The problem with the hard core "don't tax me bro" crowd is that they really really believe that there is no cost in letting people starve in the streets/have no education/have no health care.
This is sort of a jeuvenile understanding of conservatism. First of all, "letting people starve in the streets" isn't an accurate portrayal of conservative thinking. There used to be many more charities and fraternal organizations that helped people in need, and I don't see any evidence the government does a better job. Conservative opposition to most social programs arises not from the cost of the programs, but the loss of personal freedom and the social destruction that always accompany state abolition of personal responsibility.
Take, for example, AFDC. What amused me about the welfare debates in the '90s was the pitifully small amount of mony the program actually cost as a direct budget item. I don't remember the exact numbers, but in comparison to the overall budget they were lost in the noise. BUT, as you accuse conservatives of ignoring the total cost of innaction, I will accuse you of ignoring the true cost of such programs. AFDC did more to create a permanent underclass than any program or policy, before or since. It resulted the destruction of families, and in the creation of neighborhoods where children were raised in the complete absence of legal wage earners. Children for whom existence was based on the assumption all things flow from the government or illegal activity. Who can be surprised when it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle? That's the type of effect people pushing for these programs like to ignore.
Or take motorcycle helmet laws. We have motorcycle helmet laws in California. Certainly adult motorcycle riders are entitled to weigh the tradeoffs of wearing a helmet, but now the state is involved. The reason is we have laws that force hospitals and trauma centers to care for emergency cases (and also disability and medicaid for longer term care). The helmet isn't to protect the rider - it's to protect the state.
And so it goes. If you want to see how this will pan out over time, you need do no more than look at Great Britain. There the health scolds have the force of law behind them because the taxpayers are picking up the tab. So they're gradually making unhealthy behavior illegal. Smoking, drinking, trans-fats... there's really no end to it.
Assuming we get national health care in this country, which I think is a pretty good bet at this point, how long do you think it will be before the state starts to place "sensible" restrictions on our lifestyles? We'll begin to see the "smoking effect", where the majority is okay with putting restrictions on activities most people don't engage in by choice. Hang gliding, scuba diving, fast cars, etc.
It's not about money. It's about responsibility and it's about freedom. Once you invite the bureaucrats into the your life to pay bills you invite them to tell you how to live your life, whether you realize it or not.
Even assuming what you say is true, it's entirely irrelevant. We can't exploit either of those resources, economically, to the degree necessary to fuel our economy. Maybe in fifty years, or one hundred. But for now, it just ain't happening. So let's deal with the options on the table, and leave off the unobtainium discussions. We can barely make wind and solar break even from an energy perspective, let alone cost.
If we're not going to worry about the "cleanliness" of our power, there's no reason to use fuel cells. We can simply make synthetic gas from the coal and pour it into our existing cars. And the "agenda" I slipped into was the one of the post I was responding to - did you notice the quote? Really, your comment makes no sense.
This discovery in fuel cell research may ease reliance on gasoline.
I don't see how this will do anything to ease the reliance on gasoline. A fuel cell isn't a power source per se - the power still comes from whatever you're feeding it. Whatever you're using as a fuel still requires a power input. This won't do a damn thing for energy independence unless it's coupled with a massive nuclear power plant construction program. And don't go on about wind and solar - even maxed out they barely make a dent.
When that nuclear program finally starts, it's gonna be another decade, at least, before we see any benefit. So assuming they get whatever kinks they have out of the process today, and assuming auto manufacturers rush headlong into production (five year delay), and assuming ignorant opposition ot nuclear power can be overcome in those five years, the earliest this will have any displacement effect on oil is fifteen years from now.
Which, in all practicality, means we'll all be dead before any of this happens.
Honestly? I have no idea exactly how many people want it. That kind of information gets handled way above my pay grade. But it seems hard to belive the higher-ups would invest billions of dollars on something that will never repay the investment. We're not a government monopoly that can just raise your rates next year without fear of competition.
Like I said, it doesn't make sense to me. On the other hand, I didn't think the whole cell-phone thing would work out very well. Who would want to pay more for a phone that's less reliable and has poor sound quality when you can just use a land line? Meh, that's why they don't let me make business decisions.
Every country has different rules under which businesses operate. Unfortunately I don't know enough about how things work in Europe or Asia to make any kind of comparison. The one country I'm familiar with (Portugal) has much less stringent requirements for putting up a new cell, and they can site a new cell for a tiny fraction of the money we spend in the US.
The reason is cell phone companies are spending billions to upgrade their equipment. Those billions have to come from somewhere. We went from analog to digital 1x to data over 1x to 2G to 3G. Even after 3G was introduced we had data rates increase in leaps and bounds.
Customers demand performance and features. While mobile companies could probably provide you with voice-only service pretty cheaply, they'd lose customers to other companies that provided a fancier service.
I work in the business, and I have no idea why people want to watch videos on those teeny tiny screens. But they do, and the networks have to be modified as a result.
Innocent until PROVEN guilty my friend. I said the impeachment VOTE failed, as in the vote that occurred during impeachment
Actually, that's not true, although it's probably a semantic point. Impeachment is equivalent to an indictment. Clinton was impeached. Period. The vote that failed was the vote to remove him from office. By then the actual impeachment was over. In any event impeachment proceedings aren't a criminal trial - the only sanction is removal from office. He wasn't charged with a felony after leaving office as a result of a political calculation, not a prosecutorial one.
The fact of the matter is the man lied under oath. It doesn't matter to me whether or not criminal charges were brought. If you read the testimony, that's the only reasonable conclusion. Do you not recognize the obvious unless twelve strangers tell you it's so? I agree he was never found guilty in a court of law, so I'm not advocating a criminal punishment. But I think it's time people on the left finally admit what even you know deep down inside. The man lied under oath.
You'll note that the best they came up with in 8 years was that the President was getting blow jobs from an intern
No, no, no. Blowjobs are not what it's about - that's just spin. It's about breaking the law. The law is supposed to apply to presidents as well as people like you and me. The man committed a felony - that's what this is about. The blowjob is only relevant in that he lied about it under oath. At the time there were more than a hundred people in federal prison for lying about sex under oath. Why should he get a pass by virtue of his job?
As for the misleading testimony, one would be a crime and the other was professional misconduct. Accept the fact that there was no THERE there. You're rehashing a failed argument made 10 years ago.
Again, not true. Misleading testimony under oath is perjury. I would advise you not to try the same thing under oath, or you'll find yourself in the Grey Bar Hotel very quickly. And the age of the argument has no bearing on its validity.
Sorry, but in our democracy you haven't committed a felony unless you've been found guilty of committing a felony.
Not true at all. You can commit a felony without being found guilty. And it has nothing to do with democracy, which isn't our form of government anyway.
And, the impeachment vote FAILED. His law license was suspended for misleading testimony, that's as far as it went.
First of all, he was impeached. It didn't "fail". He wasn't convicted because his party was willing to ignore the crime and the Republicans didn't have a supermajority. And maybe you can tell me the difference between "lying" and "giving misleading testimony".
As usual for Clinton defenders, you glossed over the fact that he committed a felony. It was Clinton himself that forced all the sex stuff into the open by lying under oath and then not admitting to it when caught. Remember, Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair - he was impeached for criminal behavior. "This is all about sex" was spinning from the Democrats, and it's a testimony to their success that people like you keep on spinning.
As to your link: gee, everyone can use Google. I find nothing there persuasive in the slightest. I read the testimony, and there's no doubt he willfully gave an incorrect answer, and no amount of lawyerly parsing will get around that. In fact he was stripped of his law license in Arkansas because the judge found... he lied under oath. To believe otherwise is to be willfully blind to the obvious.
I think there may be some benefit to keeping the heart in a shape that's more correct as well. Isn't that the principle behind the Batista procedure?
Scientific American did an article years ago about mathmatical flow analysis of blood moving through the heart. The researchers opined the shape of the heart was something of an engineering marvel all by itself.
Oh, very well then, enlighten me. What earth-shattering experiments have my tax dollars paid for? Ones that couldn't be done on the ground. We'll even keep the ones that could have been done more cheaply with disposable rockets for the time being. The top, say, five. In your opinion.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not thrilled about it - I drive a Carolla myself. All I'm saying it these people are motivated by rational self interest. They know that the biggest car in an accident wins, and they want to make sure their family is safer than yours or mine. What pisses me off is SUV drivers in most states don't have to pay more for liability insurance because of political pressure. As we all know, taking into account anything other than your driving record wouldn't be fair. Arg.
I'll see your tank gun and raise you a 1966 Ford Galaxy with a trunk full of ball bearings. You'll get better gas mileage, but I'll go in style.
Okay, for anyone who's ever even heard of kudzu, it seems like the first thing to try for an application that needs raw biomass. So why aren't we already using it to power our cars?
Oh, I agree heavy cars don't make the roads safer in aggregate. But people don't buy heavy cars to make the average driver safer. They buy heavy cars because if they get in an accident they want to win.
First of all, they ignored the Swift Boat vets as long as they could. Secondly, they were not lies. There's a reason Kerry let the all the deadlines for filing a defamation suit lapse - he knew that not only were they telling the truth, but with access to his service records they could prove it.
Fox deserves to be singled out because the other major news outlets, including CBS, make an honest effort to be objective and non-partisan.
They make an effort to appear non-partisan. That's true. But there's no way an objective observer would think they actually are. Last election cycle the non-Fox networks pulled out all the stops for Kerry. And it's true the CBS story is a rare occurrence, but only in that they were caught.
I think this is all a question of perspective. There's no way you could ever convince me NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and virtually all the print media don't have a leftward bias. I can see it for myself. But that's the difference - I'm willing to admit Fox has a rightward bias, whereas the fact that the rest electronic media establishment is overwhelmingly liberal is somehow news to people on the left.
Why single out Fox news? Last election cycle we had a major network try to smear a sitting president with false documents a month before the election. If that isn't partisan behavior, I don't know what is. What about PBS? Have you ever seen "NOW"? What is the conservative counterpart?
Speaking as a former Republican (and still a conservative), I think this came up for two reasons.
Big blogs are an obvious loophole in campaign finance laws. With no regulation they're extremely susceptable to astroturfing campaigns. If you're gonna limit other people's free speech (McCain-Feingold), then why not blogs?
The resurrection of the "Fairness" doctrine by Democrats in Congress. It's pretty obviously a naked attempt to kill talk radio, which tends to be conservative. I could make the argument the fairness doctrine should apply to the internet if it applies to talk radio.
Having said that let me also say this is a good decision. As far as I know, this campaign finance stuff all started as a reaction to Watergate, but it's done nothing but make the situation worse. What we have now is a system where you can legally bribe a congressman through campaign donations, but you can't buy a political ad within six months of an election without going through a mountain of paperwork. The whole law should be scrapped. Should have been, in fact, thrown out by the courts.
I find abhorrent the idea one should have to register with the government before venturing an opinion on politics.
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This is sort of a jeuvenile understanding of conservatism. First of all, "letting people starve in the streets" isn't an accurate portrayal of conservative thinking. There used to be many more charities and fraternal organizations that helped people in need, and I don't see any evidence the government does a better job. Conservative opposition to most social programs arises not from the cost of the programs, but the loss of personal freedom and the social destruction that always accompany state abolition of personal responsibility.
Take, for example, AFDC. What amused me about the welfare debates in the '90s was the pitifully small amount of mony the program actually cost as a direct budget item. I don't remember the exact numbers, but in comparison to the overall budget they were lost in the noise. BUT, as you accuse conservatives of ignoring the total cost of innaction, I will accuse you of ignoring the true cost of such programs. AFDC did more to create a permanent underclass than any program or policy, before or since. It resulted the destruction of families, and in the creation of neighborhoods where children were raised in the complete absence of legal wage earners. Children for whom existence was based on the assumption all things flow from the government or illegal activity. Who can be surprised when it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle? That's the type of effect people pushing for these programs like to ignore.
Or take motorcycle helmet laws. We have motorcycle helmet laws in California. Certainly adult motorcycle riders are entitled to weigh the tradeoffs of wearing a helmet, but now the state is involved. The reason is we have laws that force hospitals and trauma centers to care for emergency cases (and also disability and medicaid for longer term care). The helmet isn't to protect the rider - it's to protect the state.
And so it goes. If you want to see how this will pan out over time, you need do no more than look at Great Britain. There the health scolds have the force of law behind them because the taxpayers are picking up the tab. So they're gradually making unhealthy behavior illegal. Smoking, drinking, trans-fats... there's really no end to it.
Assuming we get national health care in this country, which I think is a pretty good bet at this point, how long do you think it will be before the state starts to place "sensible" restrictions on our lifestyles? We'll begin to see the "smoking effect", where the majority is okay with putting restrictions on activities most people don't engage in by choice. Hang gliding, scuba diving, fast cars, etc.
It's not about money. It's about responsibility and it's about freedom. Once you invite the bureaucrats into the your life to pay bills you invite them to tell you how to live your life, whether you realize it or not.
He might say "let's start smashing stuff together and see if they exist."
Which is worse than not having the drugs at all? Patents expire, and the sooner the drug is developed, the sooner the patent will expire.
Even assuming what you say is true, it's entirely irrelevant. We can't exploit either of those resources, economically, to the degree necessary to fuel our economy. Maybe in fifty years, or one hundred. But for now, it just ain't happening. So let's deal with the options on the table, and leave off the unobtainium discussions. We can barely make wind and solar break even from an energy perspective, let alone cost.
If we're not going to worry about the "cleanliness" of our power, there's no reason to use fuel cells. We can simply make synthetic gas from the coal and pour it into our existing cars. And the "agenda" I slipped into was the one of the post I was responding to - did you notice the quote? Really, your comment makes no sense.
I don't see how this will do anything to ease the reliance on gasoline. A fuel cell isn't a power source per se - the power still comes from whatever you're feeding it. Whatever you're using as a fuel still requires a power input. This won't do a damn thing for energy independence unless it's coupled with a massive nuclear power plant construction program. And don't go on about wind and solar - even maxed out they barely make a dent.
When that nuclear program finally starts, it's gonna be another decade, at least, before we see any benefit. So assuming they get whatever kinks they have out of the process today, and assuming auto manufacturers rush headlong into production (five year delay), and assuming ignorant opposition ot nuclear power can be overcome in those five years, the earliest this will have any displacement effect on oil is fifteen years from now.
Which, in all practicality, means we'll all be dead before any of this happens.
Honestly? I have no idea exactly how many people want it. That kind of information gets handled way above my pay grade. But it seems hard to belive the higher-ups would invest billions of dollars on something that will never repay the investment. We're not a government monopoly that can just raise your rates next year without fear of competition.
Like I said, it doesn't make sense to me. On the other hand, I didn't think the whole cell-phone thing would work out very well. Who would want to pay more for a phone that's less reliable and has poor sound quality when you can just use a land line? Meh, that's why they don't let me make business decisions.
Every country has different rules under which businesses operate. Unfortunately I don't know enough about how things work in Europe or Asia to make any kind of comparison. The one country I'm familiar with (Portugal) has much less stringent requirements for putting up a new cell, and they can site a new cell for a tiny fraction of the money we spend in the US.
Your reply stinks of ignorance.
The reason is cell phone companies are spending billions to upgrade their equipment. Those billions have to come from somewhere. We went from analog to digital 1x to data over 1x to 2G to 3G. Even after 3G was introduced we had data rates increase in leaps and bounds.
Customers demand performance and features. While mobile companies could probably provide you with voice-only service pretty cheaply, they'd lose customers to other companies that provided a fancier service.
I work in the business, and I have no idea why people want to watch videos on those teeny tiny screens. But they do, and the networks have to be modified as a result.
Actually, that's not true, although it's probably a semantic point. Impeachment is equivalent to an indictment. Clinton was impeached. Period. The vote that failed was the vote to remove him from office. By then the actual impeachment was over. In any event impeachment proceedings aren't a criminal trial - the only sanction is removal from office. He wasn't charged with a felony after leaving office as a result of a political calculation, not a prosecutorial one.
The fact of the matter is the man lied under oath. It doesn't matter to me whether or not criminal charges were brought. If you read the testimony, that's the only reasonable conclusion. Do you not recognize the obvious unless twelve strangers tell you it's so? I agree he was never found guilty in a court of law, so I'm not advocating a criminal punishment. But I think it's time people on the left finally admit what even you know deep down inside. The man lied under oath.
No, no, no. Blowjobs are not what it's about - that's just spin. It's about breaking the law. The law is supposed to apply to presidents as well as people like you and me. The man committed a felony - that's what this is about. The blowjob is only relevant in that he lied about it under oath. At the time there were more than a hundred people in federal prison for lying about sex under oath. Why should he get a pass by virtue of his job?
Again, not true. Misleading testimony under oath is perjury. I would advise you not to try the same thing under oath, or you'll find yourself in the Grey Bar Hotel very quickly. And the age of the argument has no bearing on its validity.
Not true at all. You can commit a felony without being found guilty. And it has nothing to do with democracy, which isn't our form of government anyway.
First of all, he was impeached. It didn't "fail". He wasn't convicted because his party was willing to ignore the crime and the Republicans didn't have a supermajority. And maybe you can tell me the difference between "lying" and "giving misleading testimony".
As usual for Clinton defenders, you glossed over the fact that he committed a felony. It was Clinton himself that forced all the sex stuff into the open by lying under oath and then not admitting to it when caught. Remember, Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair - he was impeached for criminal behavior. "This is all about sex" was spinning from the Democrats, and it's a testimony to their success that people like you keep on spinning.
As to your link: gee, everyone can use Google. I find nothing there persuasive in the slightest. I read the testimony, and there's no doubt he willfully gave an incorrect answer, and no amount of lawyerly parsing will get around that. In fact he was stripped of his law license in Arkansas because the judge found... he lied under oath. To believe otherwise is to be willfully blind to the obvious.
Insolence? That's an odd word to use in a republic.
And doesn't the president represent the American people as well?
I suppose. But since you'll probably do that anyway, why should we pay the fine?
I think there may be some benefit to keeping the heart in a shape that's more correct as well. Isn't that the principle behind the Batista procedure?
Scientific American did an article years ago about mathmatical flow analysis of blood moving through the heart. The researchers opined the shape of the heart was something of an engineering marvel all by itself.
Oh, very well then, enlighten me. What earth-shattering experiments have my tax dollars paid for? Ones that couldn't be done on the ground. We'll even keep the ones that could have been done more cheaply with disposable rockets for the time being. The top, say, five. In your opinion.
Sure, the research on the ISS probably doesn't justify it's construction cost. But it certainly justifies its maintenance costs.
Not by a long shot. Exactly what earth-shattering research are they goning to do? More high school science experiments?
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not thrilled about it - I drive a Carolla myself. All I'm saying it these people are motivated by rational self interest. They know that the biggest car in an accident wins, and they want to make sure their family is safer than yours or mine. What pisses me off is SUV drivers in most states don't have to pay more for liability insurance because of political pressure. As we all know, taking into account anything other than your driving record wouldn't be fair. Arg.
I'll see your tank gun and raise you a 1966 Ford Galaxy with a trunk full of ball bearings. You'll get better gas mileage, but I'll go in style.
Okay, for anyone who's ever even heard of kudzu, it seems like the first thing to try for an application that needs raw biomass. So why aren't we already using it to power our cars?
Oh, I agree heavy cars don't make the roads safer in aggregate. But people don't buy heavy cars to make the average driver safer. They buy heavy cars because if they get in an accident they want to win.
People think heavy cars are safer because heavy cars are safer. Sometimes people are right.
First of all, they ignored the Swift Boat vets as long as they could. Secondly, they were not lies. There's a reason Kerry let the all the deadlines for filing a defamation suit lapse - he knew that not only were they telling the truth, but with access to his service records they could prove it.
They make an effort to appear non-partisan. That's true. But there's no way an objective observer would think they actually are. Last election cycle the non-Fox networks pulled out all the stops for Kerry. And it's true the CBS story is a rare occurrence, but only in that they were caught.
I think this is all a question of perspective. There's no way you could ever convince me NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and virtually all the print media don't have a leftward bias. I can see it for myself. But that's the difference - I'm willing to admit Fox has a rightward bias, whereas the fact that the rest electronic media establishment is overwhelmingly liberal is somehow news to people on the left.
Why single out Fox news? Last election cycle we had a major network try to smear a sitting president with false documents a month before the election. If that isn't partisan behavior, I don't know what is. What about PBS? Have you ever seen "NOW"? What is the conservative counterpart?
Speaking as a former Republican (and still a conservative), I think this came up for two reasons.
Having said that let me also say this is a good decision. As far as I know, this campaign finance stuff all started as a reaction to Watergate, but it's done nothing but make the situation worse. What we have now is a system where you can legally bribe a congressman through campaign donations, but you can't buy a political ad within six months of an election without going through a mountain of paperwork. The whole law should be scrapped. Should have been, in fact, thrown out by the courts.
I find abhorrent the idea one should have to register with the government before venturing an opinion on politics.