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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935
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 Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2016 6:55 pm Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | | This from the article he posted, which he characterized as "thoughtful" but now believes to be untrue ... |
Nuthin' wrong with posting an article for all to see, then stating one's position on it ... even if that position was negative to begin with and/or has changed due to closer examination, emerging facts, or honest change of heart. Any rational article can be thoughtful (or interesting or worthy of consideration) even if the reader disagrees with it. When we stop examining and considering viewpoints we oppose, we have stopped learning about them. Sometimes that's for the better, sometimes for the worse.
As an example of the former,
• I know enough about today's Democrat Party to vote against it and hope it collapses. Its goals diametrically oppose most of mine and will promote and advance the end of the U.S.A. and thus the free world.
OOPS; CORRECTION:
• If the GOP nominates somebody besides Trump just because they want a GOP insider, I will vote against the GOP AND the DNC and hope both collapse. The GOP's bungling ineptitude and lack of leadership are poisonous to efficient governance.
• This, despite my long-held firm opinion that a vote cast for a third party in a national election is wasted and divisive.
Last edited by isobars on Sat Jun 04, 2016 1:42 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2016 8:40 pm Post subject: |
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| I'll wait for a reasoned response as to why it was good that Ray-gun sold arms to death squad goons, and how succcessful the "star wars" program he supported (and which led to the Ray-gun nickname) was. I'm waiting... |
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mat-ty
Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 7850
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2016 8:53 pm Post subject: |
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| mac wrote: | "Little to do" escaped you, eh. You didn't post your source, I found it--among others. But the overwhelming problem was high intensity rainfall, largely in the upper watershed. It is pretty amusing to see amateurs dabble in hydrology.
On Ronnie Raygun, that slang term has been around forever. The reason that Reagan is abhorred by the left is primarily that he sold guns to Contra death squads.
| Quote: | We go to Managua, Nicaragua to speak with Fr. Miguel D’Escoto, a Catholic priest who was Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister under the Sandinista government in the 1980s. [Includes transcript]
The 8 years Reagan was in office represented one of the most bloody eras in the history of the Western hemisphere, as Washington funneled money, weapons and other supplies to right wing death squads. And the death toll was staggering–more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, 30,000 killed in the contra war in Nicaragua. In Washington, the forces carrying out the violence were called "freedom fighters." This is how Ronald Reagan described the Contras in Nicaragua: "They are our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers."
Fr. Miguel D’Escoto, a Catholic priest based in Managua, Nicaragua. He was Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister under the Sandinista government in the 1980s. |
We know now that the Soviet Union was weak (not because of Star Wars, but that didn't help), and that making union with anti-communists (or jihadists), no matter how abhorrent they are, is bad public policy.
Reagan also ignored the developing AIDs epidemic, pandered to the racist right with bogus claims about "welfare queens", vetoed legisiation to impose sanctions on South Africa (overridden, with even McConnell voting to override), and crafted the current immigration legislation to allow migrant agricultural workers--and undermine unionization of agriculture. To top it off, he was the first divorced President, and at least for a time, estranged from his children. Family values at work in the land of factless beliefs. Matty's hero. |
America's hero moron. Like I said before Reagan possessed an intangible that American hating nitwits like you will never understand. A giant compared to the fraud obama you so adore... |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2016 8:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Name caller Matty--the blood of 100,000 people killed by Contra death squads is on Reagan's hands. Your response? To call me a moron. You've again proved you are the biggest name caller on the forum--and in the running for the biggest fool. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2016 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Was the something intangible Alzheimer's? Or a willingness to play the race card to capture the South? Or just fighting unions? |
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J64TWB
Joined: 24 Dec 2013
Posts: 1685
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J64TWB
Joined: 24 Dec 2013
Posts: 1685
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| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2021 5:09 pm Post subject: |
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| It can’t export from the grid or import. What happens in Texas, stays in Texas. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Wed Feb 17, 2021 11:20 pm Post subject: |
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Deregulation and oil may not be the answer.
| Quote: | WASHINGTON - Ten years ago, plunging temperatures forced rolling blackouts across Texas, leaving more than 3 million people without power as the Super Bowl was played outside Dallas.
Now, with a near identical scenario following another Texas cold snap, Texas power regulators are being forced to answer how the unusually cold temperatures forced so much of the state’s power generation offline when Texans were trying to keep warm.
To start, experts say, power generators and regulators failed to heed the lessons of 2011 — or for that matter, 1989. In the aftermath of the Super Bowl Sunday blackout a decade ago, federal energy officials warned the grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, that Texas power plants had failed to adequately weatherize facilities to protect against cold weather.
A federal report that summer recommended steps including installing heating elements around pipes and increasing the amount of reserve power available before storms, noting many of those same warnings were issued after similar blackouts 22 years earlier and had gone unheeded. |
Of course, the dishonest governor blamed it on green power—not on incompetence and lack of concern for public welfare. I hear people are streaming back to California. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:10 pm Post subject: |
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When you appeal to voters by telling them they don't need government, and you never learn how to govern...
| Quote: | Image without a caption
Opinion by
Jennifer Rubin
Columnist
Feb. 17, 2021 at 9:39 a.m. PST
Incompetence is not the purview of one party. But when you view politics as theater and grievance-mongering, chances are you are going to shortchange governance. Elect a president with no public-sector experience, no interest in learning, no desire to hire competent people and no ability to accept responsibility, and you get something like the covid-19 debacle. Moreover, if your party is hostile to government and exercising regulatory power because it is beholden to a donor class and right-wing ideologues, you will not be prepared for disasters when they strike.
And that brings us to Texas. The Post reports, “As millions of people across Texas struggled to stay warm Tuesday amid massive cold-weather power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed his ire at one particular failure in the state’s independent energy grid: frozen wind turbines.” There is one problem: That is not remotely true (as you might have guessed from a state with an enormous oil and gas sector). “The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.”
In other words, rotten policy and management are to blame. “What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans,” The Post reports. “It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who had declared during last summer’s wildfires that California is “unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity,” had to eat crow:
Not good?! One might hope that instead of spending time on right-wing media and engaging in the politics of White resentment, the senator and the state’s dominant political party would show greater concern for providing essential services to its people, especially as they face a pattern of natural disasters stemming from climate change, the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country, double the national average in child poverty and unemployment higher than the national average (7.2 percent vs. 6.7 percent).
Mayors from Texas cities — including Arlington, Austin, Beaumont, Brownsville, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Plano and Port Arthur — are begging for passage of the Biden administration’s rescue package. In a joint letter with the Conference of Mayors to congressional leaders, they write: “The lack of adequate support has resulted in budget cuts, service reductions, and job losses. Sadly, nearly one million local government jobs have already been lost during the pandemic. … The $350 billion in direct relief to state and local governments included in President Elect Biden’s American Rescue Plan would allow cities to preserve critical public sector jobs and help drive our economic recovery.” Cruz is part of the crowd that opposes “blue-state bailouts” (though he had no problem taking relief for Hurricane Harvey). He was also one of six senators to vote against the December stimulus package.
Instead of working on getting rescue funds to his state, Cruz will certainly oppose the Biden plan (although once again, he might be all for emergency disaster relief). He spends his time ginning up the base. He led the charge to overturn the election results, a quest that resulted in the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, and he voted to acquit the instigator in chief.
Republicans such as Cruz need to stop looking for ways to disenfranchise voters, engaging in climate change denial, fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hysteria and sustaining an economic environment that puts millions of his constituents in peril year after year. Abbott needs to take responsibility for a natural disaster made worse by a governing fiasco. Right now, Texas is not looking good. If only someone there could step up and govern. |
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boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9120
Location: at a computer
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| Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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| And Ted Cruz just jetted to Cancun and left his fellow Texans to freeze to death.. |
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