j_b

I see that we must have shared a tent at some point, but we entered spray a few posts ago.

Right, why wouldn't they vote for a little more Trickle Down Goodness and Perpetual War for Freedom "please, pretty please, make it a low turn out so that our 25% can win"

The pics are about that old. I still use stuff I bought over 30 years ago. It works great for the most part.

People disapproving of corporate Democrats doesn't make them any closer to supporting conservative failed policies that took us to the brink, despite your pretending otherwise.

Don't forget about the NW face of Dragontail (between Backbone and Serpentine). a few pics (not current conditions):

At least 2/3 of Americans want a strong public health care option, similar numbers do not want an escalation in Afghanistan, want serious financial reform to reign in the banksters and their associates on wall street, want policy to bail out the real economy, etc ... Americans, and Obama's base in particular, increasingly disapprove of Obama and Democrats not delivering on the changes they promised during the electoral campaign and selling them down river to corporate interests. Meanwhile, impotent conservatives applaud this betrayal of democracy by the Democrat wing of the corporate party and pray this will lead to lower turn out during the next elections. and PP apparently still doesn't know the difference between 'independent' and 'middle'.

and I apologize to simians everywhere, it was the first picture of a knuckle dragger I found.

What we have is "laissez faire" capitalism, which had been shown to be a dead end at least already once before. It reeks of a last free for all (at least those who can) before the constraints of resource and environmental system services limits clamp down on this runaway train. The bigger the overshoot, the greater and the harder the fall.

Coal costs us hundreds of billions per year in health care, in destroyed resource/environment, and climate change. We have unlimited solar potential and significant wind potential, and existing proven technology that is cheap, mostly clean and forever, yet the so-called "small government" types want the big-government dirty solution (as in nuclear). The private sector refuses to invest in nuclear unless they can ride the taxpayers' gravy train, but have confidence in the ideologically corrupt to sing its praise. Laughable, really.

While I don't disagree with the sentiment of your post, your statement that Obama is a self-avowed capitalist which'd prevent him from delivering the needed changes isn't supported by the evidence IMO. There are many self-avowed capitalists, such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and others, who argue for structural changes in taxations and regulations because they are needed to make it work; yet, Obama won't deliver.

In Polls, Much Opposition to Health Care Plan Is From Left So PP, did you figure out the difference between 'independents' and 'middle'? In any case, you'd better straighten yourself out on that score before you treat us to another of your brilliant poll analysis.

Good catch. Is it truly neutral considering it takes decades/centuries to grow a mature forest? What about soil carbon budget?

the first week of this summit is being dominated by the representatives of the rich countries trying to lace the deal with Enron-style accounting tricks that will give the impression of cuts, without the reality. It's essential to understand these shenanigans this week, so we can understand the reality of the deal that will be announced with great razzamataz next week. Most of the tricks centre around a quirk in the system: a rich country can 'cut' its emissions without actually releasing fewer greenhouse gases. How? It can simply pay a poor country to emit less than it otherwise would have. In theory it sounds okay: we all have the same atmosphere, so who cares where the cuts come from? But a system where emissions cuts can be sold among countries introduces extreme complexity into the system. It quickly (and deliberately) becomes so technical that nobody can follow it - no concerned citizen, no journalist, and barely even full-time environmental groups. You can see if your government is building more coal power stations, or airports, or motorways. You can't see if the cuts they have "bought" halfway round the world are happening - especially when they are based on projections of increases that would have happened, in theory, if your government hadn't stumped up the cash. A study by the University of Stanford found that most of the projects that are being funded as "cuts" either don't exist, don't work, or would have happened anyway. Yet this isn't a small side-dish to the deal: it's the main course. For example, under proposals from the US, the country with by far the highest per capita emissions in the world wouldn't need to cut its own gas by a single exhaust pipe until 2026, insisting it'll simply pay for these shadow-projects instead. It gets worse still. A highly complex system operating in the dark is a gift to corporate lobbyists, who can pressure or bribe governments into rigging the system in their favour, rather than the atmosphere's. It's worth going through some of the scams that are bleeding the system of any meaning. They may sound dull or technical - but they are life or death to countries like Leah's. Trick One: Hot Air. The nations of the world were allocated permits to release greenhouse gases back in 1990, when the Soviet Union was still a vast industrial power - so it was given a huge allocation. But the following year, it collapsed, and its industrial base went into freefall - along with its carbon emissions. It was never going to release those gases after all. But Russia and the Eastern European countries have held onto them in all negotiations as "theirs". Now, they are selling them to rich countries who want to purchase "cuts." Under the current system, the US can buy them from Romania and say they have cut emissions - even though they are nothing but a legal fiction. We aren't talking about climatic small change. This hot air represents ten gigatonnes of CO2. By comparison, if the entire developed world cuts its emissions by 40 percent by 2020, that will only take six gigatonnes out of the atmosphere. Trick Two: Double-counting. This is best understood through an example. If Britain pays China to abandon a coal power station and construct a hydro-electric dam instead, Britain pockets the reduction in carbon emissions as part of our overall national cuts. In return, we are allowed to keep a coal power station open at home. But at the same time, China also counts this change as part of its overall cuts. So one ton of carbon cuts is counted twice. This means the whole system is riddled with exaggeration - and the figure for overall global cuts is a con. Trick Three: The Fake Forests - or what the process opaquely dubs 'LULUCF' . Forests soak up warming gases and store them away from the atmosphere - so, perfectly sensibly, countries get credit under the new system for preserving them. It is an essential measure to stop global warming. But the Canadian, Swedish and Finnish logging companies have successfully pressured their governments into inserting an absurd clause into the rules. The new rules say you can, in the name of "sustainable forest management", cut down almost all the trees - without losing credits. It's Kafkaesque: a felled forest doesn't increase your official emissions... even though it increases your actual emissions. Trick Four: Picking a fake baseline. All the scientific recommendations take 1990 as the dangerously high baseline we need to cut from. So when we talk about a 40 percent cut, we mean 40 percent less than 1990. But the Americans have - in a stroke of advertising genius - shifted to taking 2005 as their baseline. Everybody else is talking about 1990 levels, except them. So when the US promises a 17 percent cut on 2005 levels, they are in fact offering a 4 percent cut on 1990 levels - far less than other rich countries. There are dozens more examples like this, but you and I would lapse into a coma if I listed them. This is deliberate. This system has been made incomprehensible because if we understood, ordinary citizens would be outraged. If these were good faith negotiations, such loopholes would be dismissed in seconds. And the rich countries are flatly refusing to make even these enfeebled, leaky cuts legally binding. You can toss them in the bin the moment you leave the conference center, and nobody will have any comeback. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/our-leaders-are-staging-a_b_387942.html

Obama's Big Sellout The president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway MATT TAIBBI Posted Dec 09, 2009 2:35 PM Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing. Then he got elected. What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside. How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is? Whatever the president's real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial "reforms" that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street's political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer's role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama's top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals. How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed. [..] more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31234647/obamas_big_sellout/print

Since when are independents in the middle? did you take political science at the church of the free market or is there another reasonable explanation for your silly theories?

KKK was for 'war is peace' before he was against it? Is KKK an opportunist?

Quoting the scriptures from the church of the free market again?

I know this is what you want people to think but it's false. Many people don't want this reform because it is another handout to the insurance sector and the pharma industry without providing a public option.

You are wrongly assuming that everyone opposes current healtcare reform from the right whereas plenty of people oppose it because it is barely more than another hand out to the insurance industry through forcing the purchase of insurance and nothing to provide competiton to oligopolies. We won't even mention what it does to reproductive rights of women.

I don't need to watch FOX to recognize propaganda and the framing of events it puts forward. Since this summer the corporate media has been trying to have us believe that Obama's ratings are going down because of the "middle" or so-called "moderates" which is a lie since Obama has done nothing to upset the middle.

the same argument was used to justify invading Iraq. Did you have a problem with it then? I don't think so.

Cry me a river! If you guys didn't constantly try to pretend people's eyes are lying to them and didn't generally sound like some characters out of an Orwellian novel, you wouldn't get so much shit from everybody. Just compare your rhetoric with the reality of your politics: - the largest transfer of wealth ever from the middle class to the upper 0.1% of the income bracket and the highest rate of poverty in the developed world = 30 years of “trickle down” goodness - the largest corporate boondoggle ever at taxpayer’s expense, perpetual war, and a 25% increase in effective taxation of the middle class while corporate and upper income tax rates are the smallest in 70 years = “small government”, "free markets" and "fiscal responsibility" - the severest intrusions on privacy and trampling of the constitution in the name of security = “freedom” - And now Obama is widely perceived to be at best ineffective, if not unchallenging of the status quo despite his campaign promises and the severest crisis since the Great Depression = “moderates” are upset with Obama's "statist" policies

No shit. The mob that was cheering on torture, the patriot act, the spying on Americans, the signing statements, and on, now cries about tyranny and oppression. You can't make this stuff up. Any moment now, they'll claim to be for fiscal responsibility.

How clueless does one have to be to spew about "statism" after having supported policies that cost trillions in war expenditure and even more trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts and unsecured loans guarantees to the financial sector to barely survive the greatest speculative bubble burst since the 30's? We won't even discuss about having the gall to call that mess "free market". This is way beyond tragi-comedy, rather in the registry of burlesque in fact.