Pangloss

I responded with a lengthy, detailed post back on the first page.

More objective/centrist/moderate/non-partisan sites to watch: Spinsanity Centrist Policy Network Organization of News Ombudsmen Center for Media and Public Affairs Media Notes with Howard Kurtz (Washington Post media analyst) Editor & Publisher Magazine On the Issues (huge database of candidate voting records)

Oh no, you're right about the general tenor of scientific opinion on politics these days. Those who do speak out are predominently anti-Bush, I don't think there's any question about that. My main objection was to Skeptic magazine accusing the Bush administration of "politicizing science". I think both sides have done that. And for them to say that one side is to blame for that is anti-skeptical. It's politically correct. Even if it does happen to be their honest opinion. The job of a skeptic is to keep the mind OPEN and look at BOTH sides of an issue. Not to be a partisan ideologue. They want to talk about chilling effects? How about the chilling effect on a scientist who dares to suggest that global warming might not be human-caused? But no, I think your points in general are quite valid. And a very important subject for discussion/debate. Welcome to the forum, btw. I hope you stick around and join us for other discussions.

Lol, you guys finding any truffles down there? ;-) Ok, I'm going to take your lack of response to my posts above to mean that you conceed that there are valid reasons to vote for Bush. You just happen to not agree with them, which of course is your prerogative. But I hope I've cleared up your stated confusion in Post #1.

Yes. You may not be aware of this, but the Union of Concerned Scientists is a political organization. A special interest group, just like NOW or the NRA. They're a 501©(3), with (as they say in politics) "a PAC and an address in the beltway". So *anything* they say has to be taken with a grain of salt, because like any other special interest group, they have an agenda, and their job is to convince you that there is no other point of view. That is what their membership pays them to do. It's very impressive that 60 scientists including 20 Nobel laureates signed that thing. One question you really ought to ask, however, is why it wasn't signed by *thousands* of them. They have a membership of 100,000. Yes, they would have gotten more signatures if they'd opened it up. What they don't want you to know is how many dissenting voices would have been heard. The message is more powerful if it's portrayed as unanimous.

It's a good question. Obviously part of the answer is to get people more involved in House races, and try to focus national attention on at least the importance of them, to the exclusion of cheesy and irrelevent information about the presidential races. I do not need a daily update of Bush and Kerry's stump speeches, which I have heard a thousand times before, every night at 6:30pm. What I need is more information about whomever is running against my incumbant House member, and/or any Senators who happen to be running. I would spend more money on awareness efforts at the local level, nationally funded. I would have state-sponsored debates and town hall meetings with senate and house candidates. I would require the parties to pay for more of this stuff as well. I would have a state-sponsored discussion/debate board in every single state in the union, organized and promoted at the local level, with moderated and unmoderated areas. I would have state-sponsored, party-paid (non-partisan) workers whose job is to establish and maintain local "information centers" or "bulletin board" -- non-partisan web sites devoted to CURRENT campaign news and information at the local level. So for example if a candidate dropped out of a race, the information center would have a bulletin on that. All races would be listed and kept current. Not all of these may turn out to be great ideas, but there's a LOT that could be done, and done in such a way that people would actually take an interested in them.

I have to agree, having watched it and reviewed various articles on the subject, Cheney has definitely suggested in the past that there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11. He doesn't say it directly, he just implies the hell out of it -- synonymous with "suggesting".

But that's the "war" I believe we're fighting -- a war of policy. I don't believe there's a war against science in the Bush administration. I believe that's a construct of closed minds, determined to overstate the case in order to indicate that the baby must be thrown out with the bathwater. Phrases like "suppressing scientific studies" and "embracing the conclusions of a pro-life activist" aren't about promoting an objective assessment, but about instilling fear. The fact that there is no chilling effect never stopped anyone from pretending there is one. You have me when you talk about concerns and slippery slopes. You lose me when you make it sound like we're deep in a quagmire with no end in sight.

David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek win the Nobel Prize in Physics for "the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction". Asymptotic Freedom can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_freedom Strong Interaction can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction Essentially these are part of the attempt to discover a grand unified field theory.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

One way to look at this, by the way, is to ask what would happen if there were another terrorist attack, the government KNEW it was a possibility, and no warning was given. Another question that should be asked is: How can it be done better?

Skeptic Magazine needs to take a dose of its own medicine. There are legitimate concerns with regard to science and the Bush administration. I share them. But they overstate the case and ignore obvious facts that would ameliorate perceptions, and thus not support their ideological conclusions. Such as the fact that the "ban on stem cell research" (as it is commonly known) is actually not a legal restriction on stem cell research of any kind, it's only a ban on public funding for the embryonic variety. Or the fact that while the Bush administration has done some things that can be viewed as harmful to the environment, they've also done some things that are helpful, and all of these things should be viewed carefully and in context. Drilling in ANWR, for example, may be *necessary*, even if we find new ways to spur the exploitation of alternative fuels and greater conservation of energy.

In a sense Americans have always been that way. It's our strength as well as our weakness. The founding fathers knew its value, as did the leaders of both sides of divided America during the Civil War. Those Americans also knew that the reason their country was divided was that they had forgotten that inherent in the value of divisiveness, and its power to reach valuable conclusions, is the need for compromise. Compromise is power, not weakness. But it will ever be the purpose of the ideologue to convince us that the opposite is true.

I think one must be careful about labelling terrorist threats as invalid *only* because they come from the Bush administration. It's quite possible that all of the evils of the world that have been attributed to Bush are true *and* that the terrorist threats are real. Partisanship can be a dangerous thing.

Amusing that you guys started talking about guns, but are now talking about the Chinese economy. It's a "price of tea in China" digression -- literally! (grin)

You overstate the case. The major concerns you list above existed before Bush came along. Whether or not he made them worse is absolutely a valid point of debate and reason to vote for or against him. But you make it sound cut and dried. It isn't. I'm not a religious person. In fact if anything I'm closest to humanism. But I voted for Bush in 2000, and whether or not I vote for him in 2004 will have nothing to do with religion. Would you care to respond to any of the points I posted earlier? I think I'm the only poster who's actually responded to your question in a non-partisan, non-ideological manner. I would think you would want to respond to that, since it's what you were asking for, and have asked for it again.

Don't confuse "outsourcing" with "trade", or think that I'm confusing the two at my end. Let me try to rephrase the problem. Let's say you run a company, and your company makes a product. Let's say computer software. And you are considering outsourcing that product to programmers in India. Along comes John Kerry, offering you a tax incentive (through means at this point undetermined, but presumably able to determine for sure that you were about to outsource, and aren't just a shyster looking for a handout). You accept the incentive, and keep the jobs in the US. You go on to make your product, and then one day a salesman comes to you and says, "Hey, I got a great idea! Let's market this software in Germany!" What I want to know is, at that point, have you violated the WTO? It may sound silly, but in the case of Boeing, that's more or less exactly what happened. The WTO found the US to be in violation because of tax incentives given to Boeing for a plane that was to eventually be marketed overseas. (In fact the plane hasn't even finished development yet -- it's the 7E7.) Am I making myself more clear now? It's a fairly complicated issue, and I suspect that I can't be right about this because if I were then there would surely be thousands of entries on the WTO's violations page instead of dozens. But why? Maybe there are just more terms to the WTO than I realize.

budullewraagh (btw that name rocks, where the heck does it come from?), The economy is, in fact, improving. There's more to the economy than the defict, you know. But even if there weren't, GDP growth far exceeds the deficit numbers. But we're on the same page when it comes to discussing the deficit itself -- I'm very concerned about it, and can speak on it at great length in another thread if you like. But we're being chided to talk about pro-Bush reasons in this thread, so I won't launch into an explanation of whether I think Kerry will be any better about fixing the deficit, and why. That wasn't what r1demon was asking, so I can't address that here or I fear Say will stomp on me. ;-) Yup, that's an appropriate response to my post, I agree. Unfortunately it doesn't nullify what I posted. It's simply an alternate perspective. Both are correct. No, that's not an appropriate response to my reasoning above. Marta Stewart got plenty of leniency (more than she deserved) from the judge. Two wrongs never make a right in my book. And I've yet to see any actual evidence that Cheney has done anything illegal anyway. If he has, I definitely want to hear about it, but that doesn't change what John Ashcroft has accomplished. You have me when you talk about corporate greed and corruption. You lose me when you attribute it all to Republicans (if that's what you're suggesting -- far be it for me put words in your mouth). There's only one Jose Padilla -- I hope the Bush administration remembers at some point that the guy is a real human being with real rights. But I ain't holding my breath. But anyway, yeah, I know what you're talking about, I'm familiar with other cases, and I addressed that in my explanation above. You haven't refuted it, but your point is certainly an important one. (Like I keep saying, I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm simply giving my Bush "pros", not saying that I've made up my mind. Sorry if I'm belaboring this point, but it's been my experience that few people really understand my position, or what it is that I'm trying to accomplish in this election.) Thanks for the hyperlink, by the way. Interesting site. Yes it does. (In my opinion.) It's also not your (or my) place to make that decision. It's the Iraqi's. And they've said overwhelmingly, with polls that regularly generate 99% response rates (compared with 5% in the oh-so-busy US) that they're glad Saddam is gone. The fact that they go on to say "...and now will you please get the F out of my country?" doesn't change that point. No, it hasn't done that. We've spent about $120 billion in Iraq so far, according to Jake Tapper on ABC News the other night after the first prez debate, doing a fact-check on Kerry's $200 billion figure. (IMO Kerry's actually tapping into that $200 billion allocation figure that came later, conveniently forgetting that that was an "over ten years" allocation.) And the surplus was gone before the Iraq war. It says so on the chart you put at the start of your post. (grin)

Yeah there's no question that the US has violated WTO. I wouldn't try to contest that assertion at all. Some interesting points in the two posts above. I've got to run to class here in a few minutes, but I'll try to read your links and respond further, later tonight. Thanks for the input.

I'll answer your question, but the moment this turns into a partisan slug-fest, I'm done. I'm undecided and independent, not a Bush partisan, so ideological arguments carry zero weight with me. If you're just looking for a platform to spin partisan rhetoric from, I'm not interested. But I do have reasons to vote for Bush (as well as reasons to vote for Kerry) so I am able to answer your question, such as it was asked. 1) The economy is improving. We've recovered from the late Clinton-era recession, and we're moving forward again. LEI is up, with a growth rate equal to or (sometimes) surpassing Clintonian levels (I'm a Clinton fan, by the way, so don't take all this Clinton mentioning as an attack), and the only real remaining negative indicators are unemployment, which is a *lagging* indicator and has shown massive improvement over the last year or so (we might get ten million new jobs in the next term from *either* president), and inflation, which is being watched by the best set of eyes in the business (Greenspan), and is so far showing signs of remaining under control. 2) The war on terror. Taliban out of power. Hussein out of power. Massive numbers of Al Qaeda behind bars (yeah I know, already replaced, but THESE guys are behind bars). Point being: None of these three amazing things would have happened under Al Gore, or John Kerry. Period. No foreign power would have accomplished them either. Now instead of an Iraq that was flagrantly violating UN sanctions (sometimes with the express cooperation of major world powers!), we have an Iraq that has a chance at Democracy. Is it a foregone conclusion? No way. May not happen. But it's possible. I want to point out that I believe the war in Iraq was a mistake, in that I think it cost us too much in the political sense. But from a moral, ethical and legal position, it was the right thing to do. 3) Corporate Corruption. Unlike his predecessor Janet Reno, who seemed to go out of her way to let anyone get away with anything so long as they contributed money to the Democratic party, John Ashcroft has actually done something about this issue. Prosecutions of corporate CEOs were UNHEARD OF in the 1990s. Now they're FREQUENT. The list of corporate executives on trial is staggering: WorldCom. Enron. Adelphia. Martha Stewart. Arthur Andersen. HBOC. HealthSouth. Rite Aid. The list goes on and on. We're talking about over 250 CONVICTIONS for corporate fraud! Not ONE major CEO went to jail under Janet Reno, whose time in office is better remembered for Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elian Gonzoles, and ignoring independent counsels than for fighting corporate injustice. Even though they were doing EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS they got caught for under Ashcroft. Ask the former employees of Arthur Andersen and Enron if they are happier with or without those convictions. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud. I know I am. 4) Privacy and Freedom Concerns. This is actually my biggest area of concern about the Bush administration -- namely Jose Padilla, Guantanamo Bay, and the Patriot Act. But the key here is that they are CONCERNS. If we were looking at thousands of Jose Padilla's then I would look at this differently. The fact that it's just one or two cases tells me that we're exploring something here that may, in fact, actually need to be explored, from a legal perspective (this is how precedents are set). As for the Patriot Act, the concerns here are important, but there are also aspects of it which make sense and NEED to be explored (if you check out a library book, you're TELLING a government agency what you're reading! Hello! Doesn't that throw right-to-privacy out the window? Isn't that a reasonable point of view?). I'm still very concerned about privacy and freedom issues under a Bush second term. But I'm confident enough in our checks and balances and general common sense in this country. We can explore these issues without becoming a police state, and it's probably a good thing for us in the long run to explore them right out in the open rather than have someone come along at another time, when we're not looking, and blind-side us. 5) Democracy for Iraq. What an incredible opportunity. Thank god we have men and women willing to give their lives for such a noble cause in this jaded, forgetful, inattentive, disrespectful age. I wish it wasn't necessary, but there it is. Let's not insult them by drawing comparisons with Vietnam (of all things!). And let's not let the Iraqis down by saying things like "well they aren't ready" or "their religion won't let them have it". What HUBRIS! Let's give them a chance. (BTW, I'm not saying John Kerry would pull us out of Iraq. I'm saying that Bush will give Iraq a better chance at democracy.) Now before you folks go off on me and call me a partisan, remember -- I said I am *undecided*. That means I have reasons which are equally compelling (to me) to vote for John Kerry. But that wasn't the question that was asked here. I've answered only the question that was asked. Please keep that in mind. Thanks. (In fact I think I've already stated my reasons why I might vote for Kerry in another thread.)

But does that constitute a trade violation? The WTO ruled in Boeing's case that it did. The question there was regarding tax incentives given for a slightly different reason, but isn't the effect the same?

We had a discussion here recently in which someone tried to suggest that only the United States has violated the WTO. Which is, of course, ridiculous, but after I demonstrated that it's not the case, I got to thinking about Kerry's plan to stop outsourcing in America. The basic idea is that he wants to provide tax incentives to companies that keep jobs in the US instead of sending them overseas. Now, setting aside for the moment the obvious flaw that every company in the country will immediately apply for these incentives, claiming outsourcing pressures (sigh), another thought occurs: Wouldn't this be a violation of the WTO? Obviously this would only apply if said company exports goods to members of the WTO, but since that's most countries who buy our goods, it sounds like a valid concern. And the WTO has already stated, in the Boeing case, that tax incentives can be ruled to be in violation. So we know they're capable of going into that territory. I'm just not sure at this point what other factors might apply. Your input is invited.

So expression of one's opinion can be a "lie"? Would you say that if Edwards said it?

Anybody who watched ABC News during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions knows that there's no difference between the way big business operates with Democrats versus Republicans. I think some of the sentiments expressed above about Halliburton are interesting and relevent on the level of "figuring out what happened", but in terms of deciding what's wrong with society (the bigger picture), I grow very weary of partisan bickering on this subject -- people who hold up Halliburton as an example of how Kerry would be better than Bush. The problem is pervasive and has nothing to do with "conservative" or "liberal". And it will go away when WE do something about it. Like paying attention to who is running against our incumbant House representative. If you're American, and reading this, you have one to vote for this fall. Do you know who his or her opponent is? What they stand for? How they got their funding? WHY NOT?

There already exist *plenty* of reasons for someone to learn English, even where I live in South Florida. I do a lot of work in areas that are commonly inhabited by recent immigrants, and so I meet people on a routine basis who don't speak English. If there's one thing I can tell you that is universally true about every single one of them, is that they regret not being able to speak English, and are trying to change that as fast as they possibly can. If you think it's hard for people down here to get work if they're not bilingual, try being unilingual in Spanish. So really the question is why you would want to *force* them to learn English. What problem do you think this kind of requirement will solve, when enforcement will surely be less than 100%, leaving you right back where we are right now?