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mrgybe
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 5180
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 Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 10:45 pm Post subject: |
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| boggsman1 wrote: | | As I get ready to pop a bottle of Madam Veuve Cliquot, I look back at 2014. I didn't windsurf a single day due to a torn rotator cuff |
Two questions.........why are you waiting to pop the Cliquot? With all your millions, surely you can afford more than one? The empties are already stacked up here with several hours to go. Second.......you're giving me a hard time for sailing 45 -55 on "flat" water when you're home knitting? You bounder!! Despite that outrage, I agree with you. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in this country......unlike any other. Happy New Year you big (and very youthful) puss. Hope the shoulder improves. I can send you a bunch of exercises if you like. |
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pueno
Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807
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| Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 7:59 am Post subject: |
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| mrgybe wrote: | Rather than listen to the name callers, anyone can read a Harvard study on the topic of MTBE. This from the opening paras:
"The spectacular rise and fall of MTBE is a fascinating story for many reasons, not the least of which is the role that the federal government played in bringing about the enormous growth in its use and in causing the widespread environmental contamination that resulted from that growth..........Indeed, if taking the lead out of gasoline is a striking example of the virtues of the modern environmental regulatory regime, the addition of MTBE to gasoline in full view of a powerful regulatory agency armed with multiple authorities designed to prevent the kind of environmental damage that MTBE is now causing throughout the country represents one of its most striking failures." MTBE. A Precautionary Tale - Harvard Law School
All Exxon's fault? Any fair minded person will conclude it was not. |
But, wait, Mr. G.
Wasn't that Obama's fault?
Have you missed a golden opportunity to lay blame where you most want it?
. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17749
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 12:53 pm Post subject: |
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But wait, there's more. In my mind, this is about the collapse of the GOP since 1990. Then, a bipartisan effort led to the last kinds of significant organic legislation, like the Clean Air Act amendments, adopted by a 89-10 vote. Since then, the far right has hijacked the party, and appearances before white supremacist groups, like the #3 guy in the House, have been tolerated. It is this magical combination of batshit craziness, and complete lack of principles--sold to the unsuspecting public with fearful images of dangerous black thugs. Just a few examples. First for batshit craziness, how can we top Glenn Beck:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-revolutionaries-will-come-and-they-will-pull-you-out-your-car-and-shoot-you
And then for lack of principles, and the oil industry orchestrating the show, we have Richard Berman, speaking to the Western Energy Alliance about strategic approach--scare them for short:
| Quote: | WASHINGTON — If the oil and gas industry wants to prevent its opponents from slowing its efforts to drill in more places, it must be prepared to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, a veteran Washington political consultant told a room full of industry executives in a speech that was secretly recorded.
The blunt advice from the consultant, Richard Berman, the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm, came as Mr. Berman solicited up to $3 million from oil and gas industry executives to finance an advertising and public relations campaign called Big Green Radicals.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
This transcript of the speech made by Richard Berman in June in Colorado Springs to a group of energy executives, as well as other documents, provides a unguarded glimpse of Mr. Berman’s lobbying tactics.
“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
What Mr. Berman did not know — and what could now complicate his task of marginalizing environmental groups that want to impose limits on fracking — is that one of the energy industry executives recorded his remarks and was offended by them.
“That you have to play dirty to win,” said the executive, who provided a copy of the recording and the meeting agenda to The New York Times under the condition that his identity not be revealed. “It just left a bad taste in my mouth.”
Mr. Berman had flown to Colorado with Jack Hubbard, a vice president at Berman & Company, to discuss their newest public relations campaign, Big Green Radicals, which has already placed a series of intentionally controversial advertisements in Pennsylvania and Colorado, two states where the debate over fracking has been intense. It has also paid to place the media campaign on websites serving national and Washington audiences.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Berman confirmed that he gave the speech, but said he would have no comment on its contents.
Mr. Berman is well known in Washington for his technique of creating nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that secretly collect corporate donations to finance the aggressive, often satirical media campaigns his team conceives. They are intended to undermine his opponents, like labor unions or animal rights groups that have tried to spotlight the treatment of animals at meatpacking plants.
“I get up every morning and I try to figure out how to screw with the labor unions — that’s my offense,” Mr. Berman said in his speech to the Western Energy Alliance. “I am just trying to figure out how I am going to reduce their brand.”
Mr. Berman offered several pointers from his playbook.
“If you want a video to go viral, have kids or animals,” he said, and then he showed a spot his company had prepared using schoolchildren as participants in a mock union election — to suggest that union bosses do not have real elections.
“Use humor to minimize or marginalize the people on the other side,” he added.
“There is nothing the public likes more than tearing down celebrities and playing up the hypocrisy angle,” his colleague Mr. Hubbard said, citing billboard advertisements planned for Pennsylvania that featured Robert Redford. “Demands green living,” they read. “Flies on private jets.”
Mr. Hubbard also discussed how he had done detailed research on the personal histories of members of the boards of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to try to find information that could be used to embarrass them.
But the speech, given in June at the Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, where the Western Energy Alliance held its 2014 annual meeting, could end up bringing a new round of scrutiny to Mr. Berman and the vast network of nonprofit groups and think tanks he runs out of his downtown Washington office.
Mr. Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives — he said he had already collected six-figure contributions from some of the executives in the room — and then hide their role in funding his campaigns.
“People always ask me one question all the time: ‘How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?’ ” Mr. Berman told the crowd. “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”
What is unclear is if the hardball tactics that Mr. Berman has pitched will succeed in places like Colorado. Already, The Denver Post editorial page, generally supportive of the oil and gas industry, has criticized Mr. Berman’s tactics, calling one video spot — featuring fictitious environmentalists who debate if the moon is made of cheese before calling for a ban on fracking — “a cheap shot at fracking foes.”
In fact, at least one of the major oil and gas companies that had executives at the event — Anadarko, a Texas-based company that operates 13,000 wells in the Rocky Mountain region — now says that it did not agree with the suggestions that Mr. Berman offered on how to combat criticism of oil and gas drilling techniques.
“Anadarko did not support Mr. Berman’s approach and did not to participate in his work because it does not align with our values,” John Christiansen, a company spokesman, said.
Mr. Berman probably appreciates the criticism. As he explained in his remarks, what matters is increasing the number of people who see his work, which is part of the reason he intentionally tries to offend people in his media campaigns.
“They characterize us in a campaign as being the guys with the black helicopters,” he explained. “And to some degree, that’s true. We’re doing stuff to diminish the other sides’ ability to operate.”
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Now the first amendment allow both of these folks to say crazy and dishonest things. But it is incumbent on those, who once respected the Republican Party, to shine a light on how tawdry and crazy it has become. |
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boggsman1
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 9120
Location: at a computer
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| Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2015 1:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Mr G your uncivil verbiage might result in a Frederick recall of your 2014 award. I'm pretty sure the Queen wouldn't approve of your English. |
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MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9300
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| Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 2:12 am Post subject: |
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That shoulder injury should be healing by now. Hope to see you on the water this summer when I'll spend some time with my grandson.
PS, my son was just drafted by occidental college to play baseball for them. |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17749
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 3:15 pm Post subject: |
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How can Republicans be so consistently wrong--and bad for the economy?
| Quote: | As 2015 commences, America is moving steadily toward full employment for the first time since a Democrat last occupied the White House, during the Clinton presidency. The past 12 months marked the single strongest year of job increases since 1999, with unemployment down from 7 percent to 5.8 percent. The national economy is currently growing at an annual rate well above 4 percent, the Dow Jones average has surged above 18,000, and consumer confidence has reached its highest level since 2007 – before the onset of the Great Recession.
Although too many Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, and wages have not yet begun to reap the share of productivity that workers deserve, the economic news is nevertheless encouraging – except to the right-wing politicians and pundits whose predictions of recession, joblessness, and generalized doom have been proved entirely wrong.
For years now, the most prominent figures on the American right – from John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to Rush Limbaugh, George Will, and Sean Hannity, along with every right-wing think tank and media outlet – have warned the public that the tax, health care, and spending policies of the Obama administration were killing jobs and wrecking the economy.
Meanwhile, their own agenda of political obstruction and austerity policies did much to harm the economy and employment, especially when they drove debate over the budget and debt ceiling toward the brink of default – and insisted on enormous cuts in spending by the federal, state, and local governments. As recently as last spring, the Republican line recited by Will and Limbaugh — and parroted by Boehner and McConnell — was that Obamacare would surely destroy at least 2 million jobs.
Last February, Boehner’s office tweeted that the Affordable Care Act is “expected to destroy 2.3 million jobs.” On the radio, Limbaugh barked that the implementation of health care reform would cost “2.5 million jobs, minimum,” which he called “a literal tragedy for the country.” In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal agreed that Obamacare is “a job destroyer.” And on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer gloated that this White House unemployment debacle would be “emblazoned on the tombstone of liberalism.”
Overblown rhetoric aside, the 2 million-plus figure came from a Congressional Budget Office report, which the Republicans then distorted beyond recognition to scare and depress the public. But that episode was only one example among many of partisan trash-talking about the economy — a tactic that dates back at least to the first Clinton budget in 1993, when congressional Republicans predicted a severe recession or worse. (They were totally wrong then, too.)
In fact, the deep thinkers at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute made similarly frightening predictions when President Obama and the Democrats in Congress insisted on letting the Bush tax cuts expire and limiting deductions for the wealthiest taxpayers. A Heritage tax expert said ominously that “we’re going to have a slower-growing economy, we’re going to have fewer jobs, less opportunity for Americans of all income levels.”
Yet while the right-wing doomsaying about Obama and Obamacare continued to amplify right through the midterm elections — with little salutary contradiction from mainstream media — the economy has kept improving until the facts can no longer be ignored. So far, the president has 12 million jobs to his credit and a string of additional accomplishments, including millions of American families now enjoying health insurance — without any detectable damaging impact on prices, growth, or employment.
The question that the country now faces is whether Republican control of both the Senate and the House will encourage still more right-wing debt brinksmanship – or whether McConnell and Boehner can enforce a newfound moderation on their most addled members. Perhaps this time, if Republican mischief hinders full recovery, the public will understand where to lay blame. |
http://www.nationalmemo.com/sharp-2014-growth-proves-right-wing-predictions-flat-wrong/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=MM_frequency_six&utm_campaign=Morning%20Memo%20-%202015-01-03
Happy new year--especially those that now have health care! |
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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935
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| Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 7:44 pm Post subject: |
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| stevenbard wrote: | | my son was just drafted ... |
The very word brings back haunting memories ... which surprisingly turned out well despite changing my life dramatically and permanently. |
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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 12:46 pm Post subject: |
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(in response to Reiner's challenge, since deleted)
And the self-centered professional and idiot anarchists blocking streets and bridges in many major cities, costing (tens or hundreds of?) millions of dollars in commerce, police, cleanup, medical and fire emergencies ... this goes way beyond civil disobedience or lawful protest and well into something I'd call quiet/soft rioting, often (obviously) into full scale rioting.
I'd support Bull Connor's solution over di Blasio's total capitulation when protestors blocked bridges, endangering the public and shutting down society and commerce. We also have many crowd control techniques involving nausea, sound, and other harmless but effective anti-personnel weapons useful against these "soft" riots.
Ferguson-level riots burning cars and businesses? Bulldozers. Water cannons. Rubber bullets.
Molotov cocktail time? Bricks? It's their duty to shut down actions threatening serious bodily harm to bystanders and police and if that requires snipers and/or closer-range deadly force, so be it. It's legal for us to do it, so why not the police who's JOB is to stop such activity? |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17749
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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| The Alabama boy supports bringing back the fire hoses and dogs. You can take the boy out of Alabama--but you can't take the Alabama out of the boy. Get off my lawn! |
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KGB-NP
Joined: 25 Jul 2001
Posts: 2856
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| Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 1:55 pm Post subject: |
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| mac wrote: | | The Alabama boy supports bringing back the fire hoses and dogs. You can take the boy out of Alabama--but you can't take the Alabama out of the boy. Get off my lawn! |
I don't think that's what Iso was saying. |
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