What have Conservatives done to make American Better

I have asked this question before. Usually I don't get any response what so ever.

But to date, I haven't gotten one clear example of something Conservatives have done to make America Better?

Anybody?

Yeah Sure, the Mainstream Media is Liberal - Sure it is

Its a consistent whine from conservatives across the land that the Mainstream Media has a liberal bias and is not and cannot be objective.

Like so much of what they say I don't know which of them really believes it and which of them just like the way it sounds, but they say it all the time.

But think about it if you can.

When the tea party erupted on to the scene (financed by the Koch brothers) the entier media treated it like it was some sort of grassroots uprising of patriotic (if a little quircky Americans) with legitimate greviences. You could get new crews to show up if you 15 or 20 baggers protesting on the Mall and the news would treat it like it was this huge thing.

Now you have Occupy Wall Street, where there are (depending on the day) hundreds to thousands of protesters in the Financial District in New York protesting against the disastorous role played by the big institutition represented there in crashing the economy.

For weeks the supposedly liberal Mainstream Media didn't cover it at all. Now they cover it with ridicule, highlighting the goofiest or least articulate of the protesters.

Where is the respect they gave the Baggers? Where is the acknowledgement that this really is a grass roots movement not an event sponsored by major corporations like the Tea Party?

I suspect most of you never heard about "The People's Budget" either. If the media is so liberal, then why don't they give more coverage to Liberal events or causes?

Like tax cuts that pay for themselves and the myth that giving tax breaks to corporations will spur hiring, the myth of the Liberal Media permeates conservative speak.

And like so much of what they say, its simply not true

Science and Global Warming

In the eternal quasi debate about Climate Change the deniers keep coming back to a central tenet of their belief. Climate Scientists are somehow corrupt. They believe that all the Climate Scientists that have reached the conclusion that the current warming trend in global average surface temperature are involved in some sort of global conspiracy.

What the point of the conspiracy is I have never quite understood. Unless you just want to believe that Climate Scientists just like to lie for the sake of lying.

Then two recent stories about science caught my attention. In the first, a group of scientists in Europe were measuring the speed of neutrinos. And they discovered, to universal surprise, that the neutrinos actually traveled faster than the speed of light. That is, for the science community, shocking and amazing news. The absolute inability for any particle to exceed the speed of light has been one of the bedrock realities of science every since Einstein postulated his theories of Relativity and Special Relativity. The response in the scientific community was surprise and excitement. The work of these scientists will now be examined very closely by scientists around the world. Some will be trying to explain away the findings with some calculational or instrument error. Others will be trying to duplicate the findings, running experiments that duplicate the original experiment and designing different experiments to test the speed of neutrinos.

The second story came today in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to an Israeli scientist who proved the existence of quasicrystals which are crystalline materials where the pattern of atoms in the crystal doesn't repeat. When this Israeli scientist first published his work it challenged fundamentally what chemists had taken as a given for a very long time. So other Chemists began testing the discovery, trying to duplicate the results or trying to refute them as flawed in some way.

This is what scientists do.

Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis, Synthesis.
Repeat

The first scientist that I know of that theorized that human activity was causing the globe to get hotter faster was an American scientist back in the late 50's. I suspect that at that time his theories were not widely accepted. But scientists did what scientists do, they measured and analyzed and tested and observed and they came up with theories that described what they were observing and then they tried to figure out other ways to test their theories. Scientists would look for other theories that would better explain the data. By the early 90's, the scientists were convinced. Every published climate scientist agreed that human activity, most importantly the production of CO2, was taking an existing warming trend and accelerating it. Human activity became acknowledged as the principal driver in the warming that was occurring in global average surface temperatures.

There is no conspiracy here. When somebody stole thousands of emails from climate researchers in England they then published extracts and snippets of different emails that they claimed somehow proved that there was a vast global conspiracy among climatologists to lie to us all and to suppress dissenting views.

So there have been at least 5 investigations into these allegations of fraud. The University of East Anglia (where the scientists worked) investigated, the British government investigated a couple of state Attorney's General investigated. Every investigation came to the same basic conclusion.

There was no fraud, no academic malfeasance, no conspiracy to lie.

Its almost been funny to watch the deniers spin theory after theory. At first denying that the globe was actually warming, then claiming that volcanoes put far more CO2 into the atmosphere, or claiming that data more than about 50 years old was unreliable because those old thermometers weren't as accurate as ours are today, or something called Isotopic Drift invalidated the results of ice core surveys or that tree ring studies were just not meaningful for some reason or that where the thermometers were placed was flawed so that their readings were not sufficiently isolated from local conditions like urban heating.

And every theory gets dis proven.

The scientists who may have discovered neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light, and the scientist who discovered quasicrystals were doing what scientists to. Observing, Hypothesizing, Experimenting, and then refining the hypothesis. And then doing it again.

That's what climate scientists have been doing on the issue of global warming since at least the late 50's.

There is no fraud, there is no conspiracy, there is no big lie. At least not from the Climate Scientists.

BELIEVE what you want about Global Warming. Believe that its caused by aliens or solar cycles or volcano's or bad thermometers if you want. But when your BELIEFS are in direct contradiction of the conclusions of virtually every climate scientist, then perhaps you need to understand why you so desperately want to believe something that isn't true. Belief is in your heart. Belief is not what scientists do.

Observe, Theorize, Test and repeat. That's what scientists do. Don't believe them if you choose not to, but don't bother pretending that your BELIEFS are based on science. Just ask the real scientists.

The Real JOB CREATORS

I’m Back!!
A friend of mine commented a few days ago that he hadn’t seen a new post here in a while and he even knew the date of my last post. I replied that I was discouraged the failures of my party to own any of the current debates. My pArty, and the supposedly liberal main stream media, are letting the idiots that dominate the Republican Party lie and lie and lie and even when they get corrected, the media doesn’t hold them to account for lying. This has been the dynamic in America’s politics since the election of Barack Obama. Lies about where he was born, lies about his faith and beliefs, lies about what he has said in his speeches, lies about the 2009 stimulus bill, lies about Obamacare, lies about whose policies created the huge deficits we face, lies about lies about global warming, lies about evolution, and then more lies. The list goes on and on.
One of their favorite lies goes something like, “We can’t raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans or on Corporations because they are the JOB CREATORS!!!!!”
God forbid that we do anything to inhibit Job Creation.
In 2010 Republicans across the country ran for election based on their attacks on the President for not fixing the economy and their promises to implement policies that would create jobs.
In other words they lied again.
They are pointing to the wrong people as the Job Creators! Major Corporations in this country are sitting on TRILLIONS of dollars on cash reserves and not hiring in this country. Small businesses have been given all sorts of tax incentives to hire and they are not hiring despite facing the lowest tax burden since the end of WWII. Why are the supposed JOB CREATORS not creating any jobs? Because they are not the JOB CREATORS!!!
You are
I am
Go to a mirror and look at yourself and tell yourself, “I am a JOB CREATOR!!”
Jobs don’t get created because we repeal regulations or lower taxes or worship at the feet of small businesses and big corporations, jobs get created when WE go out and create demand. When we start buying things, that will create demand and then the supposed JOB CREATORS will start hiring people to make or provide those things WE, the REAL JOB CREATORS, want.
Ever since the Bush Tax Cuts, we have been fawning over Corporations and Small Businesses as the JOB CREATORS and look at how well that has worked out for us. Even before the Great Recession, created by the greed of Big Corporations, job growth had been anemic, the middle class was getting it ass kicked, and the rich were just getting richer. And now it’s even worse.
So how do we create more JOBS. Let’s create more Demand!!!
Let’s put a couple of million American’s back to work doing thing that really need doing like fixing our Highways and Bridges and Tunnels and Water Systems and Sewer Systems. Let hire back the Teachers and Police Officers and Firefighters that we fired because we didn’t want to ask the already wealthy to pay something more in taxes.
So let us directly create 3 or 4 million jobs and watch those 3 or 4 million now working people start spending their paychecks and buying the things they want and creating jobs making those thing they want to buy. It really does feed on itself. So if we directly put 3 or 4 million people and the demand they create puts another million or two American’s back to work all those people are creating demand (and paying taxes, something they aren’t doing now).
Cutting Taxes and repealing regulations haven’t worked and won’t work to create jobs. Creating Demand will CREATE JOBS.
So that is what we need to do.
It starts with the President’s newest jobs bill, but that’s only a start.

What would Jesus do?

I was raised as a white middle class Christian boy. A Southern Baptist. I attended First Southern Baptist Church in Colorado Springs.
We had revivals and preachers preaching fire and brimstone.
I was in the choir. We sang twice on Sunday, we even sang for the prisoners in the Colorado State Penitentiary.
I believed.
I can't tell you when I became a doubter.
But ONE of the events on a road to atheism occurred in the normal Wednesday evening meetings at the church that were half sermon and half business meeting.
I went to those back then.
A black (that was the polite way to refer to African Americans back then) family had applied for membership in our congregation.
A BLACK FAMILY WANTED TO JOIN A CONGREGATION OF A CHURCH IN THE SOUTHERN BABPTIST CONVENTION.
What were they thinking?
It is a sad reality of life in these United States that our churches are the most segregated part of American society. Many, perhaps most, churches are monochrome or very close to it.
Blacks have their churches, whites have their, Hispanics have theirs. And never the twain shall meet.
A good Christian woman stood up in the Wednesday night business meeting of the First Southern Baptist Church of Colorado Springs Colorado and said:
"They have their own church."
This good Christian woman opposed the inclusion of a Black family in our congregation for no other reason than the color of their skin.
I cannot tell you that I rose in opposition to her naked racism. I was not that brave. But that moment has stuck with me for these many years. And it is a milepost in my journey from Baptist Church Choir Member to Atheist.
There was a survey back in May 2010 (http://pewforum.org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey-Who-Knows-What-About-Religion.aspx) that showed that Atheists (like me) understand Christianity better than your average Christian.
And maybe that’s what happened to me.
I didn’t lose my faith as much as find that faith and critical thinking are essentially two different things. If you have faith then you believe in talking serpents and virgin births and you never bother figuring out that Cain married his sister. But you do know to a certainty that god is responsible for all creation and so this how the theory called Evolution is just that, a theory that doesn’t really explain anything. How can it explain anything since we haven’t found the missing link? Yet you claim that creationism is some sort of science despite it being completely without scientific foundation.
For me, starting to read the bible critically was a bad idea. The bible, like most great religious texts, says many different things, many of them contradictory. And people of faith are quite selective in which passages they cling to.
I came to see the god of the bible as a god I could fear, but never love. A god who will condemn good observant faithful Jews and Muslims to hell because they, though they believe in god and venerate god in the manners required by their faith, they are doing it wrong. God, it seems, changes it’s mind. And it doesn’t make sure that everybody gets the message. God sends a messenger, but not everybody gets to meet this messenger personally. And this messenger looks human, not particularly god like. And this messenger gets killed. So his message didn’t seem to be that persuasive. Unless you are in that tiny group of chosen who saw this man-god after coming back to life.
Kind of an obscure way to send a message of such importance as god changing his mind about how to get to heaven.
But if you didn’t get the message, too bad. Maybe god will let you take some sunscreen to hell. I hear it’s hot down there.
And that doesn’t even address god’s condemnation of people who never even heard of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim god. They might live good lives or bad. Grow up to be a mass murderer or to cure cancer. Doesn’t matter. They didn’t get the message they didn’t even know they were supposed to be listening for. Sunscreen anyone?
Even among Christians each group claims to have their own revealed wisdom, the correct message. Catholics believe that unless you get absolution from a priest just before you die, then off to hell you go. All those people in the Twin Towers on September 11. Sorry!! Many, perhaps most of them died in a state of sin and never got the mandatory absolution so off to hell they go. And there is the Christian sect that believes that Heaven can only hold 40,000 people and so not even every member of their little sect is going to get into heaven.
So that is what happened to my faith.
I thought about it too much. Asked too many questions for which there don’t seem to be answers that make sense. That god is just too scary and unstable to actually love.
And now one part of modern Christianity leans on their faith to advocate the most un-Christian of things.
Stephen Colbert, on the Colbert Report, was interviewing a man a few years ago who was advocating for the posting of the 10 Commandments in classrooms and courtrooms across this nation. Yet when asked to name the 10 Commandments he could only name 3 of them (http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/180282/september-05-2008/better-know-a-district---lynn-westmoreland-update). He missed the First Commandment "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no Other Gods before me. He missed "Make the Sabbath and Keep it Holy." This idiot, who was a United States Representative from the State of Georgia, wanted to post the 10 Commandments in courthouses across this nation, yet he could only name 3 of the Commandments. I know more of the 10 Commandments than he did.
The number of people who claim to be Christians, but advocate for policies that Christ would never support is amazing to me.
We were attacked by Al Queda in a massive way on September 11, 2001.
What would Jesus do?
Would Jesus have invaded and conquered Afghanistan, resulting in the death of 10's of thousands of Afghani's and 4 thousand of America's bravest?
Would Jesus have invaded Iraq, a country that had NOTHING TO DO WITH September 11, 2001? A country that posed nothing even vaguely resembling a threat to this country? An invasion that has resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi's and more than 6000 American service personnel and thousands more Americans who were not in the Department of Defense.
What would Jesus have done?
Jesus never talked about taking out your enemy, he never advocating deposing governments that he didn’t like. Jesus talked about Turn the Other Cheek. He talked about not returning evil for evil. (Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous: Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing. 1 Peter 3:8,9). He talked about love and forgiveness.
Would Jesus have joined all the Christian Conservatives who advocate shooting doctors working at family planning clinics that perform some abortions?
Would Jesus have advocated scrapping Medicare as we know if (for those currently under 55) in order to fund tax reductions for the wealthy and corporations?
Would Jesus, who barely mentioned sexuality and NEVER mentioned homosexuality support Christians protesting at the funerals of Soldiers who died fighting our wars. Would he make opposition to Gay Marriage a central tenet of his policies while ignoring the fact that Divorce (which Christ was very explicit in his opposition to) ends most marriages in this nation.
Somehow, I don’t think so.
Somehow modern Christianity has been twisted to become a justification of greed. A justification for a me first attitude that says we are not our brothers keeper. If our brother needs help, don’t ask me. I only take care of my own.
The social conservatives who dominate the Republican party now loudly proclaim their Christianity while advocating policies that ignore science, denigrate the needs of those who are less fortunate, demand that Commerce is most noble when completely unfettered by pesky things like regulations, and insist, despite all the evidence, that giving more money to people who are already wealthy will somehow, years later, enrich us all.
Really.
That’s what happens when you live a belief based life.
Facts no longer matter.
You believe that tax cuts pay for themselves and spur long term economic growth.
You either deny that the world is getting warmer or you deny that human activity is the cause despite all the evidence.
You believe that businesses can be trusted to make rational decisions that will be good for the greater good, despite all the times in history when businesses did things that were good for that business, and bad for everyone else. And never being able to point to one completely unregulated industry or country that didn’t end up in disaster.
You believe that We had to invade Iraq, but not Saudi Arabia and that it wasn’t really about revenge and oil.
Turns out, I am fond of facts.
Maybe that’s why I am not a Christian.
Or a Conservative.

The Media and Real News

I just turned the TV off.
I had been watching the news on CNN but just couldn't stand it anymore.
We are fighting 2 wars in Arab Muslim nations, we are aiding NATO in its operations in support of the Libyan rebels. The economy is struggling. We reached our debt limit today and Republicans seem intent on holding the entire economy hostage to their nonsensical economic theories.
And the big new is that Action Movie Star and former Governor of California Arnold Slksjlskjdflker fathered an illegitimate child with a member of his house hold staff.
This guy is an actor only in the most forgiving sense of the word who was married to a beautiful woman who was a pretty good news reader before he ran for governor.
But really, what business is it of ours now that the Arnold couldn't keep it in his pants.
He is an actor for god's sake.
I guess that CNN thinks they have to give this story a lot of play because they will lose viewer share if they don't
But in a world where we have very real and dangerous problems, does it really matter who the Arnold is banging.
I continue to be disappointed in their unwillingness to give the real important issues of our day the coverage they deserve while obsessing over how this action movie star could keep a secret like this for so long. I don't care and I don't understand why so many others do care. The sex lives of celebrities are not important.
So I will leave the TV off for now.

Stupidest and Most Offensive Thing I Have Heard Today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_xf383_QhU&feature=player_embedded This is past amazing. In a debate in the Indiana House of Representatives about new restrictions on abortion we have a Indiana State Representative opposing an exemption for victims of Rape or Incest because SOME WOMEN MIGHT MIGHT UP SUCH A CHARGE TO BE ALLOWED AN ABORTION. Words fail me. Who are these people?