Posts Made By: Robert Pasken

Once again I wonder where you and Jim were when the rest of the fake conservatives have been since the fake conservative took over both the House and Senate. I didn't hear anything then about FOCA or any of the other abortion laws. Why didn't you protest when the opportunity presented themselves but nothing was done during the Bush administration.


To be very clear pro-abortion/anti-abortion is a false dichotomy. What is important is that life must be treasured and protected at all stages from conception to natural death. All life, whether it be a fetus, a 42 year women with the mind of a 2 year, a 87 year old man with dementia, the vet who's mind has been ravaged by the horrors of war, the color their skin or the stranger at your door, is to be protected and treasured. You cannot claim special status because you are "anti-abortion", but do not have the same outrage at the treatment of the least of your brothers. There is only Pro-Life

I am tired of fake conservatives who scream about abortion, but then start unnecessary wars, decimate funding for even the most minimal amount of care for the mental and physically handicapped and the elderly, allow vets to suffer in obscenely poor care when they return home and routinely spew hatred simply because someone looks different than they do. These fake conservatives are no better than those are pro-abortion and in my book worse since these fake conservative claim to be better and hold the moral high ground when in fact they are lower in the gutter than those who care for the elderly, the stranger, the handicapped and vet, but are pro-abortion. Yes this means the Bush administration

Trouble is John Theon was never Hansen supervisor. Theon was in part of NASA that handled budgetary issues for various divisions of NASA including GISS, GSFC, LARC, KSFC, and others. Claiming to be "in effect" Hansen's supervisor is here contrasted with being "in reality" Hansen's supervisor--being the guy who gives Hansen his annual performance appraisal. So, in short, Theon was never Hansen's "supervisor" in any accepted sense of the word.

Theon further states “Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,” The "muzzling" of James Hansen occurred during the (2nd) Bush Administration, not during the 1980s. Having retired from NASA in 1994, Theon has no personal knowledge of the time period in question.

So Danny what do you say now. Theon never had any supervisory role over Hansen and left NASA before the flap over Hansen's testimony in Congress. Does that make him a liar?

next bit

and finally the end

Considering how much my taxes increased under Bush and how much both Bush and Reagan outspent even the most spendthrift democrat I cann't see how Jim can complain. The rest of the fake conservatives are worried that the democrats might or maybe think about gun control, the fake conservatives have achieved gun control by making ammmunition and guns so expensive only the military and Haliburon can afford them

Poor Jim you start with a false premise and then act like you didn't know it was a false premise

You said

"Does anyone believe that if enhanced interrogation techniques produce results and there is a national security situation where they would provide benefit, that the military or intelligence community would be able to do it without being caught, no matter who the nut case President is or the laws of the country are? Idealist and liberals do not live in the real world."

Everyone except a very few people like you understands that enhanced interrogation techniques, call it was it really is torture, do not produce results that are reliable. Any "intelligence" gathered through torture is worthless. It people like you who do not live in a real world, you make up this fantasy world and act like it was real. To wit WMD, Yellow Cake and host of other complete failures.

Same old lies just repeated again. The very first line says "The global atmospheric temperature anomalies of Earth reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded during the subsequent 10 years." That BALD FACE LIE has been debunked over and over again. The only way to get steady or declining global atmospheric temperatures is to, with malice of forethought, choose only two points to get the slope: a maximum starting point and a minimum endpoint. Choosing to use standard statistical methods for determining regression lines shows a steadily increasing trend line with a slope of +0.19 degrees per decade.

You know better why drag up the same old bovine excrement?

Grasping at straws again? The report is exactly as the NYT first reported the facts. The Global Climate Coalition freely admits they used the same tactics as did the tobacco industry. Stall as long as possible to keep profits up until the last second.

I’ve concluded that much of the right’s vehement accusations of “left bias” in scientists (and experts of any discipline) can only be explained by the knowledge that they themselves have of their own misconstruing evidence. Since they themselves try to cobble together the most plausible (at least to their target audience) arguments to support a predetermined position, ignoring contradictory evidence, they assume that those who ‘oppose’ them are doing the same. Now this seems so unlikely it took me a while to think I could believe it. It requires one to imagine people who do not believe in people whose motive is finding the truth, but only in finding arguments for their political biases.

An article in the May 2003 Archaeology magazine sheds some light on the trend and the people who preach nonsense. "They tend to be anti-establishment,
suspicious of authority, suspicious of science. They like to strike this populist pose of the little man fighting against the big university professors. Carl Sagan spoke directly to the point. Real science, he pointed out, is hard. It requires critical thinking skills that many people simply are never willing to take the time to develop, and it's much easier to believe a simplistic version of, for instance, creation, than to study the facts and discover what really happened. Pseudoscientists "long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal."

Do you really believe what you just wrote?? 8O Of course we could look at facts
An bit of FACT rather than the ravings of rethuglicans

I have little if any insight or thoughts on the method used to determine which dealerships should be closed. But since we're talking about the potential use of disclosure reports to compile an "enemies list" it seems appropriate to weigh in with a few thoughts.

First, the claim is almost certainly not true. While things may have changed somewhat since the days I was raising money for a Republican member of Congress, auto dealers are almost overwhelmingly Republican. Pretty much by definition, if you're going to be closing down auto dealerships, you're going to be closing down an awful lot of Republican-owned auto dealerships. A quick look at the giving by the National Auto Dealers Association PAC consistently shows contributions going to Republican candidates by about a 2 to 1 margin, and nearly 3 to 1 in one recent cycle.

More telling, however, is the fate of minority-owned auto dealers under the closings. If the Obama administration were targeting political opponents for closure, it would seem likely that political allies, or at least those the Obama administration presumably favors, would have a lower closure rate than others.

It's speculation on my part, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that minority-owned dealerships would come out better-than-expected if the Obama administration were using auto dealership closures as a tool of political revenge.

So what do the numbers show? From an article in the Seattle Medium:

Of the 789 Chrysler dealers who were notified that their contracts will not be renewed, 38 are minority owned...

At the end of April, there were 154 minority dealers in Chrysler's 3,181 total U.S. dealer body network...

According to my trusty calculator, before closings 4.84% of Chrysler's dealers were minority owned. What percentage of auto dealers receiving closure notices are minority owned? 4.82%

Ah yes the famous NIPCC report. Nothing like a whole lot of lies from Heartland, SPPI and FOS to sow FUD. Fred Singer and his merry band of contrarian luminaries (financed by the notorious "Heartland Institute") serves up a dishonest 'assessment' in the form of what they call the "NIPCC" report (the "N" presumably standing for 'not the' or 'nonsense'). This seems to be making the rounds again as Singer and Heartland regurgitate this years "Conference on Climate Change".The fact that the very title of the report summary ("Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate") itself poses–at best–a false dichotomy is not an auspicious start. The fact that the fonts and layout are identical to the real IPCC report is another indication that this isn't quite on the level (and reminiscent of the infamous fake PNAS paper that accompanied the first 'Oregon Petition').
Reading the table of contents, the report has eight chapters (in addition to an introduction and conclusions chapter). Five of these, quite remarkably, have titles which are simply untrue. The remaining three chapters pose loaded questions which are disingenuous and misleading, if not outright dishonest, with 'answers' provided by the authors. In fact this is such a massive regurgitation of standard contrarian talking points and discredited canards, it's obvious that reviewing this would be a herculean task (which is presumably the point - if you can't convince people with actual science, bludgeon them). However, precisely because most of these points have been made before, there exists a large body of work pointing out the flaws already. So instead of regurgitating these counterpoints I just hit the low-lights. Some have actually taken the time to read, learn and understand the science and recognize some of the same old tired lame claims, but ever the optimist maybe those that key repeating the old tired and lame lies from the …

Chapter 2 "How much of modern warming is anthropogenic" throws out the standard, itself now discredited, "the hockey stick is discredited" claim, and adds in the old favorite "CO2 doesn't lead it lags". We also get 'observations and model predictions don't match', 'the warming doesn't coincide with the greenhouse gas increases', and of course 'the instrumental record isn't reliable'. Naturally, we were a bit disappointed not to encounter the granddaddy of all contrarian talking points, But they predicted global cooling in the 1970s!. Of course these "facts" are nothing more than outright lies created by the denier community.

On to chapter 3, "Most of Modern Warming is Due to Natural Causes". The short answer to the title of the chapter is, of course, "ummm, no, its not". The chapter draws in equal parts from the twin canards that its all just natural cycles, and 'its the sun!.

If you're growing impatient for model-bashing, no fear; there's a whole chapter for you (Chapter 4: "Climate Models are Not Reliable"), which offers up the usual mix of straw man descriptions of how climate models actually work, and red herrings about supposedly missing feedbacks and processes.

The falsely-titled chapter 5 ("The Rate of Sea-Level Rise is Unlikely To Increase") rests upon incorrect claims that sea level rise projections are exaggerated, and or that the IPCC supposedly lowered their projections of future sea level rise.

Chapter 6 ("Do Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases Heat the Oceans?"), if we take it literally, asks a rather embarrassing question ('No grasshopper! The greenhouse gases are 'gases'. They heat the atmosphere and surface and a warmer atmosphere transfers some of that heat to the ocean below. You still have much to learn.').

Chapter 7 ("How Much Do We Know About Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?") answers the question it asks with the usual nonsense about how the increase in CO2 is probably natural, or that we can't trust the CO2 record, and that CO2 isn't rising as quickly as projected anyhow.

Chapters 8 and 9 offer the requisite disclaimer for contrarians that, even after you've debunked everything they've said so far, and come to the inescapable conclusion that anthropogenic climate change is (1) real, and that (2) future changes will be profound if we continue with business as usual, 'it will be good for us anyway'..

The "NIPCC" report is so self-evidently nonsense that it shouldn't even give it the benefit of any publicity.