Post by Rudy CanozaPost by Stan de SDPost by Disgruntled CustomerPost by Stan de SD(1) CO2 is NOT the primary greehouse gas.
How do you pump more than 100% humidity into the air? Water vapor is a
limited component of the atmosphere. Carbon gasses are unlimited; they do
not precipitate out.
Show me an energy balance that accounts for (a) solar radiation, (b)
blackbody radiation from the earth's surface (c) the
absorption/reflection/transmission of [snip remaining PLAGIARISM by Stain]
You are not a climate scientist, and you merely
copied-and-pasted all that bullshit.
The FACT, stain, is that an *OVERWHELMING* majority of
a) global warming is occurring
b) humans are causing it
You are INCOMPETENT to refute their conclusions,
because you have no expertise in the field; none
whatever. I have none in the field as well, but as an
intelligent and unbiased lay person, I am able to
recognize that those who do overwhelmingly agree with
the conclusions above, which is what makes it THE
consensus.
You need to learn to stop being a flunky for highly
partisan political groups.
Your a big talker. Isn't it easy to sit behind your PC and bellow out
expletives to people you do not know or know you. I am willing to
wager that you are a fat slob of a pussy that could not beat your way
out of a wet paper bag. The only exercise you do is run your big foul
mouth and move your fingers across a keyboard. I am positive that
since you are a squeamish wimp, and too chickenshit like a typical
fascist to participate in an actual battle, you prefer to disambiguate
comical right wing tripe based entirely on your hidebound opinions
about liberalism . Soon the word conservative will have a negative
coloring as the word liberal, because the left allowed the right to
define them without going on the offensive and defining the right in
counter point. I feel that your entire diatribe against liberals is
nothing but a reaction to the progress minorities have made in terms
of education and prosperity. I sense a certain amount of jealousy and
envy on your part because you are a loser.
The Coming Party Realignment
by LAWRENCE GOODWYN
[from the April 30, 2007 issue]
Intransigence and myopia. The flowering of these habits within the GOP
is driving the Democratic Party to clarity. And the potential for
serious consequences is real. It is not enough to suggest that a big
Democratic win is possible in 2008. Something far more strategic is at
work: large-scale party realignment with historic implications.
None of this seems apparent, of course. Indeed, for a number of
hopeful partisans, such a possibility seems beyond reason itself.
Politics is assumed to be modulated through the inherited customs of
the two major parties. Complacency and sloganeering are settled habits
among Republicans. Clarity, on the other hand, can scarcely be called
an ingrained cultural habit among Democrats. In the face of corporate
saber-rattling, a fair degree of communal Democratic wilting is highly
probable. This traditional analysis, while time-tested and even
accurate as far as it goes, is leading to inside-the-Beltway
conclusions that are superficial and obsolete.
Actually, very strong countervailing pressures are at work. But
Americans are no longer well instructed about how to see them. Real
life contains two elements of democratic politics that are rarely
discussed in tandem--engaged popular aspiration (unidentified people
out there in America) and cooperating elites (identifiable in
Washington). Such a range of citizens is not routinely analyzed
together because, politically, they are not assumed to be together.
Instead, people find the nominal institutions of democracy, such as
the US Congress, limping along in a decayed condition, insufficiently
independent of lobbyists. The outlying population is also found
limping, assumed to be insufficiently informed to act with relevance.
Since everyone is affected by the surrounding culture in which they
have been raised and to which they remain attached, the same decayed
condition besets the reporters who cover it, the scholars who brood
over it, the consultants who try to make a living handling it and the
politicians who seek passable footing through it. To find some footing
for ourselves, we need to catch the connections on those rare
occasions when popular and elite modes of politics function at the
same time and have serious ideas in concert. It does not happen often
in history. But it happens. When it does, expectation can begin to
replace resignation.
It is, in fact, beginning to happen now. Activity among people "out
there" surfaced soon after the 2006 elections, first as a new way to
think about political possibility--verified by the arrival in Congress
of new majority leaders and new committee chairs; verified yet again
by the weak GOP sidestep, early on, of any Senate debate on Iraq and,
not least, through the investigative horizons richly confirmed by the
perjury trial of Scooter Libby. Apart from this, in climes far from
comfortable lobbyists, activists have organized petitions for local
environmental laws even as people in midsize towns stepped up pressure
for living-wage ordinances as benchmarks for all city workers. Indeed,
agitation for a revived push for an Equal Rights Amendment, visible at
local levels soon after the November election and at state levels in
December, has now gathered momentum in both the House and Senate. This
kind of politics is not about the next election; it is about people
coming up for air and getting something done that has a chance to get
done. Nor is this effort a magic bullet to dispatch globalization. It
is not instant and it does not begin large-scale but emerges from the
interaction of popular aspirations and cooperating elites. It is out
there in America now--much more vividly than before the November
elections. It will be expanding.
There are stages here, reciprocal sequences. Unfamiliar rhythms are
apparent in the attentive but very reserved popular responses to the
bevy of presidential aspirants. Popular input is also visible on the
ground in Iraq, on the floor of the House of Representatives and in
the interplay of the two. It is no accident that the first
officeholder to speak publicly about the resentment American troops in
Iraq feel toward the crowds of contractors harvesting profit from the
war is Pennsylvania Representative John Murtha. A savvy old hand from
a working-class region hurt by globalization, Murtha does not fit the
liberal-conservative mold that frames Beltway insiderism. An
ex-Marine, Murtha saw for himself the conjunction of soldier
competence and discontent on his most recent trip to Baghdad. His
Democratic colleagues in the House will follow his lead in finding an
expeditious way out of Iraq--as they began to do soon after he first
publicly announced his opposition to Bush's policy. Like Murtha, the
boots on the ground in Iraq are responding to the reality they see
around them. What soldiers are telling the latest visitors reveals how
desperate things are. Talking to a reporter for the McClatchy
newspapers, a 19-year-old private explains, "We can go get into a
firefight and empty our ammo, but it doesn't accomplish much. This
isn't our war--we're just in the middle." An officer's take: "To be
honest, it's going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter
what we do."
The Iraq disaster undermines the Republicans but will not in itself
bring party realignment. Rather, the energizing momentum is
economic--and it is driven by abiding public anxiety here in America.
Ahead in Washington are the sharpest kinds of party divisions over
domestic policy. The signals are everywhere. The new Speaker of the
House, Nancy Pelosi, began by mobilizing all 233 Democrats to
co-sponsor the minimum-wage bill. On their first opportunity to
decamp, eighty-two Republicans did so. The final tally--an early
harbinger of the realigned future--was 315 to 116. After redistricting
in response to the 2010 census, it does not seem out of line to
envision something approaching a Democratic margin of 275 to 160. The
path to these numbers travels through Social Security, the issue that,
as Bush has already experienced, remains the third rail of American
politics. Debate before the 2008 election should produce the first of
many win-win options for the Democrats: Either enough GOP senators
defect to protect themselves as well as Social Security, or they don't
defect and boost their own vulnerability at the polls. Of forty-nine
GOP-held Senate seats, twenty-one are up for grabs.
Beyond Social Security lies a decisive second issue: healthcare. A
tangible start has already begun with the bill to end one of the
greatest boondoggles in legislative history--the GOP ban on the
government's right to negotiate prices with drug companies. It passed
the House 255 to 170. With the drug lobby weighing in, Democratic
partisans were pleased to see that all the no votes were cast by
Republicans. More suggestive is the fact that a score of others broke
ranks to support the Democrats--a move that reflects less an
alteration of ideology than anxiety about surviving 2008. This will be
a dicey time because by then Americans will know how much of their own
family budgets and the nation's Treasury the Republican Party has
brazenly transferred to pharmaceutical firms. Already put away in the
House bank is the most important labor bill in a generation: the
Employee Free Choice Act, designed to end the corporate reign of
threats and job firings routinely visited upon all those trying to get
a union at their workplace. The bill passed 241 to 185.
Meanwhile, the government has essentially been outsourced to corporate
America. In a convenient bit of tidiness, most auditing tasks have
been outsourced as well. Hired contractors guard the US Treasury by
casting glances over ledgers provided by other contractors. This way
of running the country carries arrogance to public levels never before
seen. Meanwhile, the Libby verdict ground into the national psyche the
entire structure of "lying America into war"--a venture that changed
the way the world feels about Americans as a people. What more will
surface by, say, June 2008? By November? Much fuel for realignment
lurks here.
A comparative framework for the impending Democratic sweep can be
found in the time in American history that most vividly corresponds to
the present--a moment that materialized right after another Democratic
breakthrough, seventy-seven years ago.
The time is 1930. Democrats have just found themselves in control of
the House under conditions they did not create and could not have
imagined even two years earlier. They have essentially been bystanders
at the instant of their ascendancy. The decisive political fact is
that something fundamental has gone terribly awry. The disaster has
come upon the nation with great speed, the consequences have gotten
more severe with every passing day and the President is doing nothing
in response. Instead he makes pious speeches that depress people
because they do not address reality. A testy minority has long seen
him as a complacent man nursing a penchant for pomposity. To them, his
posture comes across as disdain for the suffering of millions, not to
mention the mounting anxiety of almost everybody else. He has begun to
be hated by many people and is no longer trusted by most. The disaster
that generates all this is called the Great Depression. The President
who does not act but speaks in slogans is named Herbert Hoover. Though
the Civil War had conferred great prestige on the Republican Party,
suddenly, after many decades, grave peril looms.
The relationship between then and now is compelling. Every time Hoover
extolled the curative powers of the free market, every time he wrapped
himself in the red, white and blue of American prosperity, he verified
the emptiness of his leadership. The American people had to endure a
one-two punch: a self-undermining President, leaking support while
trying to defend his immobility, and a docile party confined by its
dazed need to be loyal to him. It took a while to play out publicly,
but eventually the rhythm of an immobilized President and a party of
straight men brought home to the population the depth of the trap they
were in. But right after their breakthrough, Democrats could not by
themselves drive home to a needy electorate the initiatives many hoped
to enact. They did not yet have the aid of a cooperating President.
Just as Iraq undermines George Bush in 2007, Hoover's inability to
deal with reality in 1931 and '32 was seen by voters for what it was:
clear failure. The result in 1932 made the breakthrough in 1930 seem
petty. The House became Democratic, 310 to 117; and the Senate, 60 to
35.
Nevertheless, these numbers did not mean what they seemed--a landslide
victory that ushered in the New Deal that followed. Herbert Hoover was
out and Franklin Roosevelt was in, yet what "followed" for three more
years was neither Social Security nor the Wagner Act but rather
intense struggles at workplaces across the country. Striking for union
recognition, workers mounted almost 4,000 job actions in 1933 and '34,
most visibly a failed general strike of 200,000 that spread through
Southern textile country and a second, more successful general strike
on the San Francisco waterfront. Support for collective bargaining was
strong in both Houses of Congress, but FDR, focused as he was on
agriculture, blocked it. Finally, in the summer of 1935, after one of
the anchors of New Deal legislation, the National Industrial Recovery
Act, was declared unconstitutional, the Senate overwhelmingly passed
the Wagner Act, 63 to 12. FDR finally got on board just before the
bill soared through the House and became law--along with Social
Security.
The GOP response to all this remained grounded in the belief that the
New Deal was destructive and socialist. The party's most vivid voice
was a redbaiting, occasionally anti-Semitic lobby calling itself the
Liberty League. But in the same way that the evening news from Iraq
mocks the rigidity of Bush talk today, such hysteria about socialism
could not substitute for reality in 1933 and '34 any more than Hoover
talk could in 1931 and '32. Never at any point in the 1930s did the
GOP develop a rhetorical match for Roosevelt. His fireside chats on
nationwide radio became the most dramatic and effective connection
between the American people and their President ever forged, before or
since. "Taxes shall be levied according to the ability to pay," he
said. "That is the only American principle." He effectively ridiculed
the Republican Party as the home to "economic royalists" who, despite
having "two perfectly good legs...never learned to walk forward."
For generations still to come, American historians will doubtless be
comparing the period 1930-36 to that of 2006-12 as years of high
political-economic crisis for capitalism. One crisis stemmed from a
worldwide depression, triggered by the American depression of 1929,
the other by an ambitious scheme of globalization benefiting the
financial sectors of every country in the world advanced enough to
have a financial sector. It also severely harmed workers in all the
advanced democracies, placing their labor movements under unbearable
pressure--and none more so than in America. The most important
achievement of the Democratic Party in the earlier period rested on
the vital educational function it served on an absolutely essential
subject: the role of demand in facilitating a healthy economy. Though
later scholars would label the Wagner Act "labor's Magna Carta," it
was, in fact, the nation's economy that was set temporarily on the
path to liberation--even if it took another decade or so for some of
the nation's classical economists to begin to consider that the
long-term welfare of the economy and the growth of organized labor
were essentially linked.
In the wake of the realignment of 1932, Congressional Democrats found
themselves on this issue, the analysis of demand, hemmed in at square
one--not only with journalists and other opinion-makers but with their
own President. Both FDR and Congress could share in the achievement of
Social Security. But the Wagner Act belonged to Congress alone--and to
the American people who backed their representatives. Today, with the
Wagner Act long since gutted, globalization is well along the path of
rotting the fabric of the economy from below.
It will take a sensible and dedicated President and a sensible and
strong Congress to set a more democratic course for the realigned
politics that is coming. But the table has been set for both.
Relentless Congressional inquiries have begun--and are
unstoppable--because the initial target is a regime whose capacity for
sustained deceit and wholesale incompetence has reached a broad
plateau of ethical corruption that is without precedent in American
history. Bush lied the country into a foreign quagmire that destroyed
the goodwill toward the country of populations residing on every
continent. He politicized and humiliated his own Justice Department,
falsely accusing honorable men and women of incompetence. To protect
his closest adviser, he betrayed lesser advisers, weakening the
country's rule of law.In power-grabbing acts of centralization,
through the grossly mistitled Patriot Act, he has repeatedly shown
contempt for the Bill of Rights. Through acts that were legal but
grotesquely undemocratic in philosophy, he destroyed the structure of
the balanced budget he inherited, undermining long-term demand and
hastening the economic downturn that has begun. He has proved his
indifference to the fate of one of America's great cities because of
his indifference to most of the people who lived in it. He has
degraded the nation. Though our plate of dismay and despair is full,
we have more to learn, and Congress, with Karl Rove's blood
everywhere, will see that we learn it.
The citizenry as a whole has been pushed far back by the
authoritarianism of the Bush/Cheney team and the greed it has
inspired, particularly in finance and corporate medicine. The country,
including the media at large, has a distance to travel to get up to
speed for the revelations to come.
Finally, though American life in 2007 does not resemble the numbing
degradation of the Depression years, something else is eating its way
through the fabric of the commonwealth--a reality we don't yet possess
the political language to describe with poise. Woven deeply into the
shared experience of Americans is a sense of people actually "getting
somewhere," of being able through hard work to "move up in the world"
and, when disaster occurs, to get a second job to hold family
catastrophe at bay. Over time, generations of parents have passed on a
belief in the nation's democratic experiment, a concept at once
American and biblical--originally set down with romantic
seventeenth-century flair as "a city upon a hill." It accounts for the
peculiarly American sense of the possibility of dignity for everyone.
It is this very sense of what we should be as a people that stokes
modern anxiety, activated as it now is by downsizings across the
country. Initially surfacing privately, inside families, it is now a
part of life, a social blemish that has turned into a hardened scar as
highly skilled mechanics in dozens of occupations become unemployed
and women have no option but to become family breadwinners. These
anomalies are driven by the very industrial facts people once believed
they had under control. At a time when the value of the minimum wage
has sunk by 20 percent in a single decade, the enormous leap in wealth
by the top 1 percent fails to console the rest of us. We all have
proof there is (currently) no promise of a city on a hill. In 2007,
the quality most visible at the top of the hill is greed.
This sober reality explains why Americans are giving themselves
permission, once again, to think broadly about democratic possibility.
Though most people work for businesses, they have learned to be
skeptical when the boss tells them what is good for the nation. The
suffocating consistency of the Bush Administration's lies has expanded
this skepticism exponentially. But in a corporate culture where
conservative arrogance has been rubbed in people's faces at work and
in politics, it takes a while for citizens to allow themselves to
stand up.
To assist them, a measure of Democratic Party clarity would be very
helpful. Since GOP incumbents cannot campaign effectively in 2008 by
dealing seriously with issues that now bear down on the American
people, much of Republican electioneering will consist of TV attacks
on the character of their opponents. Democratic defenses will depend
on the power of the agenda they have advanced. In 2004 the many-sided
John Kerry was Swift-Boated into history's dustbin, while two years
later in Tennessee, there appeared a Democratic candidate who managed
to take the lead in a tight Senate race. He was a nice fellow, though
prone to straddling issues of substance. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that the bigger the issue, the wider his straddle. Detecting
opportunity, GOP consultants served up a casually dressed Caucasian
lass who, in a racist TV ad, coyly used the Democratic candidate's
first name--as if to court him and degrade him all at once. The GOP
aspirant, a man of modest talent, managed to pull out a narrow win in
a Democratic year. When Democrats learn how to be clear on central
issues, this kind of ignoble foolishness will no longer succeed. Party
realignment will then happen and the country can start to work on its
very real problems.
And not until then.
We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is
he in heaven? - Is he in hell? That damned, elusive Pimpernel?
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win. Mohandas Gandhi
