Monday Open Thread
It’s Monday so let’s get started on our open thread. How’s your holiday shopping going? Despite my doubts about the new fitness shoe craze, I bought some. I’ve been wearing them and they’re pretty comfortable but my thighs are killing me. Is this a sign they’re working?
I find this interesting, especially since Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are intent on killing any good parts of health care reform. Teabaggers are going to stage a “die in.” Why bother, there’s already plenty of people dying from the lack of health care.
Tea Party organizer Mark Meckler writes on his site: “The intention is to go inside the Senate offices and hallways, and play out the role of patients waiting for treatment in government controlled medical facilities. As the day goes on some of us will pretend to die from our untreated illnesses and collapse on the floor. Many of us plan to stay there until they force us to leave.”
The “die-in,” set to take place tomorrow, could be yet another example of Tea Party groups appropriating protest tactics formerly associated with the activist left. The tactic has formerly been used by anti-war groups, or by groups demanding more government action on AIDS. In this case, it’s being done by a group demanding less government action on health care.
“We know it’s a sacrifice to do this right before Christmas,” Meckler writes. “But throughout history American Patriots have made far greater sacrifices than this to protect our liberty. Now the burden (and the honor) falls on us.”
It’s a burden and sacrifice to act like a jerk in the halls of Congress?
The Copenhagen Climate Conference has been temporarily suspended because developing countries have walked out. The dispute is because most of these countries are bearing the brunt of climate change and think the rich countries’ subsidies are too small and the carbon reduction targets are not big enough:
The climate-change conference in the Danish capital of Copenhagen is in disarray after some 130 developing countries walked out of the confab on Monday. That’s led to at least a temporary suspension of the conference while rich-world delegations try to convince developing nations to rejoing the talks.
Fundamentally, the walkout seems to be a “put up or shut up” message from poor countries to rich ones. The developing countries are upset that the Copenhagen conference may ditch the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and are upset with paltry amounts of financing offered so far by developed countries.
An official in the Nigerian delegation which was part of the walkout, said Europe’s lowball offers of financial support were “pathetic. He added: “There will be no commitments from the G77 [bloc of developing countries] until we get better assurances about financial and technology transfers,” reports our colleague Alessandro Torello from Copenhagen.
Tags: Open Thread
Gore at climate talks: Polar ice may go in 5 years
AP ^ | December 14, 2009
The Arctic Ocean sea ice has shrunk dramatically, to record low levels, the past several summers. Scientists blame global warming, which has raised temperatures twice as fast in the far north as elsewhere.
Gore said polar scientists told him Sunday that the latest data “suggest a 75 percent chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.”
or
November Arctic Sea Ice Growth Exceeds 1979-2000 Average (Talk about bad timing)
National Snow and Ice Data Center ^ | 12-7-09 | NSIDC STAFF
“In November, the average rate of Arctic sea ice growth slightly exceeded the 1979 to 2000 average growth rate for the month.”
“420,000 square kilometers (160,000 square miles) above the record low for the month, which occurred in November 2006. In general, the ice edge is now at or slightly beyond its average location, with two notable exceptions: Hudson Bay and the Barents Sea.”
The real pity of this is that RICO has no idea how completely stupid these two – fake – comparisons are.
Or maybe the real pity of it is that he thinks that the people who read here will never see the pretty obvious stupidity here.
Keep hope alive, man.
you data deniers are so cute!
Sea ice hasn’t grown, it’s shrunk. They thought it was recovering, but it turns out it was “rotten” ice, which is only a few inches thick.
76% reject the left’s ‘church and state’ myth
The Macon County Conservative Examiner ^ | 12/11/09 | Robert Moon
A new Rasmussen poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans (76%) support allowing religious symbols on public land. 83% think public schools should actively celebrate religious holidays. This flies in the face of everything we are told by radical left-wing groups like the ACLU about where the American people stand on this issue. It also clarifies just how far out of the mainstream these liberal groups are…like the American Humanist Association, which recently launched its creepy ‘No God? No Problem!’ ad campaign nationwide for the holidays. And, of course, this poll also shows that the American people openly defy…
Lizard,
I guess that also flies in the face of a bunch of our founding fathers, who weren’t christians but deists.
Here’s the link that Lizzie’s too incompetent to post.
And here’s an interesting little nugget: Most Democrats (51%) and a plurality (48%) of adults not affiliated with either major political party favor celebrating all religious holidays in the schools. Republicans are more evenly divided between celebrating some and celebrating all.
Some, but not all? Which really is just another way of saying “my religion, but not your’s.” Typical.
A new Rasmussen poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans (76%) support allowing religious symbols on public land. 83% think public schools should actively celebrate religious holidays.
Fortunately the Constitution is designed to protect all of us, not just 76% or 83% of us. Tyranny of the majority and all that.
Lizard, since you don’t know anything about science (or much about anything else), you’re reduced to reproducing the cherry-picked “facts” put forth by your crooked conservative handlers. Truly pathetic.
But the way to make all of this religious display crapola go away is to tell folks that they have to pay a spanking new tax to pay for and maintain these displays.
Watch ’em run for the hills.
Awesome. The Color of Change has been leading the charge to have advertisers boycott the Glen Beck madness, and have been pretty successful at it too. In response, another site came up to try to defend Beck, spent alot of time smearing CoC and lying about their work, and here is Color of Change’s story:
Click through the link above to see the retraction as it is posted up on that DefendGlenn site.
Good work, Color of Change!
As the day goes on some of us will pretend to die from our untreated illnesses and collapse on the floor…. it’s being done by a group demanding less government action on health care.
Somebody needs to tell them they won.
Isn’t anyone outraged like I am after reading in today’s NJ that included in the big spending bill is a 2% raise for federal employees??? The whole country is going to pot–people losing jobs, people getting their salaries reduced–and Congress and other fed employees are getting a raise!!!!
Chancery Court action today (12.14.09):
1 p.m. Wilmington, oral argument before V. Chancellor Noble, in the matter of Trust for Grandchildren of Wilbert L. and Genevieve W. Gore.
I heard on the street that Coons’ gold digging momma was divorced from the Gore $$$$$ leaving Chris w/o a trust fund *sniff & snuffle*…unless you want to count his county rip offs as his trust fund.
What a dud. My bet is he’ll go back to some government trough as soon as he’s free of the county. I suggest he, and his minions the Paoli Bros., bloody well go get real jobs!!!! By that I mean a job not subsidized by taxpayers……
Did you go to the hearing, Lips? You’d have seen that your “heard on the street” was gibberish. Tommy’s minions are pathetic.
Arctic sea ice is not recovering:
Gee, people who actually study this stuff and who have actually gone to see the ice know different than so troll on a blog. Go figure.
Inconvenient Truth For Al Gore As His North Pole Sums Don’t Add Up [Global Blunder Exposed!]
London Times ^ | December 14th 2009
December 15, 2009 Inconvenient Truth For Al Gore As His North Pole Sums Don’t Add Up
Al Gore’s office admitted that the percentage he quoted in his speech was from an old, ballpark figure
Hannah Devlin, Ben Webster, Philippe Naughton in Copenhagen
There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday.
The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row.
Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.
In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.