Actually most studies done by respected sources (PEW, Dartmouth College, etc) have shown a strong liberal tendency in the media. They have shown that 'conservative' viewpoints are often treated as the 'minority view' and liberal views treated as the norm, regardless of actual statistics. A perfect case in point is the current health care debate where opponents are often treated as the minority even though the current polls shown them as being 55% of the population.
I believe the last PEW study that plotted news shows and organizations along a ideological line had ABC news just slightly left of center, Fox about the same distance right of center with almost all other news organizations far to the left of ABC (that was for their news broadcasts, NOT their opinion shows).
Other forms of bias also are quite normal in standard media reporting, such as the 'name that party' game in which Republicans at any level from dog catcher to Senator, when caught misbehaving are prominently announced as such, usually in the headlines themselves, while it's not unusual for Democrats to just be referred to by their office title and not party affiliation. The AP has been hounded for this practice numerous times.
Another prominent practice is the use of the 'conservative' label for anyone who is even slightly right leaning. Speakers and groups that are right leaning are almost always identified as such, even at times when they are not discussing a political topic, while decidedly left leaning groups are rarely identified as 'liberal'. It's a tried and true technique to marginalize a viewpoint.
While the political views of those in control of the money is an important factor nothing outweighs the bias of those presenting the news directly to the viewer/reader and with over 80% of reporters and news producers listing themselves as liberal it is impossible to not have a bias. It doesn't even have to be intentional but when your entire office has a similar ideology, who is there to act as a counter balance? To make you question certain assumptions? To view things from another perspective?
So, following your logic, ALL meaningful research in the world can only be done in the US through Federal funding so ANY research denied funding should be held against Bush (since no other President ever denied anyone anything in the far left world you seem to exist in), even if most treatments resulting from that research are only in the realm of pure hypotheticals with no proof of viability, even in countries that have no such 'ban'.
And how does the fact that Bush was actually the first President to ALLOW ANY federal funding for stem cell research, overriding an actual ban from the Clinton years (that was the leader of the US from the 'before time', that dark mysterious past from which you, and most media organizations, apparently have no records) fit into your narrative?
Only in far left academia, and the MSM can a person be made the poster boy for anti-stem cells by actually giving hundred of millions in new funding to reseach.
Companies run unprofitable business ventures all the time for one reason or another. From video game consoles, to racing teams to movie production companies and everything in between. When taken as an isolated companies many of these would look like stupid business decisions but when added into an entire conglomerate of companies the losing member may in fact be providing a valuble service.
For example, it's estimated Volkswagon loses about half a million on every Bugatti Veyron sold but they still sell them because it was a way of testing certain concepts and of generating press. It was never meant to make a profit and never will. In the same way that some movies are made simply because companies need something to write off their profits against.
And some companies exist solely to create a footprint in a market for their parent companies. Who cares if one of your companies makes a profit if it allows you to meet resedential requirements for other branches of your company to bid on contracts. So any additional cost of doing business (carbon taxes) are seen as small pittance to pay if it allows you the rights to bid on government contracts with your other branches.
As for exports, of the top 5 exports coutries for the US, Australia isn't even on there (although they are working on possibly removing their cap and trade systems anyway) and the only European nation is Germany (#5) (and reports from Germany say cap and trade has only managed to make the Companies richer as they game the system and then increase prices to consumers).
Canada is #1 by a mile and the Dems have already done enough to hurt that export market with the "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill. Mexico is #2 and they have openly said they are willing to look into a cap and trade system but at the cost of other nations giving them grants and loans in order to implement it.
You might not "labor under the assumption that a tax like this one is supposed to result in a net increase in jobs" but that is how it is being sold to the public. Just last night an official white house spokesman was on TV saying that the cap and trade system was fundementally a jobs program.
You fail to take into account that large corporations do not require all branches to make a profit to still have a solid balance sheet. They will often sacrifice profits simply to maintain a presence in a market for other purposes. An example for this type of business model would be the gaming industry, where the standard practice is to sell hardware at a loss in order to get your system as widely distributed as possible in the hopes that software liscenses will cover your expenditures.
So if 2 facilities produce sprockets and make a $10 profit per ton of CO2 produced, the local company with no other outside financing cannot afford to spend $10/ton for the credits. The multinational company, can easily spend the $10, or even $11 or $12 if they have a belief that simply having that sprocket plant in the US is of some benefit to the company as a whole.
And as for companies that deal in international markets, forget about that poor US company being able to compete with anyone when they automaticallty have a additional expense on their books that no one else has simply because of this carbon fee.
Some countries that have tried a form of cap and trade have already begun, or have completely dismantled the programs, and with good reason. A recent study in Spain found that for every green job created through these type of government programs 2.2 jobs were lost. Not to mention that their energy costs have gone up 31% under that system.
Striving to make the air clearer or rivers cleaner is a good thing but the use of regressive tax systems like cap and trade does little to actually do either and simply results in a lot more vacant buildings as companies move overseas and people lose their jobs.
How does single 'family' factory compete with a large multinational for these rights?
If all their wealth is being generated by local production facilities that will now all have an added expense to operate how can they hope to compete with a company that has offshore facilities that they can easily use to offset the expenses.
You don't have to reduce emissions anywhere but on paper to make a profit.
There have already been cases in other cap and trade systems where companies actually ramped up CO2 output prior to adoption of the system just to set a high level mark for cap purposes. Then after the system is implemented they just return to normal and sell of their excess credits.
In some cases companies were set up for the sole purpose of being a co2 producer just to generate credits for sale.
It's much the same as the carbon offset scam in which offset companies take in huge amounts of money and then give a fraction to already existing projects.
Or the more Slashdot friendly patent infringement scammers whose companies do nothing but buy up patents with no intention of ever producing a product of any kind just so that they can sue people for usage fees.
The end result is nothing of value is added to the systems in question and a few more shady busines people get rich.
Or he could be assuming that the use of private transportation might be a bit more limited in a country with a much higher population density and roads that were originally build to handle foot and horse traffic.
Of course the US could try and duplicate the UK method of driving control by just making it so unbearable to drive anything yourself that most people give up and go public and even when they choose to get their own car they only practical solution is a something in the size of a Ford Focus (hence the abundance of very nice small cars in Europe).
Just because they don't use gas doesn't mean they wouldn't if they could. Extremely inflated car costs, horrendously small roads and obscene gas and vehicle taxes pretty much ensure a lower useage rate.
Most studies that compare healthcare systems, such as the most recent UN study from last year that was used by everyone, put large weights on the payment methods used. So systems like Canada's, France's or Britain's, which are 'universal' but could have you waiting over a year for a standard operation or several months for a simple test are rated higher than the US because user pays systems are automatically eliminated from ever being able to get into the top ten.
As for child mortality rates, the calculations completly ignore the excessively high abortion rates in some of those third world countries. It's much easier to lower your child mortality when you actually kill off the fetus before they are born, a common practice in places like Cuba when a defect is found.
And life expectantcy has a lot more to do with lifestyle than healthcare. If you live in a coutry where excess is not only practiced by many but applauded then having cheaper access to a family doctor (something that also has a multi-year waiting list in many places up here in Canada) is not really going to help you. Poor eating habits, excercise routines and the like are not something that universal healthcare would change, unless you start to mandate and tax those to compel your fellow citizens to behave properly.
In fact, Americans have access to some of the best medical sytems in the world; sure the insurance system needs a complete overhaul, but universal is not necessarily the best way to go. Many of the top ranked 'universal' coutries have systems that are just a few years away from bankruptcy or severe cutbacks in services. Medical tourism is hardly heard of in the US but is a common practice in other coutries.
I've had friends who were told by their doctors that the best way for them to get treatment for their particular ailments was to drive south across the border because the waitlists here would mean they would be living in pain for months whereas if they just drove the NY state or Vermont they could get treatment within a week. I had a neighbor who instead of the one knee replacement she required had to have two done because of the year and a half wait but lucky for her according to the official Government of Ontario wait times she would only have to wait between 200 and 320 days if her injury were to re-occur.
Bascially in a universal healthcare system, the end result is a lowest common denominator driven approach to healthcare. If your population is small enough or concentrated enough than that can be fine but if it is spread out or too large (both would apply to the US) then choices have to be made as to where those limited resources go and when the government is the one making those decisions politics, more often than practicality plays a part. Just a few years ago all the privately owned medical testing clinics here in Ontario were forced to shutdown because of a perceived inequality. So just because a person with the available cash could pay a few hundred for a MRI or catscan to be done within a week and others had to rely on the many months of backlogs at the hospitals the Liberals made sure to balance everything out by closing all the clinics. Universal healthcare at it's finest.
47 - 20 (districts which allowed large numbers of felons to vote even with the lists) = 27
So only 27 districts out of 67 enforced the rules as set out by the elections board and even some of those allowed some suspect voting or allowed voting of people who were listed when a clear mismatch was identified.
To even lessen the impact of the lists, thousands of people on the lists were already cleared after following the appeal process, only 108 of the appeals were not cleared pre-election.
Ok, in the 30 seconds I googled I found a cached Palm Beach Post artcile at Common Dreams that mentions that 20 of the 67 districts outright ignored the list (including Palm Beach itself) and also according to the Post and Miami Herald between 5000 and 6500 felons did in fact vote illegally in at least 20 other districts in the the state (can't find a cached version of those articles, just several other sites referencing the issue such as this paper on overall disenfranchisment.
And as for the poll closing, even the Wiki page has the fact that the major networks all announced poll closing times to be 1 hour earlier that they actually were in the heavy Republican Pan Handle.
Few Florida counties even bothered to pay attention to those felons lists because of the fuss that had been kicked up over them in the days prior to the election so there is the possibility that more votes were generated by those lists as true felons were not being denied.
And for those that were turned away, I would think various networks announcing that polling stations were closed, an hour before they actually were in the heavily Republican pan handle, would easily make up the difference.
The election was close, both sides made mistakes, but Bush won Florida, plain and simple.
If you still want to blame someone blame the Democrats who designed the butterfly ballot. That, more than anything decided the final outcome.
I never said they've never made anything but temperory jobs but jobs created under this type of make-work bill are almost by definition temporary. Either that or the government grows to a point of unsustainability (which it pretty much already has).
Anyone with an iota of common sense, thus excluding you apparently, would understand that since the government essentially only creates income through taxation, it cannot create a sustainable system in which the only people it's taxing are in fact it's own employees. Every person working directly for the government is a drain on the tax system, unless you are taxing that employee at 100%, so therefore increasing the size of government, beyond essential services, is a net loss for the system as a whole.
Even people indirectly employed by these type of projects, in the end, can cause more problems than solutions. If you go with Obama's assumption that massive spending on infrastruture improvements will stimulate the economy you just need to look 3 years down the road when these projects come to a close to ask yourself what will all these new tradespeople do now? By creating an artificial demand the government creates a ticking timebomb in the market place that either comes to a dramatic end at some point in the future (unless you happen to get a job on the Big Dig) or the government is forced to continually come up with more make-work projects to keep the market artifically high, thus creating unecessary expenditures. It's the same type of interference that helped creating the housing bubble.
The best thing the government can do is get out of the way of small to medium size business who have a much better track record at creating full time employment. And no, that does not exclude the concept of moving some projects ahead of schedule to help generate a few extra dollars in the economy, but it does mean that those types of projects still have to be well timed to prevent an artifical boom and that reliance on those projects to save the economy is foolhardy, at best.
The government is a very inefficient way to create jobs and most jobs it creates are temporary at best. At worst they can create an artifical job market that when the projects are completed, leads to higher unemployment as people are now trained for jobs that no longer exist.
Buying your way out of a recession, as many, if not most, ecomomist have come forward and said, at best leads to a temporary bump but will more than likely lead to an extended downturn in the economy. Spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave is no way to stimulate the economy; it's just a way to ensure a huge debt load.
That's not to say the government shouldn't play a huge role in the recovery, but they should be background players, creating oppourtunities for small businesses to grow (lower taxes on small/independant business, job grants, etc...).
And as for Keynesian economic theory. It was Keynes himself who suggested that Hoover's tax increases (much the same as Obama's proposed corporate and income tax increase) actually signifigantly lengthened the depression.
That claim has been debunked time and time again but like most of the mythy of Obama is still put forward as fact by the faithful.
While Obama did raise a larger than normal amount through small grassroots donations, which is to be expected since he raised more money than anyone else, the largest portion of his donations still came from the same pool of wealthy contributors as every other Democrat candidate. And while he avoided PACs he did take contributions from those same industries in larger numbers than McCain (just not officially from a PAC)
While 45% of his donations did fall into the under $200 category (generally a good measurement of grassroots giving) you have to remember that Kerry got 37% and Bush 31% in that way, and as far as I'm aware, they were at least using some form of validation on their donation system, unlike Obama's system which according to credit systems experts, not only didn't use any form of validation but had to actively disable those validations that are on by default in almost all available credit card services.
Almost universally the independant estimates are, as I've said, all in the neighbourhood of 800k -1.2m. The 1.8m number is the very definition of a PC value because it is almost entirely derived from beurocrats and people who want to push the "largest gathering ever" narrative with no regard to actual analysis of the data at hand.
I personally have no stake in whatever the real number was, I was just using this as an example of how fiction can become truth using circular verification, as was the case in the actual post.
Same type of 'fact checking' happened with the Obama inauguration estimate.
1) News papers reported an estimate of 2 million people.
2) Parks service (which stopped counting crowds after the Million Man March a few years back after their analysis was way below the politically correct estimate) quotes the newspapers.
3)When asked for verification of their numbers the newspaper points to the Parks Services numbers.
Most independant analysis of satellite photographs pegs the number at somewhere between 800k-1.2m ; including estimates for people in transit. Still a very impressive number but nowhere near the hyped multimillions the press had been pushing for weeks so essentially ignored.
The Washington Post did do a follow up piece which exposes some of the problems (after it was pointed out to them that they were the Parks Services source for the 1.8 figure in the first place) but even though they still headline the 1.8m figure it doesn't seem any of their other sources come withing 500k of that number.
In the new age of media, speed of data, and it's ability to match expectations, sadly far outweigh accuracy.
Vietnam had little to do with the Vietnamese miltary prowess, as they lost pretty much ever confrontation with American forces, but much more to do with a lack of political will Stateside.
Artifical restrictions placed on the military with regards to targetting or weapons use by a the various branches of government back home had a lot more to do with the loss than anything the Vietnamese did, unless you include their efforts to pump up the anti-war crowd which helped make the beurocrats more hesitant about allowing the military to take the required actions to achieve victory.
Yeah, it's amazing this claim gets repeated so much seeing every study, both by independant groups and by most journails schools have consitantly put Fox's news coverage right in the middle of the left/right scale. ABC News is the only other news agency I've seen that routinely scores pretty close to even. But then again, when you are used to watching or reading news sources that are generally rated on the far left of the scale then anyone close to the center is seen as "too conservative".
As for Al-Jazeera, any news organization that holds a birthday celebration for a man who shoots a father in front of his 4 year old child and then proceeds to bash her head in with his rifle cannot even pretend to be unbias.
Yeah, but most of those people don't face the possability of financial ruin everytime they simply talk to a 'client'.
Miss something on a diagnosis = lawsuit Catch something on a diagnosis = lawsuit Person dies during risky surgery = lawsuit
You may be the nicest person in the world who only wants to help others but the financial risks of being a doctor as well as the pressure of making life and death decisions, often in very short timelines, on a daily basis can add a lot of stress to a persons life, and for most people financial compensation is what they look at to balance that stress.
Or for that matter he could have simply requested the converter credit anytime in the last year before they ran out of cash and cost him nothing.
I live in Canada and with all the notices on almost every American station there was no way I could avoid knowing about the switch last year. The way they've been beating it into people I almost ordered a converter box.
And as some comedian once pointed out: in the US, at least, if you did succeed in killing all the lawyers you couldn't even be convicted of a crime - there would be a lack of adequate representation in court.
The main reason he survived Wright, Ayers, Rezko, and now possibly Blago is the shown quite clearly in your earlier post
Obama said he did not meet with him, and hasn't.
That is about the extent most major news outlets have investigated all these relationships. Here's the general game plan for most of these news stories over the last year:
A scandal breaks involving an Obama associate:
Step 1: Ask Obama (makes sense - go to the source first) Step 2: Accept Obama's answer, even when facts indicate the contrary, without question. Step 3: Well, step 2 was enough, stop reporting.
In none of the above mentioned cases has Obama's original answer stood for more than a day but no one ever follows up on it. Rezco was just a client of his law firm, Ayers was a guy from the neighbourhood, Wright was a racist but only on days Obama wasn't present. When the facts came out later no one bothered to report them or question why Obama's original answers were so far removed from the truth as to be an outright lie.
On Blago he's already gone from no one had any contact to, well maybe some did but he'll get back to us on who. Of course it didn't help his case that his own top advisors were saying there was high level contact at the same time he's giving a prepared statement saying the exact opposite.
Most of the flagged questions were very general and in no way implied any wrongdoing on Obama's part; they merely mentioned Blago.
An example question:
"In light of the recent corruption scandals (Blagojevich, Rangel, Jefferson, Stevens, etc) that have dominated the political scene,is there any ethics legislation being crafted to actually curb corruption and prevent another wave of nixonian cynicism?"
Slashdot Mirror
Actually most studies done by respected sources (PEW, Dartmouth College, etc) have shown a strong liberal tendency in the media. They have shown that 'conservative' viewpoints are often treated as the 'minority view' and liberal views treated as the norm, regardless of actual statistics. A perfect case in point is the current health care debate where opponents are often treated as the minority even though the current polls shown them as being 55% of the population.
I believe the last PEW study that plotted news shows and organizations along a ideological line had ABC news just slightly left of center, Fox about the same distance right of center with almost all other news organizations far to the left of ABC (that was for their news broadcasts, NOT their opinion shows).
Other forms of bias also are quite normal in standard media reporting, such as the 'name that party' game in which Republicans at any level from dog catcher to Senator, when caught misbehaving are prominently announced as such, usually in the headlines themselves, while it's not unusual for Democrats to just be referred to by their office title and not party affiliation. The AP has been hounded for this practice numerous times.
Another prominent practice is the use of the 'conservative' label for anyone who is even slightly right leaning. Speakers and groups that are right leaning are almost always identified as such, even at times when they are not discussing a political topic, while decidedly left leaning groups are rarely identified as 'liberal'. It's a tried and true technique to marginalize a viewpoint.
While the political views of those in control of the money is an important factor nothing outweighs the bias of those presenting the news directly to the viewer/reader and with over 80% of reporters and news producers listing themselves as liberal it is impossible to not have a bias. It doesn't even have to be intentional but when your entire office has a similar ideology, who is there to act as a counter balance? To make you question certain assumptions? To view things from another perspective?
So, following your logic, ALL meaningful research in the world can only be done in the US through Federal funding so ANY research denied funding should be held against Bush (since no other President ever denied anyone anything in the far left world you seem to exist in), even if most treatments resulting from that research are only in the realm of pure hypotheticals with no proof of viability, even in countries that have no such 'ban'.
And how does the fact that Bush was actually the first President to ALLOW ANY federal funding for stem cell research, overriding an actual ban from the Clinton years (that was the leader of the US from the 'before time', that dark mysterious past from which you, and most media organizations, apparently have no records) fit into your narrative?
Only in far left academia, and the MSM can a person be made the poster boy for anti-stem cells by actually giving hundred of millions in new funding to reseach.
Companies run unprofitable business ventures all the time for one reason or another. From video game consoles, to racing teams to movie production companies and everything in between. When taken as an isolated companies many of these would look like stupid business decisions but when added into an entire conglomerate of companies the losing member may in fact be providing a valuble service.
For example, it's estimated Volkswagon loses about half a million on every Bugatti Veyron sold but they still sell them because it was a way of testing certain concepts and of generating press. It was never meant to make a profit and never will. In the same way that some movies are made simply because companies need something to write off their profits against.
And some companies exist solely to create a footprint in a market for their parent companies. Who cares if one of your companies makes a profit if it allows you to meet resedential requirements for other branches of your company to bid on contracts. So any additional cost of doing business (carbon taxes) are seen as small pittance to pay if it allows you the rights to bid on government contracts with your other branches.
As for exports, of the top 5 exports coutries for the US, Australia isn't even on there (although they are working on possibly removing their cap and trade systems anyway) and the only European nation is Germany (#5) (and reports from Germany say cap and trade has only managed to make the Companies richer as they game the system and then increase prices to consumers).
Canada is #1 by a mile and the Dems have already done enough to hurt that export market with the "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill. Mexico is #2 and they have openly said they are willing to look into a cap and trade system but at the cost of other nations giving them grants and loans in order to implement it.
You might not "labor under the assumption that a tax like this one is supposed to result in a net increase in jobs" but that is how it is being sold to the public. Just last night an official white house spokesman was on TV saying that the cap and trade system was fundementally a jobs program.
You fail to take into account that large corporations do not require all branches to make a profit to still have a solid balance sheet. They will often sacrifice profits simply to maintain a presence in a market for other purposes. An example for this type of business model would be the gaming industry, where the standard practice is to sell hardware at a loss in order to get your system as widely distributed as possible in the hopes that software liscenses will cover your expenditures.
So if 2 facilities produce sprockets and make a $10 profit per ton of CO2 produced, the local company with no other outside financing cannot afford to spend $10/ton for the credits. The multinational company, can easily spend the $10, or even $11 or $12 if they have a belief that simply having that sprocket plant in the US is of some benefit to the company as a whole.
And as for companies that deal in international markets, forget about that poor US company being able to compete with anyone when they automaticallty have a additional expense on their books that no one else has simply because of this carbon fee.
Some countries that have tried a form of cap and trade have already begun, or have completely dismantled the programs, and with good reason. A recent study in Spain found that for every green job created through these type of government programs 2.2 jobs were lost. Not to mention that their energy costs have gone up 31% under that system.
Striving to make the air clearer or rivers cleaner is a good thing but the use of regressive tax systems like cap and trade does little to actually do either and simply results in a lot more vacant buildings as companies move overseas and people lose their jobs.
Just a question about the auction method.
How does single 'family' factory compete with a large multinational for these rights?
If all their wealth is being generated by local production facilities that will now all have an added expense to operate how can they hope to compete with a company that has offshore facilities that they can easily use to offset the expenses.
You don't have to reduce emissions anywhere but on paper to make a profit.
There have already been cases in other cap and trade systems where companies actually ramped up CO2 output prior to adoption of the system just to set a high level mark for cap purposes. Then after the system is implemented they just return to normal and sell of their excess credits.
In some cases companies were set up for the sole purpose of being a co2 producer just to generate credits for sale.
It's much the same as the carbon offset scam in which offset companies take in huge amounts of money and then give a fraction to already existing projects.
Or the more Slashdot friendly patent infringement scammers whose companies do nothing but buy up patents with no intention of ever producing a product of any kind just so that they can sue people for usage fees.
The end result is nothing of value is added to the systems in question and a few more shady busines people get rich.
Or he could be assuming that the use of private transportation might be a bit more limited in a country with a much higher population density and roads that were originally build to handle foot and horse traffic.
Of course the US could try and duplicate the UK method of driving control by just making it so unbearable to drive anything yourself that most people give up and go public and even when they choose to get their own car they only practical solution is a something in the size of a Ford Focus (hence the abundance of very nice small cars in Europe).
Just because they don't use gas doesn't mean they wouldn't if they could. Extremely inflated car costs, horrendously small roads and obscene gas and vehicle taxes pretty much ensure a lower useage rate.
Most studies that compare healthcare systems, such as the most recent UN study from last year that was used by everyone, put large weights on the payment methods used. So systems like Canada's, France's or Britain's, which are 'universal' but could have you waiting over a year for a standard operation or several months for a simple test are rated higher than the US because user pays systems are automatically eliminated from ever being able to get into the top ten.
As for child mortality rates, the calculations completly ignore the excessively high abortion rates in some of those third world countries. It's much easier to lower your child mortality when you actually kill off the fetus before they are born, a common practice in places like Cuba when a defect is found.
And life expectantcy has a lot more to do with lifestyle than healthcare. If you live in a coutry where excess is not only practiced by many but applauded then having cheaper access to a family doctor (something that also has a multi-year waiting list in many places up here in Canada) is not really going to help you. Poor eating habits, excercise routines and the like are not something that universal healthcare would change, unless you start to mandate and tax those to compel your fellow citizens to behave properly.
In fact, Americans have access to some of the best medical sytems in the world; sure the insurance system needs a complete overhaul, but universal is not necessarily the best way to go. Many of the top ranked 'universal' coutries have systems that are just a few years away from bankruptcy or severe cutbacks in services. Medical tourism is hardly heard of in the US but is a common practice in other coutries.
I've had friends who were told by their doctors that the best way for them to get treatment for their particular ailments was to drive south across the border because the waitlists here would mean they would be living in pain for months whereas if they just drove the NY state or Vermont they could get treatment within a week. I had a neighbor who instead of the one knee replacement she required had to have two done because of the year and a half wait but lucky for her according to the official Government of Ontario wait times she would only have to wait between 200 and 320 days if her injury were to re-occur.
Bascially in a universal healthcare system, the end result is a lowest common denominator driven approach to healthcare. If your population is small enough or concentrated enough than that can be fine but if it is spread out or too large (both would apply to the US) then choices have to be made as to where those limited resources go and when the government is the one making those decisions politics, more often than practicality plays a part. Just a few years ago all the privately owned medical testing clinics here in Ontario were forced to shutdown because of a perceived inequality. So just because a person with the available cash could pay a few hundred for a MRI or catscan to be done within a week and others had to rely on the many months of backlogs at the hospitals the Liberals made sure to balance everything out by closing all the clinics. Universal healthcare at it's finest.
Is my math wrong?
67 (districts) - 20 (districts who officially ignored list) = 47
47 - 20 (districts which allowed large numbers of felons to vote even with the lists) = 27
So only 27 districts out of 67 enforced the rules as set out by the elections board and even some of those allowed some suspect voting or allowed voting of people who were listed when a clear mismatch was identified.
To even lessen the impact of the lists, thousands of people on the lists were already cleared after following the appeal process, only 108 of the appeals were not cleared pre-election.
Ok, in the 30 seconds I googled I found a cached Palm Beach Post artcile at Common Dreams that mentions that 20 of the 67 districts outright ignored the list (including Palm Beach itself) and also according to the Post and Miami Herald between 5000 and 6500 felons did in fact vote illegally in at least 20 other districts in the the state (can't find a cached version of those articles, just several other sites referencing the issue such as this paper on overall disenfranchisment.
And as for the poll closing, even the Wiki page has the fact that the major networks all announced poll closing times to be 1 hour earlier that they actually were in the heavy Republican Pan Handle.
Few Florida counties even bothered to pay attention to those felons lists because of the fuss that had been kicked up over them in the days prior to the election so there is the possibility that more votes were generated by those lists as true felons were not being denied.
And for those that were turned away, I would think various networks announcing that polling stations were closed, an hour before they actually were in the heavily Republican pan handle, would easily make up the difference.
The election was close, both sides made mistakes, but Bush won Florida, plain and simple.
If you still want to blame someone blame the Democrats who designed the butterfly ballot. That, more than anything decided the final outcome.
I never said they've never made anything but temperory jobs but jobs created under this type of make-work bill are almost by definition temporary. Either that or the government grows to a point of unsustainability (which it pretty much already has).
Anyone with an iota of common sense, thus excluding you apparently, would understand that since the government essentially only creates income through taxation, it cannot create a sustainable system in which the only people it's taxing are in fact it's own employees. Every person working directly for the government is a drain on the tax system, unless you are taxing that employee at 100%, so therefore increasing the size of government, beyond essential services, is a net loss for the system as a whole.
Even people indirectly employed by these type of projects, in the end, can cause more problems than solutions. If you go with Obama's assumption that massive spending on infrastruture improvements will stimulate the economy you just need to look 3 years down the road when these projects come to a close to ask yourself what will all these new tradespeople do now? By creating an artificial demand the government creates a ticking timebomb in the market place that either comes to a dramatic end at some point in the future (unless you happen to get a job on the Big Dig) or the government is forced to continually come up with more make-work projects to keep the market artifically high, thus creating unecessary expenditures. It's the same type of interference that helped creating the housing bubble.
The best thing the government can do is get out of the way of small to medium size business who have a much better track record at creating full time employment. And no, that does not exclude the concept of moving some projects ahead of schedule to help generate a few extra dollars in the economy, but it does mean that those types of projects still have to be well timed to prevent an artifical boom and that reliance on those projects to save the economy is foolhardy, at best.
The government is a very inefficient way to create jobs and most jobs it creates are temporary at best. At worst they can create an artifical job market that when the projects are completed, leads to higher unemployment as people are now trained for jobs that no longer exist.
Buying your way out of a recession, as many, if not most, ecomomist have come forward and said, at best leads to a temporary bump but will more than likely lead to an extended downturn in the economy. Spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave is no way to stimulate the economy; it's just a way to ensure a huge debt load.
That's not to say the government shouldn't play a huge role in the recovery, but they should be background players, creating oppourtunities for small businesses to grow (lower taxes on small/independant business, job grants, etc...).
And as for Keynesian economic theory. It was Keynes himself who suggested that Hoover's tax increases (much the same as Obama's proposed corporate and income tax increase) actually signifigantly lengthened the depression.
That claim has been debunked time and time again but like most of the mythy of Obama is still put forward as fact by the faithful.
While Obama did raise a larger than normal amount through small grassroots donations, which is to be expected since he raised more money than anyone else, the largest portion of his donations still came from the same pool of wealthy contributors as every other Democrat candidate. And while he avoided PACs he did take contributions from those same industries in larger numbers than McCain (just not officially from a PAC)
While 45% of his donations did fall into the under $200 category (generally a good measurement of grassroots giving) you have to remember that Kerry got 37% and Bush 31% in that way, and as far as I'm aware, they were at least using some form of validation on their donation system, unlike Obama's system which according to credit systems experts, not only didn't use any form of validation but had to actively disable those validations that are on by default in almost all available credit card services.
Almost universally the independant estimates are, as I've said, all in the neighbourhood of 800k -1.2m. The 1.8m number is the very definition of a PC value because it is almost entirely derived from beurocrats and people who want to push the "largest gathering ever" narrative with no regard to actual analysis of the data at hand.
I personally have no stake in whatever the real number was, I was just using this as an example of how fiction can become truth using circular verification, as was the case in the actual post.
Same type of 'fact checking' happened with the Obama inauguration estimate.
1) News papers reported an estimate of 2 million people.
2) Parks service (which stopped counting crowds after the Million Man March a few years back after their analysis was way below the politically correct estimate) quotes the newspapers.
3)When asked for verification of their numbers the newspaper points to the Parks Services numbers.
Most independant analysis of satellite photographs pegs the number at somewhere between 800k-1.2m ; including estimates for people in transit. Still a very impressive number but nowhere near the hyped multimillions the press had been pushing for weeks so essentially ignored.
The Washington Post did do a follow up piece which exposes some of the problems (after it was pointed out to them that they were the Parks Services source for the 1.8 figure in the first place) but even though they still headline the 1.8m figure it doesn't seem any of their other sources come withing 500k of that number.
In the new age of media, speed of data, and it's ability to match expectations, sadly far outweigh accuracy.
Vietnam had little to do with the Vietnamese miltary prowess, as they lost pretty much ever confrontation with American forces, but much more to do with a lack of political will Stateside.
Artifical restrictions placed on the military with regards to targetting or weapons use by a the various branches of government back home had a lot more to do with the loss than anything the Vietnamese did, unless you include their efforts to pump up the anti-war crowd which helped make the beurocrats more hesitant about allowing the military to take the required actions to achieve victory.
Yeah, it's amazing this claim gets repeated so much seeing every study, both by independant groups and by most journails schools have consitantly put Fox's news coverage right in the middle of the left/right scale. ABC News is the only other news agency I've seen that routinely scores pretty close to even. But then again, when you are used to watching or reading news sources that are generally rated on the far left of the scale then anyone close to the center is seen as "too conservative".
As for Al-Jazeera, any news organization that holds a birthday celebration for a man who shoots a father in front of his 4 year old child and then proceeds to bash her head in with his rifle cannot even pretend to be unbias.
Yeah, but most of those people don't face the possability of financial ruin everytime they simply talk to a 'client'.
Miss something on a diagnosis = lawsuit
Catch something on a diagnosis = lawsuit
Person dies during risky surgery = lawsuit
You may be the nicest person in the world who only wants to help others but the financial risks of being a doctor as well as the pressure of making life and death decisions, often in very short timelines, on a daily basis can add a lot of stress to a persons life, and for most people financial compensation is what they look at to balance that stress.
Or for that matter he could have simply requested the converter credit anytime in the last year before they ran out of cash and cost him nothing.
I live in Canada and with all the notices on almost every American station there was no way I could avoid knowing about the switch last year. The way they've been beating it into people I almost ordered a converter box.
And your own link has links to other analysis of the various figures indicating no change.
And as some comedian once pointed out: in the US, at least, if you did succeed in killing all the lawyers you couldn't even be convicted of a crime - there would be a lack of adequate representation in court.
It also has the strange affect of causing the earths average temperature to drop over the last decade instead of rise.
Dam that global warming, it's a tricky bastard.
The main reason he survived Wright, Ayers, Rezko, and now possibly Blago is the shown quite clearly in your earlier post
That is about the extent most major news outlets have investigated all these relationships. Here's the general game plan for most of these news stories over the last year:
A scandal breaks involving an Obama associate:
Step 1: Ask Obama (makes sense - go to the source first)
Step 2: Accept Obama's answer, even when facts indicate the contrary, without question.
Step 3: Well, step 2 was enough, stop reporting.
In none of the above mentioned cases has Obama's original answer stood for more than a day but no one ever follows up on it. Rezco was just a client of his law firm, Ayers was a guy from the neighbourhood, Wright was a racist but only on days Obama wasn't present. When the facts came out later no one bothered to report them or question why Obama's original answers were so far removed from the truth as to be an outright lie.
On Blago he's already gone from no one had any contact to, well maybe some did but he'll get back to us on who. Of course it didn't help his case that his own top advisors were saying there was high level contact at the same time he's giving a prepared statement saying the exact opposite.
Most of the flagged questions were very general and in no way implied any wrongdoing on Obama's part; they merely mentioned Blago.
An example question: