As if you needed another reason to not vote Romney.
Celebrity business magnate Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president Thursday, telling reporters he will not mount an independent campaign if ...
In a perfect world, the Republican contest to find a nominee to face Barack Obama would go on forever...or at least until August. You cannot attach a number to the ...
I suspect there are a ton of conservatives secretly agreeing with Begala and while it's too early in the game for Dems to get cocky, it's difficult to not smile ...
Quotes don't get much better than this one by Bob Dole.
"Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" asked a perplexed Gingrich, to whom Dole bluntly ...
After the beating Gingrich took last night, it's hard to imagine under what scenario he can make a comeback. Florida is going to Romney and for Gingrich to regain the ...
There's a lot out there on the President's SOTU, so I'll keep my thoughts short and sweet.
The speech did what it had to do which was target liberals and independents ...
The highlights from last night's debate.
- Newt Gingrich can't wait to become president so he can revisit the early 60s and overthrow Castro in Cuba. War, baby, war.
- Santorum, who ...
It appears that the South Carolina verdict is forcing Romney to start taking Gingrich seriously.
“We’re not choosing a talk show host, we’re choosing a leader,” Romney said, saying that their ...
Mike Huckabee offers advice to Mitt Romney concerning his unreleased tax returns.
Let him [Romney] make this challenge: "I'll release my tax returns when Barack Obama releases his college transcripts and ...
Via Political Humor...
"Mitt Romney is coming under fire because even though he is a multimillionaire, he only paid 15 percent in taxes. That's not a tax, that's barely a tip." ...
Good line.
My guess is that after Romney fails to beat Obama in the general, Huntsman will be back in 2016. The most electable guy in the field and he could ...
I found this pretty funny...and accurate. It comes from a reader over at Balloon Juice.
So, let’s review. The contenders for the GOP nomination are
A vulture capitalist who believes that any ...
Lively little debate going on at one of last week's posts with Libertarianism put under the microscope.
ocLiberal:
I know I am in sketchy territory here, (start the indignant shouting now) but ...
In the contest to determine the winner of the Far-Right Politics gold medal, rack up a few more points for Newt Gingrich.
“I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal ...
Via Political Humor...
"Congratulations to Mitt Romney. He won the New Hampshire primary last night. See, this is proof that even the multimillionaire son of a multimillionaire can beat the odds ...
Story 1:
North Korea punishing those who 'didn't display enough sadness over Kim Jong Il's death'
North Korean authorities are reportedly punishing citizens who did not display enough sadness over the death ...
In case you missed the story, Pope Benedict made headlines this week by doing what it is popes do best - putting the irrational fear of God into his followers.
The ...
Romney was asked whether questions dealing with distribution of wealth and power were a matter of jealousy or fairness.
You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class ...
If one could meld the Republican presidential candidates into a single person, what would emerge? I was thinking along the lines of Jekyll and Hyde and the result, as demonstrated ...
a) so full of himself, it starts oozing out of every body orifice.
b) so desperate to win that he…
c) tries to win over the idiot base by pretending he doesn’t believe in global warming science.
“I’m an amateur paleontologist, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the earth’s temperature over a very long time,” Gingrich said. “I’m a lot harder to convince than just by looking at a computer model.”
Pathetic. Newt Gingrich once dreamed of becoming a zookeeper, read a couple of books on dinosaurs and kept a T-Rex skull in his office when he served as Speaker of the House and that, he believes, qualifies him to dismiss climate change data as erroneous. Gingrich, the pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-scientist bullshit artist feels he’s better equipped to determine the validity of climate science than the 98% of the world’s climatologists who study this stuff day in, day out and warn of the impending danger of ignoring the data.
Gingrich’s statement is too ridiculous for words but yet they’re words of wisdom to those less knowledgeable than Newt. That’s simply the way it works.
Top environmental officials under Perry have gutted a recent report on sea level rise in Galveston Bay, removing all mentions of climate change. For the past decade, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which is run by Perry political appointees, including famed global warming denier Bryan Shaw, has contracted with the Houston Advanced Research Center to produce regular reports on the state of the Bay. But when HARC submitted its most recent State of the Bay publication to the commission earlier this year, officials decided they couldn’t accept a report that said climate change is caused by human activity and is causing the sea level to rise. Top officials at the commission proceeded to edit the paper to censor its references to human-induced climate change or future projections on how much the bay will rise.
[...]
TCEQ even deleted a reference to the fact that the bay is currently rising by 3 millimeters a year—five times faster than the long-term average. The edited version that TCEQ sent back also killed a line noting that the bay’s “future will be strongly regulated by the now rising sea,” as well as the factual assertion that the disappearance of the wetlands is “due mainly to direct human intervention.” The officials also cut out the statement that the water level rise “is one of the main impacts of global climate change.”
The degree of willful ignorance on the part of GW deniers is astounding. Fossil fuel lobbyists line the pockets of politicians as they go about the dirty business of censoring scientific research on the causes and effects of climate change. None of this is new to conservatives and Republicans. From day one, the Bush administration blatantly censored government funded research which ran counter to the story they were promoting. From 2007.
The Bush administration was yesterday accused of systemic tampering with the work of government climate scientists to eliminate politically inconvenient material about global warming.
At a hearing of Congress, scientists and advocacy groups described a campaign by the White House to remove references to global warming from scientific reports and limit public mention of the topic to avoid pressure on an administration opposed to mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions.
Such pressure extended even to the use of the words “global warming” or “climate change”, said a report released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project. The report said nearly half of climate scientists at government agencies had been advised against using those terms.
And here’s a 2006 piece on James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s top climatologists.
…this imminent scientist says that the Bush administration is restricting who he can talk to and editing what he can say. Politicians, he says, are rewriting the science.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is little point in discussing climate change with your run-of-the-mill, Fox News parrot. These people are clueless. Enough of them would believe that the earth is flat and the center of our solar system if Bill O’Reilly believed it to be so. If these fools are unwilling to accept the scientific consensus of 98% of the world’s climatologists over that of a lying monkey, it’s fair to assume that anything anyone else has to say on the matter will have little impact on their beliefs. It’s an old line but true nonetheless – you can’t fix stupid.
The focus needs to be on ensuring that as many as possible of the politicians who push an anti-science, GW denying agenda, remain out of power. If there’s no Rick Perry or George W. Bush to appoint officials with the authority to censor and make a mockery of science, then maybe, truth and common sense can win out.
“I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective, is more and more being put into question.”
“Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that but I think that it is.”
“I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”
“What I’m not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don’t know the answer to.”
“I do not believe in cap and trade and I do not believe in putting a carbon cap” on polluting industries, Romney said.
Just like he did on abortion, gay rights, gun control, immigration, campaign finance and health care, Romney has turned away from previously stated positions and sold his soul in hope of becoming the next president. The latest Gallop poll has Perry taking a commanding lead over Romney as Republican’s candidate of choice – 29% for Perry, 17% for Romney. Combine that with endorsements from climate skeptics in the Senate – yes I refer to the pathetically stupid Jim Inhofe…
U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Wednesday that he plans to endorse Texas Gov. Rick Perry for president.
“I called Rick Perry a year ago and told him, ‘If you’re running for president, I’ll be the first to endorse you,’” Inhofe said at a State Chamber of Commerce breakfast at the Tulsa Press Club.
“I’m going to be that person on Monday.”
Inhofe said he “likes Mitt Romney, but he’s a little mushy on environmental issues.”
…and what you’re left with is Romney pulling a 180…again. He sees his second chance at fulfilling his dream in danger of slipping away at the hands of a Texas fool and his gut reaction is to immediately pander to the ignorance of the base he so desperately needs to win.
One can almost feel for Romney and the dilemma he finds himself in. He has come to learn what it is to be a candidate in today’s Republican Party – a truth expressed so well by a reader at TPM.
You can’t have an informed, reasonable position on anything, i.e. one that is based on established fact or a preponderance of scientific evidence (e.g. climate change, evolution) and be a viable Republican candidate. Mitt knows this; Huntsman will learn it soon enough.
Faust is alive and well and living in the heart and soul of Mitt Romney.
In the last post, Gary Johnson spoke of Republicans, social issues and intolerance. Let’s now take a look at Republicans and the views on climate change held by those vying for the President’s job.
“I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective, is more and more being put into question.”
“It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life. And I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.”
“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party – the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science – Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.”
And we won’t even get into Republicans and evolution.
Make no mistake about it, the Republican Party is the anti-science party. But if critical thinking is not your thing and you happen to be a Fox News guzzling lapdog who watches and believes the crap served on that network, then Perry, Bachmann and Santorum are the ones you should be sticking with. And if Sister Sarah joins the race, throw her into the moron heap as well. But if you’re a thinking conservative, then you might want to consider Huntsman. A presidential debate between Mr. Huntsman and President Obama would be a fine thing to watch and would do much to elevate American politics beyond the cartoon spectacle it has now become. Sadly, it’ll never happen.
Who is leading the Republican primary? Rick Perry. Who doesn’t have a chance in hell of winning the primary? Jon Huntsman.
Obviously, the GOP has no intention of relinquishing its well earned title as the Party of Ignorance.
Far be it from me to fail to do my small part to help seal Jon Huntsman’s doom, so count me as one more impressed liberal. His tweet from last week about believing in science and evolution and his remarks from his This Week appearance on Sunday, in which he disparaged his opponents on various reality-based grounds, were the words of a man who actually occupies this planet (and I mean the 4.5 billion-year-old one, not the one formed divinely 6,000 years ago when caveman and dinosaur fell simultaneously from the sky). Occupying this planet, of course, gives him no chance of winning the GOP primary, but it does give the rest of us a narrow thread of hope about the future.
[...]
The Huntsman strategy here is obvious: position himself as the moderate and reasonable guy on the off chance Republicans decide to be moderate and reasonable. We must assume he is aware that his odds on this are rather long, so what he’s really hoping for is to be the consensus candidate of 2016. Maybe the party just has to go through this purge, this Reign of Terror; so just let it do that, and once it does and nominates an extremist who can’t beat a weak incumbent during a time of 9 percent unemployment rates, and the heads are piled high enough in the tumbrels and enough people finally have returned to their senses, he will ride the Thermidorian wave to victory after Obama leaves town.
…but with a warning for liberals.
Remember: at the recent Fox News debate, when the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they would oppose a long-term budget deal that cut $10 for every single dollar it raised in revenue, Huntsman’s hand shot up just like Mitt Romney’s and Newt Gingrich’s did. There are some forms of standing out he is clearly not willing to do, and let’s keep focused on those, because liberals are too easily won over (as he surely knows) by Republicans who sound reasonable on cultural issues.
Fox continues doing what they do best – empowering idiots with their endless stream of misinformation and ignorance. Via MediaMatters we learn from a Guardian report that:
A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.
Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.
There has been talk, meanwhile, of a new environmental peacekeeping force – green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources.
So what do those lovely, insightful people over at Fox have to say about the climatic threat to small islands?
GREG GUTFELD: U.N. Security Council is considering climate change peacekeeping. And they’re having a meeting to discuss whether they should intervene in conflicts, due to rising sea levels. They actually believe that, like, small island states are going to disappear because of climate change. And there are even people that are saying, and this is at the U.N., that climate change is worse than terrorism. Is that amazing, Eric?
ERIC BOLLING: The U.N. and tree huggers are kind of like the Mickey Mouse Club for liberals so they feel better about themselves, meanwhile at our taxpayer dime. That’s the problem. Neither one work.
[...]
GUTFELD: How can you build an entire U.N. initiative on a science that everybody is debating anyway?
I don’t want to hate anyone, really, but I’m seriously at a point where I’ve come to despise these ignorant sonsofbitches with a passion. These anti-science, GW deniers do the work of the fossil fuel industries, feeding their hapless viewers a sack of shit and lies on a daily basis. I just had a little ‘discussion’ on the topic of climate change with an acquaintance of a friend who swears by anything he hears on Fox. Hearing this guy parrot the nonsense he’s heard on Fox and elsewhere with no attempt at understanding the science behind it all was a good reminder that the next time I wish to waste 15 minutes of my life, I’ll go have a chat with a brick wall.
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