.
Which is why I called their review an apology for the movie. As pro-AGW people, they are inclined to ignore the errors, or minimize them. For example, even though RC.org itself says you can't blame Katrina on AGW (as you can read in the link I posted), they also make the baldfaced lie that Al Gore doesn't blame Katrina on AGW in the movie, even though the movie has a clip of him flying over the devastation, saying "I warned 'em! I warned 'em!"
My point was that even RC.org noticed errors in the movie, even if they'd rather have their teeth pulled out than say anything truly bad about AIC.
Right, I could have gone more in depth with their other pages on it. For example, RC.org says, as you say, "Nowhere does Gore state that Katrina was caused by global warming" - this is an outright lie. Not only did he make Katrina the poster child for global warming (literally), but in the movie there's a clip of him flying over the devastated city of New Orleans while Al Gore mutters, "I warned 'em! I warned 'em!"
The RC.org apology for Al Gore was actually quite sickening for a group dedicated to spreading truth about global warming, pooh-poohing the outright fabrication of the polar bear photograph used in the movie (the Polar Bears on the iceberg - remember?), which was taken right off shore in Alaska. The polar bears in question jumped off the iceberg and swam back to shore.
>>Conclusion: In sharp contrast to your wild statement, actual climate scientists found no significant errors in Gore's movie.
Which is why I called their review an apology for the movie. They weren't being honest. And even still they grudgingly found a number of errors in the movie, which they then tried to conveniently sweep under the rug.
>>Literate and educated populace is not a function of government, it's the function of a market
If you look back at the Scottish Miracle, it's quite clear that having an educated and literate populace not only is good for the country as a whole, but pays itself back seven-fold.
>>so now, that the market in USA does not require literate and educated populace (because nobody wants to hire in US)
The USA is still the largest economy in the world. It got that way through its education system, which, for all its faults, produces enough smart people and innovators and potentially-trainable employees for the market.
>>The real question is then: why the hell would you be against repeating the same success in health care/insurance and education?
Um. I'm not?
Explaining why the world is a certain way doesn't mean condoning it. Our medical system is fucked three ways from Friday.
As far as college goes, I actually do think having a literate and educated populace is an acceptable thing for a government to spend money on. (I'm just not very convinced the current way we're doing it is accomplishing that goal.)
>>Biofuels are a red herring.
They may not be all of the story, but they're the largest part of it. The IMF, World Food Bank, etc. all concur on this issue.
A study at Purdue says about 66% of all food price inflation is due to Biofuels (http://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/ID/ID-346-W.pdf).
So... yeah. TFA is full of shit.
>>Err, perhaps petroleum contributed to the process of development, but Fertilizer is not petroleum based
Awesome - you got to learn something today!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
>>Uh? And this price is already known? Before a long-term disposal "landfill" is operating?
The entire notion that we need a centralized waste disposal center (especially one that can last for millions of years) is misleading.
Dry Cask Storage is doing just fine, and if we ever get our collective heads out of our asses and start burning the 'highly energetic waste' as the fuel that it is, the problem goes away.
>>I, on the other hand, who has seen what a communist society is like, suspect that the failure was more due to the economy being planned five years in advance
No.
Communism is a complete and total failure - economically, socially, politically. The lies of the production rates of the factories was a symptom, not a cause.
Communism makes everyone equally poor, so the poor in a capitalist society are richer than all but the the ruling class in the communist countries.
>>Take a look at landfills: the consumer society is burning through raw materials faster than ever
So?
There's several key takeaway points for you:
1) Landfill space isn't an issue, at all. (Unless you're living on a small desert island.)
2) It's cheaper to make a new plastic bottle than to recycle it.
3) The parts of the oil spectrum that go into new plastic bottles might not be used otherwise, IIRC.
4) If it does becomes more expensive to make new, then the freeish markish will start recycling.
5) This is the reason why most scarcity doomsaying never pans out, because the freeish market can usually find workarounds for scarcity at a higher price point.
>>That is criminal
Why? Is it illegal to pay people more money in certain countries now?
>>The disparity in wages between different countries for what is essentially the same work can not continue indefinitely.
What is the mechanism that will rectify this? Zambian miners forming a union and demanding jobs at the Glory Hole in Alaska?
>>Except Communism was doomed to fail because it still relied on a currency accounting, and was scarcity-based, meaning that the citizens still consumed all resources at the old rate
I suspect the failure might have been due to people like you for criticizing the kulaks for eating their resources (bread) "at the old rate". Certainly, comrade, we should be able to legislate that they eat less, yes?
>>Really, it's just less hassle and fewer chances to screw up if it is implemented as what you call communism
Hey, what could go wrong, right comrade?
>>I can recall reading about 20 years ago that we had already passed the point where it was possible to give everyone on Earth the same standard of living as the average American.
Typical environmentalist hokum. 20 years ago, they also said 1,000 species a year were going extinct, and yet we've only seen a handful of species in America go extinct since even the mid-1960s.
By the Year 2000, we were all supposed to have run out of fresh water, and be eating each other for dessert by now, since all agriculture is supposed to have collapsed.
Is it due to environmental laws? Well, partly. But environmental laws have also made it impossible to build new water reservoirs, or even worse, have been forcing us to flush 100,000 acre-feet of water into the Sacramento Delta (costing, according to wikipedia, 16,000 jobs) in order to keep an invasive fish species alive.
>>But standard of living really is a proxy for resource consumption and not a very good one because as technology advances it can produce more from less. Eventually you reach a wall though.
Silicon is cheap and effectively limitless.
>>So how many people can afford themselves a daily hospital stay with their daily pay?
>>How many people can afford even their daily tuition with their daily pay? (there must be more of these, than ones who can afford daily hospital, but still?)
Hospitals and colleges are both examples of market failure.
If people actually had to pay for doctor's themselves, you'd quickly see more $30/visit clinics spring up (buy them in bulk to get a discount to $20!).
Likewise, how many people pay for their college education? Most just borrow against their future earnings and pay whatever their college wants to charge. $80k, $100k, $120k, what's the difference?
For anything the freeish market has been able to work its magic on, our purchasing power is much higher in the 2000s than ever before.
>>My father worked to help make the green revolution happen in India and Southeast Asia, and he had absolutely nothing to do with oil
The Green Revolution was built on the success of developing a fertilizer (and other chemicals) from petroleum. Fritz Haber and all that.
The GP wasn't talking about the "evil" oil companies doing it, but rather that if we magically lost all of our fossil fuels overnight, our current agro practices would all have to change, too.
>>When a company like Monsanto can turn around and sue a neighboring (small) farmer for copyright infringement when pollinating insects have absolutely no capacity for discriminating between GMO crops and non-GMO crops
To be fair, I used to think that, but apparently it wasn't a case about cross-pollination at all. It might be worth going back and looking at that case again.
>>In the Southwestern US (New Mexico, specifically), it is feasible to purchase 4-6 acres of land, which is much larger than the standard "house sized" block of anywhere from 1/4th to 1/2 an acre, for $75-100k USD. There are some houses in the mountains near here sitting on similar sized plots of land selling for $350k USD
In South Carolina, you can buy about a quarter of Sumter County, and get a pretty sweet house, too, for about that price. And the problem isn't with the land being unfertile, but rather too fertile. Trees grow up like weeds there.
>>Basically, it's not that we can't produce enough food to feed ourselves; it's that we're letting the bureaucrats and lawyers eat us out of house and home.
We do produce enough food to feed ourselves here in America. The problem with rising food costs has everything to do with ethanol, and nothing much to do with anything else.
>>also the average american household is swamped in debt and is therefore living vastly out of their means.
By debt do you mean credit card debt? "About a quarter [of Americans] have no credit cards, and an additional 30 percent or so pay off their balances every month. (Source: Federal Reserve Board survey of consumer finances, 2004)" About 3% of Americans are delinquent on their credit card bills.
So hardly "swamped in debt" and "living vastly out of their means".
If you mean taking a mortgage out, then you fundamentally don't understand how the system of debt works. If you're pulling in $4,000 a month but paying $1,000 on a mortage, you're doing well. The fact that you have a $200k loan doesn't mean you're "swamped" - you've just structured your income in such a way that works for you.
>>No one here is mentioning the fact that many industrialized nations have a steady population.
Actually, the growth rate in almost all industrialized nations is negative. Countries like France have been having to open the gates to immigrants to keep their population growing (and to pay for the entitlements for the old folks). Their growth rate has picked up in recent years, but still isn't enough to even replace the people they have now. And all the immigration is causing problems across Europe.
As you say, countries like Japan and Singapore have a real crisis on their hands with not having enough replacement babies.
Honestly, all the people worried about our growth rates being out of control should be working to provide the world with a middle class existence. Decent income, food, education (esp. for women) and boom - population bomb defused. (And don't give me any of that bullshit about the middle class lifestyle being unsustainable.)
>>Imagine a test tube filled with sugar and water. It represents all the resources and space on earth. Or just think of the earth, it works either way.
>>Now place one bacteria in the test tube.
Now replace the bacteria with farmo-bacteria that actively cultivate new food sources. Your analogy begins to fail.
Now replace the farmo-bacteria with birth-control-farmo-bacteria that can limit their population growth. Your analogy then totally fails.
>>The depth of your wrongness is staggering.
The fact that you support Malthus's error even after he was proven wrong over hundreds of years is even more staggering. Malthus was an idiot, you're a fucking moron.
Food prices have not been growing "as the result of global warming" as TFA says. They've been growing due to idiot policies try are using our food supply for fuel - corn ethanol being the biggest culprit. Which even China has banned as being detrimental to human health and happiness. China.
Well, I guess indirectly it is AGW causing the problem, but as the result of shortsighted fucktards like yourself that can't think anything through all the way. The Law of Unintended Consequences always tends to bite hippie policies in the ass, but since their "sustainable" lifestyle is mainly subsidized by their parents, they don't ever feel the pain.
Lol, as soon as I read "Professor Mike Nelson, who spent four years as Senator Al Gore's science advise" all the credibility the article had vanished.
An Inconvenient Truth had so many anti-scientific mistakes with it (the Drowning Polar Bear Myth, the Global-warming-caused-Katrina Myth, and so forth), that even RealClimate.org's apologetic review of the movie had to admit them (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie/).
There's all sorts of good sources of information about AGW out there, but Al Gore is not one of them.
Decomissioning is actually included in the bill for nuclear power, as is waste disposal.
Are you honestly so clueless about how radiation works, "AtomicJake" that you don't see the idiocy about worrying about waste for 10 million years?
Hint: google this thing called "half-life" and its relationship to radioactivity.
>>Actually no, as a Libertarian I don't think you get neuclear power at all. These things only get built with subsides and loan grantees, that we don't support. The free market does not build these.
The subsidy rate for nuclear (20%) is lower than any other green power plant (averaging 50% or so).
The Soviets didn't have Admiral Hyman Rickover.
He's the main reason why the USN has had such a good safety record.
>>Spend 5 minutes in a university bar and you'll see all the arts students parroting their lecture notes, or engineers acting like their still high school jocks, and so forth.
I agree with you, except the bit about engineers acting like jocks. (What?)
However, I think the university experience does have a large YMMV component to it. I found my college experience to be very valuable, and everything I'd hoped it to be (except for the whole collegiate sports thing - UC San Diego has no real tradition supporting sports teams). I met lots of smart people, got to interact with interesting professors that, outside of intro classes, were genuinely interested in developing your ability to think and solve problems, and learned the kinds of things about coding you can't pick up from a book. Was well worth the time and effort to get my Master's degree in CS, too.
>>I don't look down on people who've been to university, but I do approach anyone who has with caution.
I'm... somewhat the other way around. While the smartest coder I've ever worked with was a college dropout, a lot of people that don't go to college have bad coding habits that cause problems down the line in terms of bugs, readability, and maintainability. These sorts of things traditionally get beaten out of you in your intro classes in college.
>>I had a great philosophy lecturer that did encourage thinking, advised not to write notes and refused to give any reading material.
By contrast, I had the Churchlands for some philosophy classes, and they were dismissive and condescending to anyone that didn't agree with their point of view. Their goal was to create clones of themselves, I think, since they're so outnumbered in the philosophy field.
>>I'm having trouble seeing your cause-effect argument here. Many of the worst purges (as documented by Solzhenitsyn and others) happened well before the 1950s
Yes, the worse purges. But millions of people were murdered behind the iron curtain during and after the 1950s, too. If we'd had nukes and they hadn't, it's possible we could have pressured them to allow the warsaw pact countries to hold fair and open elections (as the USSR had promised at the end of WWII).
>>Yeah, it's pretty clear that were were much safer after we ran Charlie Chaplin out of the country.
He never appeared before the HUAC. Hoover acted unilaterally in that case.
>>Then don't vote for them. Until they've been convicted of a crime, they have every right to run for office, same as you do.
Harry Dexter White was in an unelected position, and worked furiously (and without pay) at the behest of his masters in the USSR.
To put it in modern terms, it's like allowing someone who is an admitted member of Al Qaeda to work in the secret service.
>>It's always the peanut gallery yelling "Derpa derp she stoopid SHE SO STOOOPID!"
Right. On the NPR thread for this, I asked why people don't go derp derp every time Obama says something stupid. Which he does. A lot. He and Biden are as bad as GWB. But GWB gets labeled as an idiot, and Obama/Biden's mistakes and misspeak-ings get labeled as "funny gaffes".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG7VSt0_VcU
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/281640/OBAMA-WESTMINSTER-ABBEY-GUESTBOOK.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws
Plenty more if you Google for them.
You might say that Palin is getting all this attention because she defended her mistake on a technicality, but on a technicality she IS right. So it's just mindless hate.