Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

Well you can't beat the republicans by hiring nice people I suppose. But hiring a convict is a blunder and putting a lightning rod right on your campaign team. On the bright side, one might hope it could help sink her candidacy before it gets through the primaries, though with republicans everywhere talking almost exclusively about her it seems she is being willed by the establishment to be the next Dem candidate.

But it's just one thing more for the press to talk about in their endless effort to talk about anything but the candidate's positions. I've been noticing much of the media coverage of the campaign is limited to being about how much money Candidate X has raised (republican or democrat) and how they're doing in the polls heading into the primaries, but precious little coverage of what any of the candidates actually stand for. I think this does a serious disservice to the public and the electoral process. It's like it's all just some horse race to watch just for the sake of seeing who's coming out ahead so we stay distracted from whatever's really going on.

Bases of both parties want impossible things. All politicians know that. The democratic base wants Pelosi to get in a time machine and go back to 2002 and prevent the Iraq invasion from happening. The republican base wants a christian-nation theocracy with more military spending, more wars and no taxes.

The left base has been jonesing for a fight with the right for 7 years and the dems won't give it to them so they're venting and lashing out in every direction. The country is tensely polarized, and some steam has been building for years that seriously needs some blowing off.

She's a pragmatist, a "business is business" politician, and frankly it becomes her to be so. The hard left will vilify her for failing to be the omnipotent savior to rescue the nation from the yoke of the neocons, but time will vindicate her sober and moderating influence.

Jim Babcock said:
I will take that as a campaign promise, and cannot wait.

Pffft. You take everything as a campaign promise. She says she'll "attempt" to form a coalition... "attempt" is a weasel word, which, roughly translated, means she promises NOTHING.

I know how much you're in love with the word lie but I'll stick to the judge's term of 'errors' :

I think it should be noted that 7 of the 9 "errors" are just disagreements in interpretation of the presented facts. In other words, the judge disagrees with the documentary's conclusions.

The remaining 2 "errors":

The bit about polar bears -- it's not just 4 corpses, additional evidence includes multiple sightings of bears swimming out in the open ocean, up to 60 offshore. In any event, the bears are vanishing but obviously this is indirect and could point to alien abductions or something. The assertion that it is a "factual error" implies that 4 corpses from a storm (I haven't read anything yet that said they were from a storm) was all the evidence there was, and that assertion is factually wrong. So this "error" also doesn't count.

So that leaves 1 "error":
The bit about low-lying pacific atolls being evacuated or not, I honestly don't know about that -- it was certainly not a memorable part of the film, whether it's already happened or happening 10 years from now is not a material dispute at any rate. I can find some articles from 2006 talking about this in a future tense, and someone saying some paper somewhere had claimed it had already begun. This may have indeed been a factual error if the movie's research department pulled the fact from the papers without actually flying to the atolls to confirm it.

So that reduces the 9 "errors" to 8 disputed conclusions (someone disagrees with the conclusions, surprise surprise) and 1 actual error in a movie packed with hundreds of facts, statistics, maps and charts. That's not counting this year's record retreat of the polar ice cap that occurred since the movie, I notice you left out that "fact".

Do the words "preponderance of evidence" mean anything to people? Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

That said, I'm done with the global warming battle. Republican obstruction has already won that one, the greenhouse is here and we've dithered long enough so that it's too late to fix. Congratulations. You got the malaria-infested jungle-planet you wanted. I hope western civilization survives your ideological victory.

A technical event worth noting for those who like to try to read the tea leaves -- The Nasdaq appears to have formed a key reveral today, and a fairly devastating one at that. The event was duplicated in the Russell 2000 smallcap index and the vix and also nearly so in the mid-caps and S&P 500... but the Dow looks positively sleepy in the midst of all this.

Well at the moment the woman has no name and there is no source. That's not a terribly useful scoop. Somebody's trying to generate some kind of buzz, maybe to see if it rustles up something real. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it the story was a plant by Hillary's campaign.

Just another artifact of trying to hold the center at a polarized time. The Dems in Congress are trying to avoid politically marginalizing themselves the way Repubs did.

By trying to hold the center though, you have to annoy your base to some degree. That's the stuff that makes for lasting, if awkward, majorities. Otherwise you can ride a one-time tidal wave to victory, totally pander to your base and forget the rest, and ba-da boom ba-da bing you're out in the next one or two elections wondering what went wrong.

So some poll says 49% say the U.S. is in a recession. At what point does this psychology become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

So what do you guys think of this multi-billion-dollar fund the money-center banks are tying together to buy up some of these shaky SIVs. Reading about it the whole thing sounds flaky to me, like a bunch of smoke and mirrors to try to bury a really BIG problem. Opinions?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a_jPiji.oAzw&refer=home

Since we decided to spend $462 billion and counting to go to war to secure the oil reserves for our future, I can't help but wonder how far $462 billion would have gone toward making us independent of it.

Of course, such sums can never be found for long-term planning and preparation even though it's easy enough to find it when it comes to having to spend money to fund massive policy mistakes -- but it's still fun to imagine alternative history. Of course, the ultimate cost of the Iraq war could be trillions, but even the amount we've spent already could have bought:

- 20 million hybrid cars
- A 400W wind generator for every man, woman and child in America
- Solar installations for 10 or 20 million homes
- Fusion power R&D for 250 years

Of course hindsight is 20-20. I still remember the good ol' days when the war proponents here and in the media were touting the fact that this war would be 100% free of charge -- oil revenues were going to pay for it all quite easily, and afterward we would all have cheap gasoline to dump into our SUV's. Of course the government's best information even back then said otherwise, but it was a convenient lie that made the war easier to sell to a somewhat skeptical public.