And Down the Rabbit Hole We Go

He said he wanted to hand pick his own team and to have full autonomy. Trump offered it but not on those conditions so he turned it down. That seems straightforward enough.

Many voted only because of abortion. They don't care about anything else.

Not all of us can hear the same voices that you hear in your head. It may be helpful to provide a link for context, because no, I don't recall Democrats supporting Assange--quite the opposite, if anything, though most were silent.

That's one interpretation. An interpretation that completely ignores Alien and Sedition Acts, among other things. But an interpretation nonetheless.

And even that vote is often out of sheer ignorance, same as the "they're grabbin' our guns!" votes.

Absolutely, @John, there are a lot of ignorant people on the right with irrational fears. What makes you a brain damaged partisan hack is that you refuse to recognize the left also has a lot of ignorant people with irrational fears (Bush is Hitler! No, Trump is now Hitler! Oh, and he is sending the muslims to death camps because he is a Nazi!).

A reality based person recognizes the problems which both sides suffer from and doesn't try to pretend one side's shit doesn't stink, like you do.

You're a bigot.

I should say, more or less it was that way for some time.

John's response shows why he and his side keeps failing. Avoid logic, avoid facts, make Bo arguments which will persuade anyone and instead just name call.

You guys keep failing because that is all you deserve with your transparent bull shit. Grow up and actually learn what a sound argument is and maybe you folks will start winning elections again but until them I hope you like losing.

2 of 3 posts you've made in this thread are name-calling.

How about you try addressing the issues? Maybe invoke the logic you're so proud of.

Here's more of your logic:

Haven't done an accurate assessment, but based on two threads, your tendency towards name-calling is near 100%. Logic, 0%.

Would that they had ceased it, but instead they seized it.

Pretty much.

To be fair, there was a fear that not stringing them along would have meant an even earlier collapse. And this wouldn't have happened if the Middle East hadn't been destabilised. But yes, the EU did not handle Turkey well.

For a few years, yes. But the same could be said for the judiciary as well, which really didn't get any teeth for a few decades. Separation of powers is meaningless if the executive and judiciary have little to no power.

Carnaval float in Düsseldorf



("Blond is the new Brown" -- brown as in brownshirt) I wish they hadn't written (almost) everyone's name on his forehead. Bit too nudge-nudge.

That says more about the delusions of the fools who made those floats. What lemmings.

Houston, we have standing.

Oops.

To the Dusseldorf folks - get a life. Seriously, don't you have enough political shit in your own country to worry about? You can't make a statement without piggy-backing on what happens across the pond, or what happens in England? Fucking lame.

Okay what is going on here with the spacing?

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...-carbon-dioxide-global-warming-climate-change
"EPA head Scott Pruitt denies that carbon dioxide causes global warming"

Well, folks, welcome to the post-truth era. It ain't so cuz it don't please me to be so.

You literally just criticized another culture for not being exclusively interested in what happens in their own little petri dish?

That is the most American thing I've seen all week.

While his stance is troubling, the headline and implication is inaccurate: he said, "“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” [bolding mine] This is not the same as denying the CO2 we are releasing is one of the causes.

This contradicts the website of the agency he heads that states, "Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change."

The headline is slightly inaccurate, but it amounts to the same thing. "Not a primary contributor" means that "we get to ignore it".

Do you know of any credible climatologist who would contest the fact that "measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging"?

As for there being "tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact", I doubt that's true. That would mean climatologists wrangling over what they are convinced is The Degree. It seems to me that what climatologists are saying amounts to acknowledging that that degree could be anywhere on the spectrum from X to Y --- we simply can't know for sure.

Pruitt says he "would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see". How the hell does he know? NOBODY knows. And nobody credible would be so stupid as to claim to know. Cuz we can't.

Now, if you say what Pruitt said, or if I say it, or if Professor Dayton says it, then it's not, as you put it, "the same as denying the CO2 we are releasing is one of the causes." And big deal anyway, because we have no influence on public policy and nobody's listening to us.
But if the head of the EPA says it, then I feel it does amount to denial. Especially given the growing worldwide consensus.

Yes, without a doubt, carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change. I mean, what are the other candidates? Methane? Yes, it's a greenhouse gas but how could it possibly be the leading one? Etc.

There may of course be other, non-greenhouse causes as well. But whatever they are, they sure as hell ain't anything we can do anything about.

And that's the point. When the scientific consensus is that your hair's on fire, you don't stand there prevaricating for the sake of business interests. You rush for the sink. That's Pruitt's job.

I agree with you completely. Just don't want the headline writer's bias to misrepresent what he said. Any more than conservative bias misrepresenting the science underlying climate change evidence, or the scientific process.

OK, maybe we're basically disagreeing about how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin.
I don't agree that the headline writer was misrepresenting Pruitt. Of course, it all depends on one's definition of "causes" in the headline.

Meantime, Snopes apprears to concur, concluding that it's Pruitt who's doing the misrepresenting here.

(... Donald) is a man whose first political act was to take out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News demanding the execution of the “Central Park Five,” five men charged with the assault and rape of a Central Park jogger, all of whom were completely exonerated when the real attacker confessed and his DNA matched what was found at the crime scene. (Note to Donald: the Constitution prohibits the death penalty for all crimes other than first-degree murder and treason, but that’s beside the point. The point is that you fell for it.)

Remember that Trump first came to national political attention by arguing incessantly (and hiring investigators to try to prove) that President Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible to be President. As if those two different birth announcements in Honolulu newspapers as well as Daddy Obama’s contemporaneous immigration file (not to mention the Obama birth certificate), meant nothing. [Footnote: One of my relatives, a Fox News addict, recently tried to convince me that Obama was born in Kenya. I mentioned the birth announcements. With not even a hint of irony, she warned me, “don’t believe everything you hear.”]

So, does it come as any surprise that since the election, Trump claimed to have won the biggest Presidential landslide in recent history? (As Trump would say, “WRONG!”) That the turnout for his inauguration was the largest ever? WRONG! That the US murder rate is the highest that it’s been in 47 years? WRONG! That there was a recent fatal terrorist attack in Sweden? WRONG! That President Obama tapped Trump’s phones? WRONG! (...)

-- former (I think) congressman Alan Gryson

She's stating what should be obvious. What should be, in a sane country, the single biggest crisis since JFK was shot (at least). I know I know, I remember how one of the first rules of being a conservative is "never believe anything on MSNBC" but watch it, and tell me what factually is incorrect here.
And this isn't even all of it. For example, there's a direct line of sight thread indicating how and when Putin turned Assange into an asset.

http://www.towleroad.com/2017/03/wikileaks-rachel-maddow/

And while she's leading out on reporting it now while many others are asleep or in denial, I can show you a guy who's not even a journalist who was putting the pieces together even before the election, collating various stand-alone media stories into a solid narrative that more and more holds together and as she points out, whenever there's a "breaking news" story it often plugs seamlessly into the story we've already pieced together.

Makes you wonder how bad it will need to get before the apologists admit there's a "there" there.