Sandy is the record holder for largest tropical storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. It caused so much disruption because of sea level rise (caused by global warming), increased precipitation (increase by global warming), and it hit New York because of a blocking pattern (strengthened by global warming) around Greenland. Until it hit that low-Arctic-ice blocking pattern, it was headed towards Greenland.
The chance that storm was made worse by global warming is approximately 100% and the chance it was made weaker by global warming is approximately 0%.
Al Gore promised us a hockey stick spike in temperatures and he was flat wrong.
You do realize that 2100 and 2012 are not the same year, right? The hockey stick doesn't predict temperatures it charts historical temperatures. The original one went from rought 1400 to present (at the time, 1999). The IPCC reports, however, predict a rise of around 0.2 degrees per decade. As far as I can tell Al Gore's predictions in an Inconvenient Truth were all further out than 2012. His predictions haven't come true because we haven't reached them yet. It's kind of like you're castigating someone who told you electric cars would be everywhere in 2040 because they're not everywhere right now.
In the last 16 years, you cannot say that the trend he predicted came anywhere close to being accurate.
Climate modles predict that we will occasionally have decades where the temperature slope appears to be 0. It's a consequence of noise in the data. We've had quite a few of these flat periods in the past too, yet the average temperature keeps rising. Skeptical Science has a blog post explaining the problem with this.
All the schemes to add carbon taxes, reduce drilling, oppose oil shale development, fracking, and kick back schemes to promote "green energy" are just fleecing taxpayers and making the economy weaker.
Actually, carbon taxes tend to be economically neutral to good. They encourage the reduction of CO2 emissions, and the money gets either refunded to tax payers who then spend it, or spent by the government on infrastructure projects. Both of those activities may actually stimulate the economy more than what the money would have otherwise been spent on (like raises for company executives).
As I understand opposition to shale development and fracking has a number of reasons, most of which are not global warming related. It seems people don't like poisoned water supplies and earthquakes. Who knew?
The total subsidies to green companies are actually still much lower than the subsidies offered to coal, gas and oil companies. I don't know why extremely profitable companies that pollute the land and air are beeing given tax payer money, but I'd start looking there if you want to figure out who's fleecing you.
2 and 3x increase in energy prices create poverty, inflation, higher unemployment, and more dependency on the government.
It will indeed, however, it's also unavoidable. The easy to access energy is gone, every year the cost to get the next barrel of oil out of the ground increases. It's only a matter of time before oil is the expensive, dirty option instead of the cheap, dirty option.
But we can disagree. Turn off your computer, you're burning carbon.
Actually, most of my power comes from hydro-electric or nuclear power.
Most of Antarctica is technically a desert because it's actually too cold to snow much. Warming the temperature, for example, from -20 to -15 degrees Celcius actually allows more snow to fall, so the ice can grow while the temperature rises. It's a complex system, but here's a National Geographic article that explains some of the complexity.
No, you are posting bullshit. Using the same measurements that were used to scare us prior to 1988, there has been no significant warming since
I suppose that depends on how you define significant. If you looked at the graphs on the page, you'd notice again and again they show an increase of around 0.4 to 0.5 degrees celcius since 1988. That's pretty close to the IPCC prediction.
No surprise when you realise these are basically the same people that came up with the hockey-stick by merging several different data-sets, using one set for one year and a different one for the next to get the effect they were looking for while while making it appear to be a single consistent measurement.
This is ignorant hogwash, the real critics don't stoop to just making lies up on the spot like you have. I suggest you read up on the various controversies so you can at least not look like a vapid idiot.
I understand that most people can lie easily if they believe it is for a good cause, but scaring the human race back into the dark ages is not a good cause, and I shudder at the thought of trying to understand someone so messed up they think it is.
Now, who's being alarmist? If we started comprehensively dealing with global warming right now, it would cost the world about the same amount as sewer systems cost us. And I'm sure there were people just like you in the 19th century declaring that the first sewer system would send London back ot the dark ages.
the arctic thaws every year, and we don't have measurements of how much for even the last 100 years.
There is melt every year, however, the low point of ice at the height of North American temperatures in the 1930s, during which "dramatic melting" was seen was higher than the highest level in any year since satellite recording began. So while we don't have satellite measurements, we do know that the first successful north west passage took place in the 1940s and took 2 years to accomplish. The ship was nearly trapped and destroyed a half-dozen times by shifting ice during the passage.
In ten years, there may be no ice at all in the artic during the summer minimum, that's a huge difference. It seems to reason that if the Arctic has been ice free at any point in the last century people would have noticed. Hell, we'd probably know if the arctic had been ice free at any point in the last few thousand years. The Inuit tend to notice things like that. According to the Wikipedia article on climate change in the Arctic, there's no evidence that the Arctic has been seasonally ice free at any point in the last 700,000 years. So saying it's a big change might be a bit of an understatement.
Is this really that hard to understand? There are several potential avenues for profit if they coudl prove that global warming isn't happening:
1) Coal companies would probably want to hire the guy who disproved global warming (they already pay a bunch of people to study it) 2) The Heatland Institute would fund them for a speaking tour to promote their research (they already pay a bunch of people to deny it is happening) 3) They could now have a career as a prominent "conservative" or "Republican" speaker at political events. 4) Conservative publishers would sign the guy to a book deal immediately (ghost-written if necessary).
None of these things involve conspiracy thinking, those are just the obvious opportunities that would afforded to such a monumetnal achievement.
Additionally, the guy who disproved global warming should be a hero to all libertarians everywhere for reaffirming their faiith in capitalism as the solution to every problem. So there is a lot of money to be made by disproving global warming, and perhaps more importantly, it would humiliate some very powerful people's enemies in the environmental lobbies. The Koch brothers, for example, want to destroy the EPA (and environmentalism) because cleaning up after themselves costs money and they don't see why they should have to pay to clean up the messes their companies create. According to their thinking, that's what governments are for.
Sorry, coward, but you missed the point. It's that frackers don't necessary need clean water, but the people living there do.
Additionally, you appear to have mistakenly linked to the Heartland Institute's main propaganda site, next time you want to try and prove a point you might want to link to a group that is not internationally known for using lies and deception to try and influence the public. I mean, these are the guys who are still fighting against the link between smoking and cancer. I was, however, amused by the amateurish and nasty content on that site. It can only serve to further discredit the organization in the eyes of reasonable people.
I've noticed in the last few years that the truth no longer matters in the US. Its all about having the "correct" policical views and doing whatever it takes to smear the people telling truth that doesn't line up with that.
What if you're wrong? What if the people who are "telling truth" are actually bought and paid for shills who are lying to you? Because that's what the Heartland Institute seems to be to me. What they say runs directly against all available evidence. How can they be telling "truth" when everytime I look into their allegations it turns out be nothing more than innuendo and lies?
And what makes you think it would be much of a challenge to survive? I am amazed by how people seem to confuse inconvenience with survival these days.
The survival threat is global crop failure. No one really knows what will happen if it gets too warm for our current staple crops to grow well. What do we do if there's only enough food to feed 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 of the world's population? We are facing the very real possibility that we will turn some of the world's best agricultural land into desert. We can compensate for a lot of the problems we're creating with artificial climate control, but that's far too expensive to feed everyone in the first world nations at a price they can afford, never mind the rest of the world. The greatest survival threat is global war as we struggle to control the world's diminished food and water supplies.
What if, on the other hand, humans are contributing about 200% of the observed increase. Impossible you say? No so, natural cycles are pulling about half of the CO2 we produce out of the atmosphere. Furthermore humanity is the only significant source of CO2 emissions in most years, human emissions are close to 100 times larger than the next nearest natural source.
Human emissions have increased the CO2 in the air by about 25% over the last century. If we reduced our emissions to nothing, temperatures would continue to climb for a 10-20 years (estimated) and then settle in at a new, relatively stable level. At that point they'd probably resume their slow march towards the next ice age, at around -0.04 degrees per century (as opposed to the 4 degrees this article indicates we might see by the end of this century).
The frackers might not care, but the people who live near where the fracking is going on might like to be able to drink, bathe, and wash their clothes without catching on fire.
So you are free to say anything you want as long as your ok with consequences of the men in black suv's showing up and putting you down sans trial under patriot act anti terror legislation.
Because the men in black SUVs only show up if you threaten to kill someone important? But beyond that the AC didn't say that any consequence was justifiable. Having your real name attached to stupid racist things you've said is a far cry from extraordinary rendition.
Additionally, free speech has never meant you were free from the consequences from your fellow people, only from government reprisal for most things that you can say. Even that protection from the government has been limited. For example, you're are still legally responsible for crimes commited with speech such as fraud, intimidation, uttering death threats, treason, and other related crimes that can result from your speech. In addition you can be held civilally responsible responsible for many types of speech such as slander, copyright infringement (public performance of a protected work), wrongful death (if someone dies because of what you said) and others.
Beyond that there are all kinds of consequences your fellow citizens can inflict on you, such as telling other people your real name when you spout offensive crap. There is no way to have consequence free speech other than making sure no one ever hears it.
It's about "net production". Nature's net production of CO2 is nearly zero and currently over long periods it's slightly negative. Humanity's CO2 production is almost entirely net positive, we sequester very little CO2, so we are increasing the CO2 level in the atmosphere. It may represent only a small amount of the total carbon in the atmosphere each year but we're putting all of the extra CO2 into it.
It's a like a guy standing by a half-filled swimming pool with a hose pouring water into the swimming pool. While we can't show that any particular molecule of H2O came from his hose, we can observe that the water level is rising and few people would doubt that the reason the level is rising because of the hose pouring water into the pool.
If there are 720 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere and humans add 10 gigations of carbon a year, you should be able to figure out roughly how long it takes to double it.
I'm not going to hunt out the dozens of other examples of partisan behavior
Dozens of examples, huh. It seems like you should have hundreds of examples, what with about 1460 days to choose individual statements from.
I think you're cherry picking events to try and make a case while at the same time ignoring the underlying truth. It's called confirmation bias and you continue to provide an excellent example of exactly the type of thing Weaselmancer said was happening.
Your real world example is more accurately called an anecdote. Although, the last time someone told me about the horrors of single player medicine, it turns out she slightly exagerated "I could have (improbably) suffered temporary blindness from a benign brain tumour, and instead mortgaged my house and paid someone $150,000 to have it removed earlier than scheduled" to "Free market health care totally saved my life because I'm sure I would be dead if I hadn't had the operation that saved my life and my universal health care system wouldn't provide".
The real truth is that she was assigned a low priority because the tumour was benign, she freaked out because it was brain tumour (which is pretty understandable, that's scary stuff), but it's the lies after the fact that are just unacceptable . Even the doctors who performed the sugery on her say it wasn't "a life-saving" operation, and yet she persists in claiming that it was.
That's why we don't rely on anecdotes to decide policy, unverified facts can be easily (even unintentionally) distorted to the point where they no longer bear any resemblance to reality.
He may be smarter than that, I'm not sure he was wiser than that, though. It seems pretty clear from his first two years in office he actually tried to work with the Republicans and they weren't willing to work very much with him. I saw them work with him a bit and repeatedly pull the rug out from under him as soon as he wasn't looking directly at them.
He knew exactly what he was getting into, and that he could promise anything and blame Republican intransigence for not actually delivering.
The opposite could also be true. That no matter what Obama promised the Republican instransigence would prevent him from delivering. After all, these are the guys who opposed extending health benefits for 9/11 first responders and veterans. Those are the same guys the Republican lionize and campaign on. Yet the Republicans demanded that first responders be required to prove that their anomalously high cancer rates are directly caused by exposure to toxic chemicals at the World Trade Center. Petty.
I'm not sure if you're confusing debt and deficit or being myopic. According to the article you linked to Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit and with stimulus spending increased that to $1.4 trillion and $1.3 trillion for his first two years. The majority of the debt that Obama has added during his term is from the deficits that he inherited from George W. Bush. Approximately $5 trillion of his probably $6 trillion added to the debt in his first term can be directly attributed to fall out from George Bush and his Republican Congress.
It's not possible, gerrymandering means that less than 10% of the congressional seats are competitive. What that means in political terms is that 90% of the congress people in both parties are chosen by the largest and most active block of their local supporters. That means the majority of congress people are not responsible to the people who elect them in a general election, they are instead responsible only to the people who vote in their party's primaries (the only place where they could face a reasonable chance of defeat).
There is a practical problem there. If you don't get re-elected then someone who doesn't know what's best for the country is very likely to undo your work and make your sacrifices pointless.
Mr. Etch-a-sketch? How do you know he won't just reset after the election? Even if he's honest about offering "something different", that has a lot of potential to be something worse. Especially given that politcally censored study that showed current Republican economic policy has had no relation to economic reality at any time in the last 65 years. Is it any wonder that Bush drove the country off a cliff when the party's foundational economic principles are demonstrably false? Even Bush's father knew that, he called it "Vodoo economics" back in his day.
When the Republican party wants to be the party of sane, rational government rather than Crazy Eddie's House of Tax Cuts, then maybe I'll be able to treat them as a serious party again.
Slashdot Mirror
My imagination is fine, but apparently you don't understand hyperbole.
Really, if you're nit picking over exactly how rich someone would get off the discovery, you've already conceded the argument.
I'm afraid you don't understand, coward.
Sandy is the record holder for largest tropical storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. It caused so much disruption because of sea level rise (caused by global warming), increased precipitation (increase by global warming), and it hit New York because of a blocking pattern (strengthened by global warming) around Greenland. Until it hit that low-Arctic-ice blocking pattern, it was headed towards Greenland.
The chance that storm was made worse by global warming is approximately 100% and the chance it was made weaker by global warming is approximately 0%.
With Obama in, the anti-war protests have stopped
One war is effectively over, and the other is winding down. They don't have much left to protest, do they?
the sea levels have stopped rising
I though it was the Republicans who were saying that?
and the economy is always improving.
When you start at the bottom, it's not hard to go up.
Al Gore promised us a hockey stick spike in temperatures and he was flat wrong.
You do realize that 2100 and 2012 are not the same year, right? The hockey stick doesn't predict temperatures it charts historical temperatures. The original one went from rought 1400 to present (at the time, 1999). The IPCC reports, however, predict a rise of around 0.2 degrees per decade. As far as I can tell Al Gore's predictions in an Inconvenient Truth were all further out than 2012. His predictions haven't come true because we haven't reached them yet. It's kind of like you're castigating someone who told you electric cars would be everywhere in 2040 because they're not everywhere right now.
In the last 16 years, you cannot say that the trend he predicted came anywhere close to being accurate.
Climate modles predict that we will occasionally have decades where the temperature slope appears to be 0. It's a consequence of noise in the data. We've had quite a few of these flat periods in the past too, yet the average temperature keeps rising. Skeptical Science has a blog post explaining the problem with this.
All the schemes to add carbon taxes, reduce drilling, oppose oil shale development, fracking, and kick back schemes to promote "green energy" are just fleecing taxpayers and making the economy weaker.
Actually, carbon taxes tend to be economically neutral to good. They encourage the reduction of CO2 emissions, and the money gets either refunded to tax payers who then spend it, or spent by the government on infrastructure projects. Both of those activities may actually stimulate the economy more than what the money would have otherwise been spent on (like raises for company executives).
As I understand opposition to shale development and fracking has a number of reasons, most of which are not global warming related. It seems people don't like poisoned water supplies and earthquakes. Who knew?
The total subsidies to green companies are actually still much lower than the subsidies offered to coal, gas and oil companies. I don't know why extremely profitable companies that pollute the land and air are beeing given tax payer money, but I'd start looking there if you want to figure out who's fleecing you.
2 and 3x increase in energy prices create poverty, inflation, higher unemployment, and more dependency on the government.
It will indeed, however, it's also unavoidable. The easy to access energy is gone, every year the cost to get the next barrel of oil out of the ground increases. It's only a matter of time before oil is the expensive, dirty option instead of the cheap, dirty option.
But we can disagree. Turn off your computer, you're burning carbon.
Actually, most of my power comes from hydro-electric or nuclear power.
Most of Antarctica is technically a desert because it's actually too cold to snow much. Warming the temperature, for example, from -20 to -15 degrees Celcius actually allows more snow to fall, so the ice can grow while the temperature rises. It's a complex system, but here's a National Geographic article that explains some of the complexity.
No, you are posting bullshit. Using the same measurements that were used to scare us prior to 1988, there has been no significant warming since
I suppose that depends on how you define significant. If you looked at the graphs on the page, you'd notice again and again they show an increase of around 0.4 to 0.5 degrees celcius since 1988. That's pretty close to the IPCC prediction.
No surprise when you realise these are basically the same people that came up with the hockey-stick by merging several different data-sets, using one set for one year and a different one for the next to get the effect they were looking for while while making it appear to be a single consistent measurement.
This is ignorant hogwash, the real critics don't stoop to just making lies up on the spot like you have. I suggest you read up on the various controversies so you can at least not look like a vapid idiot.
I understand that most people can lie easily if they believe it is for a good cause, but scaring the human race back into the dark ages is not a good cause, and I shudder at the thought of trying to understand someone so messed up they think it is.
Now, who's being alarmist? If we started comprehensively dealing with global warming right now, it would cost the world about the same amount as sewer systems cost us. And I'm sure there were people just like you in the 19th century declaring that the first sewer system would send London back ot the dark ages.
the arctic thaws every year, and we don't have measurements of how much for even the last 100 years.
There is melt every year, however, the low point of ice at the height of North American temperatures in the 1930s, during which "dramatic melting" was seen was higher than the highest level in any year since satellite recording began. So while we don't have satellite measurements, we do know that the first successful north west passage took place in the 1940s and took 2 years to accomplish. The ship was nearly trapped and destroyed a half-dozen times by shifting ice during the passage.
In ten years, there may be no ice at all in the artic during the summer minimum, that's a huge difference. It seems to reason that if the Arctic has been ice free at any point in the last century people would have noticed. Hell, we'd probably know if the arctic had been ice free at any point in the last few thousand years. The Inuit tend to notice things like that. According to the Wikipedia article on climate change in the Arctic, there's no evidence that the Arctic has been seasonally ice free at any point in the last 700,000 years. So saying it's a big change might be a bit of an understatement.
Is this really that hard to understand? There are several potential avenues for profit if they coudl prove that global warming isn't happening:
1) Coal companies would probably want to hire the guy who disproved global warming (they already pay a bunch of people to study it)
2) The Heatland Institute would fund them for a speaking tour to promote their research (they already pay a bunch of people to deny it is happening)
3) They could now have a career as a prominent "conservative" or "Republican" speaker at political events.
4) Conservative publishers would sign the guy to a book deal immediately (ghost-written if necessary).
None of these things involve conspiracy thinking, those are just the obvious opportunities that would afforded to such a monumetnal achievement.
Additionally, the guy who disproved global warming should be a hero to all libertarians everywhere for reaffirming their faiith in capitalism as the solution to every problem. So there is a lot of money to be made by disproving global warming, and perhaps more importantly, it would humiliate some very powerful people's enemies in the environmental lobbies. The Koch brothers, for example, want to destroy the EPA (and environmentalism) because cleaning up after themselves costs money and they don't see why they should have to pay to clean up the messes their companies create. According to their thinking, that's what governments are for.
Sorry, coward, but you missed the point. It's that frackers don't necessary need clean water, but the people living there do.
Additionally, you appear to have mistakenly linked to the Heartland Institute's main propaganda site, next time you want to try and prove a point you might want to link to a group that is not internationally known for using lies and deception to try and influence the public. I mean, these are the guys who are still fighting against the link between smoking and cancer. I was, however, amused by the amateurish and nasty content on that site. It can only serve to further discredit the organization in the eyes of reasonable people.
I've noticed in the last few years that the truth no longer matters in the US. Its all about having the "correct" policical views and doing whatever it takes to smear the people telling truth that doesn't line up with that.
What if you're wrong? What if the people who are "telling truth" are actually bought and paid for shills who are lying to you? Because that's what the Heartland Institute seems to be to me. What they say runs directly against all available evidence. How can they be telling "truth" when everytime I look into their allegations it turns out be nothing more than innuendo and lies?
And what makes you think it would be much of a challenge to survive? I am amazed by how people seem to confuse
inconvenience with survival these days.
The survival threat is global crop failure. No one really knows what will happen if it gets too warm for our current staple crops to grow well. What do we do if there's only enough food to feed 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 of the world's population? We are facing the very real possibility that we will turn some of the world's best agricultural land into desert. We can compensate for a lot of the problems we're creating with artificial climate control, but that's far too expensive to feed everyone in the first world nations at a price they can afford, never mind the rest of the world. The greatest survival threat is global war as we struggle to control the world's diminished food and water supplies.
What if, on the other hand, humans are contributing about 200% of the observed increase. Impossible you say? No so, natural cycles are pulling about half of the CO2 we produce out of the atmosphere. Furthermore humanity is the only significant source of CO2 emissions in most years, human emissions are close to 100 times larger than the next nearest natural source.
Human emissions have increased the CO2 in the air by about 25% over the last century. If we reduced our emissions to nothing, temperatures would continue to climb for a 10-20 years (estimated) and then settle in at a new, relatively stable level. At that point they'd probably resume their slow march towards the next ice age, at around -0.04 degrees per century (as opposed to the 4 degrees this article indicates we might see by the end of this century).
The frackers might not care, but the people who live near where the fracking is going on might like to be able to drink, bathe, and wash their clothes without catching on fire.
So you are free to say anything you want as long as your ok with consequences of the men in black suv's showing up and putting you down sans trial under patriot act anti terror legislation.
Because the men in black SUVs only show up if you threaten to kill someone important? But beyond that the AC didn't say that any consequence was justifiable. Having your real name attached to stupid racist things you've said is a far cry from extraordinary rendition.
Additionally, free speech has never meant you were free from the consequences from your fellow people, only from government reprisal for most things that you can say. Even that protection from the government has been limited. For example, you're are still legally responsible for crimes commited with speech such as fraud, intimidation, uttering death threats, treason, and other related crimes that can result from your speech. In addition you can be held civilally responsible responsible for many types of speech such as slander, copyright infringement (public performance of a protected work), wrongful death (if someone dies because of what you said) and others.
Beyond that there are all kinds of consequences your fellow citizens can inflict on you, such as telling other people your real name when you spout offensive crap. There is no way to have consequence free speech other than making sure no one ever hears it.
It's true, stupid people can rarely tell the difference.
It's about "net production". Nature's net production of CO2 is nearly zero and currently over long periods it's slightly negative. Humanity's CO2 production is almost entirely net positive, we sequester very little CO2, so we are increasing the CO2 level in the atmosphere. It may represent only a small amount of the total carbon in the atmosphere each year but we're putting all of the extra CO2 into it.
It's a like a guy standing by a half-filled swimming pool with a hose pouring water into the swimming pool. While we can't show that any particular molecule of H2O came from his hose, we can observe that the water level is rising and few people would doubt that the reason the level is rising because of the hose pouring water into the pool.
If there are 720 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere and humans add 10 gigations of carbon a year, you should be able to figure out roughly how long it takes to double it.
I'm not going to hunt out the dozens of other examples of partisan behavior
Dozens of examples, huh. It seems like you should have hundreds of examples, what with about 1460 days to choose individual statements from.
I think you're cherry picking events to try and make a case while at the same time ignoring the underlying truth. It's called confirmation bias and you continue to provide an excellent example of exactly the type of thing Weaselmancer said was happening.
Instant run-off doesn't meet all of the Condorcet criteria. If you look at the voting system criteria section of the instant runoff voting page, it'll do a better job of explaining the problems. IRV is an improvement over FPTP, though.
Is it a quota thing or is it a "because the person is [fill in the blank] we gotta pay them higher than what the person is worth"?
It's a "you can't pay someone with breasts 60% of what you pay someone without breasts for doing the exact same job" thing*.
It not as common as it used to be, but there's still a pay gap in some areas.
We can no longer offer people higher-than-usual pay just because that person happens to be [fill in the blank].
Actually the law was supposed to prevent people from being paid less-than-usual pay because the happened to be born with "the wrong equipment".
* Excluding acceptable reasons for the discrepency like seniority, skills, or experience.
Your real world example is more accurately called an anecdote. Although, the last time someone told me about the horrors of single player medicine, it turns out she slightly exagerated "I could have (improbably) suffered temporary blindness from a benign brain tumour, and instead mortgaged my house and paid someone $150,000 to have it removed earlier than scheduled" to "Free market health care totally saved my life because I'm sure I would be dead if I hadn't had the operation that saved my life and my universal health care system wouldn't provide".
The real truth is that she was assigned a low priority because the tumour was benign, she freaked out because it was brain tumour (which is pretty understandable, that's scary stuff), but it's the lies after the fact that are just unacceptable . Even the doctors who performed the sugery on her say it wasn't "a life-saving" operation, and yet she persists in claiming that it was.
That's why we don't rely on anecdotes to decide policy, unverified facts can be easily (even unintentionally) distorted to the point where they no longer bear any resemblance to reality.
He may be smarter than that, I'm not sure he was wiser than that, though. It seems pretty clear from his first two years in office he actually tried to work with the Republicans and they weren't willing to work very much with him. I saw them work with him a bit and repeatedly pull the rug out from under him as soon as he wasn't looking directly at them.
He knew exactly what he was getting into, and that he could promise anything and blame Republican intransigence for not actually delivering.
The opposite could also be true. That no matter what Obama promised the Republican instransigence would prevent him from delivering. After all, these are the guys who opposed extending health benefits for 9/11 first responders and veterans. Those are the same guys the Republican lionize and campaign on. Yet the Republicans demanded that first responders be required to prove that their anomalously high cancer rates are directly caused by exposure to toxic chemicals at the World Trade Center. Petty.
I'm not sure if you're confusing debt and deficit or being myopic. According to the article you linked to Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit and with stimulus spending increased that to $1.4 trillion and $1.3 trillion for his first two years. The majority of the debt that Obama has added during his term is from the deficits that he inherited from George W. Bush. Approximately $5 trillion of his probably $6 trillion added to the debt in his first term can be directly attributed to fall out from George Bush and his Republican Congress.
Yup, I don't have facts. Of course, you'll protest Forbes as being "right wing" ... and HuffPo is unbiased .. right?
That opinion article was written by someone actually working on Romney's campaign, a week before the election. It goes way beyond "biased".
It's not possible, gerrymandering means that less than 10% of the congressional seats are competitive. What that means in political terms is that 90% of the congress people in both parties are chosen by the largest and most active block of their local supporters. That means the majority of congress people are not responsible to the people who elect them in a general election, they are instead responsible only to the people who vote in their party's primaries (the only place where they could face a reasonable chance of defeat).
There is a practical problem there. If you don't get re-elected then someone who doesn't know what's best for the country is very likely to undo your work and make your sacrifices pointless.
Mr. Etch-a-sketch? How do you know he won't just reset after the election? Even if he's honest about offering "something different", that has a lot of potential to be something worse. Especially given that politcally censored study that showed current Republican economic policy has had no relation to economic reality at any time in the last 65 years. Is it any wonder that Bush drove the country off a cliff when the party's foundational economic principles are demonstrably false? Even Bush's father knew that, he called it "Vodoo economics" back in his day.
When the Republican party wants to be the party of sane, rational government rather than Crazy Eddie's House of Tax Cuts, then maybe I'll be able to treat them as a serious party again.