M.A.?  I would have flunked you from my class, buddy.

Rus, I note that you did not deny my suspicion that your education does not go beyond high school. (At times I have wondered whether it even goes that far). I have no doubt that you never served in the military, let alone experienced combat (My resume includes the fact that I am also a Vietnam Vet). 

You project onto others your own “lack of judgment”—a lack of judgment that arises from profound ignorance and is the product of the having been duped over a life time by the likes of comedian Rush Limbaugh or, in the words of Keith Olbermann, “Billo the Clown from Fixed Noise,” or simply because you lack the intellectual capacity to understand how to look for and ferret out the facts from the constant white noise bombarding you from the right-wing echo chamber.

Frankly, I don’t enjoy pounding away at a lesser mind, but since you have persisted in your nonsense and irrational attacks on everyone who is not taken in by your talking points drivel, I felt the time has come for someone to tell you like it is.  Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, kid, but you don’t have a clue.

Rus, I hold both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science (with honors).  I graduated from a fully accredited law school 4th in a class of 277; published a law review article on executive privilege, served as a student editor of that law review, successfully practiced law for 31 years, including numerous appellate court appearances, served as an arbitrator, a judge pro tem and lectured at continuing education of the bar seminars, and you, whom I suspect has at best a high school education, are going to presume to lecture me on the difference between fact and opinion?

r-r-r-rus.  Now you’re stuttering even in print.

John McCain is not only a fraud he is a hypocrite. Like Bush and Cheney, he cares nothing about an energy policy. If people would watch his actions and then listen to his words that becomes patently obvious.

On July 30, the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

This is the fraud and hypocrite who is passing himself off as one who cares about our future.

How typical these neocons are of right wing posters.  As Bill Moyers once observed, the quickest way to be denounced as sheltering a liberal bias is to hit them with the facts.  Of course, being Orwellian trolls, they cannot accept any source unless it is an “official source,” as if the documents emanating from our political branches of government are the only version of reality one may accept.  (And we just know that the Bush administration would never dream of cooking the books). All else, regardless of the facts upon which it is based, is mere “opinion” to be discarded like yesterday’s trash.

How sad!  How blind!  How stupid!

The challenge is still out there, Rowman & JBlack—negate a single “fact” I posted on 8/10 at 7:29 a.m.  And they are indeed facts, JBlack.  The question of whether the gap between rich and poor is the greatest since 1929 is a fact, not an opinion.  The question of whether we are facing the greatest number of home foreclosures since the Great Depression is a fact, not an opinion.  The question of whether the percentage of Americans in a negative savings status is the highest since the Great Depression is a fact, not an opinion.  The question of whether America is experiencing the largest number of bank failures since the Great Depression is a fact, not an opinion.

Here’s a couple of added facts about the growing gap between rich and poor.

Thirty years ago, at $1.3 million, the average annual CEO compensation was 39 times that of the average worker.  Today, at $37.5 million, it is over a thousand times that of the average worker,  who experienced a ten percent loss of real wages during the same thirty years.  During the past twenty-five years the number of Americans below the poverty line swelled from 21 million to 33 million. 18,000 Americans die each year simply because they cannot afford to purchase health insurance. 

By 1999, the net worth of just three individuals, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Warren Buffet, was larger than the gross domestic product of the world’s 41 poorest nations and their 550 million people.

Sources:  Bill Moyers, “Moyers on America;” Eduardo Parker, “After Years of Growth, What About Workers’ Share?” New York Times, 10/15/06; Jim Hightower, “Thieves in High Places”; Kevin Phillips, “Wealth & Democracy;”  Center for Disease Control.

Yeah, real original, JBlack.  Don’t trouble yourself with all those dire statistics establishing that Republicans have driven the American economic bus to the edge of a ditch as deep as the Grand Canyon.  The U.S. is simply suffering from a “mental recession.”  (JBlack = Phil Gramm?) I’ll just take a drive down to skid row and give a speech to the growing ranks of homeless people and tell them, don’t worry, be happy!  That will solve everything.

rowman, list a single “fact” set forth in my last post which is less than accurate.  Can’t do it, can you.  Know why?  Because they are truths that are simply inconvenient to those, like you, who have bought into Republican propaganda.

cann4ing “We have a fascist government…”

I agree that the Democrats and Republicans have transferred us from a great nation of Freedom to the nation of Laws we have today. The only purpose of these laws is to control and suppress you, the citizen.

So then, how in the hell can you sit here and push propaganda in support of the Democratic Party?

They are just as guilty and just as much of the problem. There is NO difference between these two parties, they are one. The DemoPublican Party.

Alarmist?  Largest gap between rich and poor since 1929.  Largest number of home foreclosures since the Great Depression.  Largest percentage of citizens with negative savings since the Great Depression.  Largest federal deficit in our nation’s history fueled by a permanent warfare mentality and an imperial conquest of a foreign nation that had never attacked us—a conquest that per Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has already cost this nation three trillion dollars. 

America today is lead by an exorbitantly wealthy elite which has shipped our entire manufacturing base overseas in search of the $2/day laborer as the remnants of American labor or either out of work or working for below-poverty wages.  We have a fascist government so perverted by corruption and power that it could stand idly by as tens of thousands of its citizens were left to sink or swim in a toxic soup of flood waters, petrochemicals and dead bodies (Katrina).  It is a government which is so out of touch that it finds it necessary to spy on its own citizens, deny the right of habeas corpus, engage in torture and hide its own corrupt behavior behind an impenetrable veil of secrecy. 

But the most monumental reason for concern is the existence of citizens like JBlack, who are so monumentally uninformed, that they actually think that we can bring gas prices down by handing more land and oil to the oil cartel to horde and divvy out as it pleases—citizens who think it is actually a good idea to elect a monumentally stupid and dishonest man like the guy Paris Hilton referred to as the “wrinkly, white haired old dude” who, even in his prime, could not parlay the good fortune of being the privileged son and grandson of powerfully placed admirals into anything better than finishing 894th in a class of 899—as compared to an opponent who, as the product of a broken home, parlayed a superior intellect and hard work into becoming the first African American editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, going on to graduate from that esteemed institution Magna Cum Laude before teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

When I see citizens out there, like you JBlack, who are so monumentally stupid that they will buy into McSame’s BS, I shudder for the future of this nation.

Hmmmm, did it ever occur to you Sam that the oil cartel wants exclusive access to drilling but also the ability to limit supply to maintain price levels?

Also, in seeking new and more expensive ways to drill for more, aren’t you leaving off little things like global climate change and much cheaper, clean alternative energy sources—wind, solar, geothermal, wave.

Al Gore said it best.  When you’re in a hole, you don’t keep digging.

Graduate students have been working on cost effective ways to process Colorado oil shale for at least fifty years, and their problem has always been the cheap 20 dollar a barrel oil. At this point, ANY of the ideas put forward ought to work fine and get us all the oil we need for years to come with no dependence on foreign oil sources at all.

How long it would take us to get the new oil “in the pipeline” in quantity would depend on two major things: (1) commitment, and (2) when we get started. What I cannot understand is why we have not already started.

I just read that the GOP convention committee has hired additional “escort” services to be able to handle all participating attendees.  At least we know that the Republican Party is in favor of “On Shore Drilling.”

Consider Paul Krugman’s op-ed from today’s New York Times:

“Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid….The know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. party’s de facto slogan has become: ‘Real men don’t think things through.’”

“In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadeggus, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

Krugman goes on to discuss the current poll numbers revealing how many Americans have been taken in by the drill-our-way to independence canard (69%) but to the large numbers who mistakenly believed we invaded Iraq to retaliate for 9/11 while any who dared to point out the not so subtle distinction between Osama and Saddam as America-hating, effite snobs, then adds: 

“Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. ‘Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,’ declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. ‘He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.’”

Ever since they launched into Lloyd Benson for telling Dan Quayle, “Senator, you’re no John Kennedy,” Republicans have proclaimed it their birth right to place the dumbest MF they can find into the POTUS.  In that, their current presumptive nominee, the guy Paris Hilton aptly dubbed “the wrinkly, white-haired old dude” does not disappoint.  The son and grandson of powerfully placed admirals whom privilege afforded a place in the Naval Academy where he finished 894th in a class of 899 is intellectually overmatched by an opponent who graduated Magna Cum Laude from the nation’s most prestigious law school—Harvard—before going on to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

Thanks to a pliant corporate media, these “know nothings” are permitted to operate in a fact-free environment.  Is it any wonder why we are teetering on catastrophic failure?

Say what you will about the old war horse (senile, out of touch, bumbling old codger) He’s catching up in the poles (Obama should be at least 20 points up by now) by being nothing but his dimwitted self. Just wait until after the RNC convention, when his cronies run the neocon playbook and a bitter frightened citizenry elect his wrinkled ass.
Think I’m wrong? Anybody remember 2000 or 2004.
Keep these facts in mind as November approaches,
a majority of Americans still think that Saddam planned 911, that torture is OK, that global warming is a left wing conspiracy, that Barack Obama is a muslim, and that Angels are watching over us.
Let’s hope they’re right about the last one, or we just might be FUBAR!

As a libertarian, I don’t have a dog in the fight between tweedle dee and tweedle dum. If someone put a gun to my head and forced me to choose between Obama and McCain, I’d go for Obama. But, as an outside observer, I have to say he could still manage to lose the election on his energy policy.

Imagine! Losing an election to the sitting president’s party, when the economy is in recession, and an unpopular war continues to drag on seemingly forever.

In my opinion, the Federal government has almost no constitutional role in “energy policy”, since this is not an enumerated power per Article 1, Section 8. Having sufficient energy is a matter of getting the government out of the way, and letting the market determine which sources of energy will work best.

The Democratic Party used to be the party of decentralized, local government, rather than the party of Washington Ueber Alles. Now, the D’s simply “me too” the R’s, agreeing that the President, like some sort of Il Duce, should have the power to determine what energy concerns will be allowed to succeed, and which to fail.

Silly people. You will not get around the drilling. Get real.

You are totally dependent on oil, use it every day and have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Wind electricity is only reliable 10% of the time. Solar is most efficient right now at heating water and we are decades away from being able to use either as a replacement. Moore’s law does not apply.

We import most of our oil from Canada, have the largest Natural Gas reserves but we buy it from Canada also, sell portions of our oil to other nations and China is tapping the coastal oil by drilling of the coast of Cuba. We should be selling it to them and paying off our debt instead of giving it away.

You want to blame all of this on others when you are the problem so stop whining like a little spoiled brat. Pelosi has no clue how to fix this and is playing politics with your and my money while we pay for their auto fuel.

Drill we will and if you are against it, stop using any form of electricity or transportation that comes from oil or natural gas.

what was pointed out most aptly by a writer on Alternet- WE will not Own tht Oil, Exxon et al Will own the oil- so they can sell it to anyone they want, Highest bidders? Exxon et al have no obligation to reserve all that Oil for OUR consumption only.
So regardless when or how much oil comes from Off shore drilling, or new leasing opportunities - Gov’t sold OUR rights to that national Resource off to the Corps LONG ago!

Drill more Amerikan oil so that oil can be planted on the global market! That’s where the real money is. Yup. Build more nuclear monstrosities and where oh where does Amerika store the nuclear waste? Wait a minute, Phoenix! Yup, there’s not much going on in Phoenix so, Amerika could store the nuclear waste there. Besides, McNuts doesn’t live in Phoenix.
Yup, Amerika’s “war hero” has certainly got it going on. More “drilling” and more “nuclear power” and golly ‘we’re saved’! Phoenix is going to mostly suck with all those spent fuel rods laying hither and yon, but it’s Phoenix and maybe the Maricopa County Sheriff could get his ‘slave labor force’ to tidy up a snudge.

SOoo…....If we start drilling NOW….we will see the BENEFITS in 10+/- YEARS…Does “mccbush” plan on MULTIPLE TERMS OF OFFICE in order to see his “plan” thru???????And we KNOW HE READS PROMPTS-cuz he has “fuck*d” them up many times-Coul it be CUZ HE HAS “oldtimers/alzheimers”.........???????

No, he does not want to be placed in a situation of having to respond to those type questions. Besides, it won’t be on his script! Have you noticed that every time he gives a “speech” he is constantly looking down to “read” what he needs to say? And all those gaffs, like the “tire pressure” issue. That properly inflated tires saves gasoline is true and many of us have known it for YEARS and HE makes a joke as if it were not! And his idea of “taking on big oil” really means taking on their contributions to his floundering campaign! No, McCain does not want to confront those questions AT ALL!