Thursday Open Thread

16 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. Apparently God hates me. Tuesday CenturyLink decided to block our long distance (they don't know why it happened, but it's fixed now). Today no power to our building or the others in the area.

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   1. Not a fan of Centurylink. They tend to come up with bogus charges to attach to one's bills. Charter Spectrum is the only big company available in my area, and I'm pretty happy with them so far.

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      1. Just you wait…

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   2. God probably has a pretty good long distance calling rate. 

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   3. Nah, Charlie Ergen at Dish is god (just ask him) …

      … although he probably doesn't care much for you, either.

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2. What a surprise….

   Pennsylvania sues gas driller over 'deceptive' leases

   By MICHAEL RUBINKAM | December 9, 2015 | 10:45 PM EST

   Pennsylvania's attorney general sued one of the nation's largest producers of natural gas on Wednesday over claims it cheated at least 4,000 landowners who signed drilling leases with the company.

   http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pennsylvania-sues-gas-driller-over-deceptive-leases

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3. This is one of the guys we need to be Bipartisan with in the US Senate:

   At a Senate subcommittee hearing [called by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Batshit)] Tuesday, Mark Steyn, a conservative writer and pundit (and regular sub on Rush Limbaugh's hate machine.-ed) , dismissed the threat of climate change and said that related concerns about national security were “ridiculous.” In a two-minute rant, Steyn appeared to make the argument that saving low-lying islands isn’t a priority, because displaced Muslims can simply move to radicalized neighborhoods in Europe.

   …

   In October, 48 national security and foreign policy leaders, diplomats, and former members of Congress from both parties ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for climate change action. “This issue is critically important to the world’s most experienced security planners. The impacts are real, and the costs of inaction are unacceptable,” the experts, including Secretaries of Defense Chuck Hagel, William Cohen and Leon Panetta, write in the statement.

   Steyn, who does not have any national security experience or qualifications, took the complete opposite position at the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness hearing Tuesday, calling climate change a “cloud-cuckoo, fantasy-land, saving-the-planet type” concern.

   “I can’t tell you how absurd it is to be talking about the security threat [of climate change],” Steyn said. He then went on to talk about how the growing population of West Africa was a greater threat to international stability. “All those people are just going to get on a boat and walk into Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and the idea that climate change is [impacting] that is absolutely trivial to the remorselessness of those [population] numbers.”

   It is unclear why — beyond his extreme views on climate change and politics — Steyn was invited to testify at the hearing called by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), titled “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.” Steyn does not have a background in science. He was trained as a journalist.

   Perhaps wisely, Cruz, who chairs the subcommittee, did not engage on the national security debate after Steyn’s comments. “I’ll leave that aside for a moment,” he said, eliciting chuckles from the room.

   Instead, Cruz heavily focused on the idea of a global warming pause, which has been refuted by NOAA scientists. In his opening remarks, Sen. Cruz said, “According to the satellite data, there has been no significant global warming for the past 18 years. Those are the data. The global warming alarmists don’t like these data – they are inconvenient to their narrative. But facts and evidence matter.”

   Cruz has made similar comments many times before, and they have been debunked many times before. In fact, the world is on pace to have its hottest year on record. In addition, scientists predictthat the speed of global warming is expected to increase dramatically. Ninety- seven percent of published, peer-reviewed climate science papers concur that man-made climate change is occurring.

   “The only thing that requires a serious scientific investigation is why we are holding today’s hearing in the first place,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) noted.

   Both sides don't pull this insane crap. We shouldn't be obligated to be bipartisan with a bunch of crazy, hyped-up, anti-social, anti-government motherfuckers who have very little connection to reality, whether in congress or not. And we shouldn't be urged to do the same by our representatives from the Senate or House. 

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   1. Exactly. It's not "both sides". And it's a shame that even Obama spent his first 5 years in office feeding that lie and throwing his congressional Dems under the bus with his extremists on both sides malarkey. It never got him an iota of the compromise he was looking for from those who had pledged to be against anything he was for, even if it came straight out of their own think tanks, and kept that pledge.

      It undermined his support among congressional Dems who, quite understandably, were not much inclined to go out on any limbs for a President who constantly dissed them and contributed to his losing his majority in both Houses as Dem candidates followed a losing strategy of running away from everything Obama including the positive accomplishments.

      After all why should voters vote for a Dem who doesn't want to touch Obama with a ten foot pole but supports his policies in most votes when you can vote for an R who won't support the guy even your Dem candidate doesn't like much on anything?

      Rightie empowerment is where all this both sides are equally to blame crap got us. And what did the Kumbaya charm offensive get us? Zilch.

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   2. Everything Senator Ted Cruz said about climate change in this NPR interview was wrong.

       

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4. On the Republican "Axis of Ignorance":

   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/the-trump-effect-and-how-it-spreads.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

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5. Oh and to all those in the media wringing their hands and expressing shock over the rise of Trump. Guess what. It's on you more than any other factor. Bernie Sanders had better numbers from day one than Trump and you studiously ignored him while lavishing free attention on Trump because of the outrageous things he said, giving him more and more free attention as the outrageous factor escalated. Trump would not be where he is now without you. You encouraged him to keep upping the anti. You're a bunch of hypocrites. If innocent Muslim Americans die because of his hate spewing incendiary rhetoric, you were his giant free megaphone.  MSNBC as much as Fox….  you all did this.

   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tv-networks-donald-trump-anti-muslim-airtime_5666e50ce4b072e9d1c775f7?utm_hp_ref=media

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6. So we've reached the point in the Benghazi hearing that Democrats releasing unredacted emails is considered a 'political ploy'? 

   New email splits Benghazi Committee

   The Democrats released their email a day after conservative legal group Judicial Watch released a slightly redacted version, which it had won access to under the Freedom of Information Act. At the time, conservative outlets such as Fox News said that the email was a “smoking gun” that undermined testimony from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. 

    

    

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   1. They're truly desperate.

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   2. When selective editing is your modus operandi, unredacted is a "ploy" . . .

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      1. I thought Modus Operandi was your good friend Moderatus' son?

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   3. As Stephen Colbert once reminded us, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

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