State of the Union, 2003

[Typhoon1244]

Typhoon, you were the one who brought your opinion into the fray about the State of the Union Address not being an appropriate forum for passionate references to faith in God...

Your're right, and I wish I hadn't.

...of course, you didn't say WHY...and then you bailed out on answering any more comments about the one that you opened the door to.

I did say why. If you knew how to read as well as you knew how to pontificate, you'd realize that.

So, I'll repeat myself. I don't like it when people use "God" to describe everything that our society doesn't understand yet. I don't like it when people wear their faith on their sleeve, as our president often does. I don't like it when people substitute religious faith for sound judgement (i.e. the Taliban). And I don't like it when people surrender responsibility for their lives to the "Almighty God."

This nation was founded by people with fervent Christian religious beliefs and the foundational principles upon which those people wrote the basis for our contry's government and its values are rooted in those beliefs and the founding fathers beliefs and faith in God.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the "Founding Fathers" also believe in everyone's right to choose what they believe and how they worship?

The President represents ALL Americans...not just the ones who happen to be Christians. If he can't acknowledge everyone's faith in a speech, he shouldn't bering it up at all...

...just as I shouldn't have here.

And frankly, the decay of family values, the moral degredation of the country, and many other maladies that afflict our society today...

...have been going on for three hundred years or more. Wait, don't tell me: you're one of those people who believe that "moral decay" is somehow new in America, right? There was no rape, drug use, child abuse, etc., while Leave it to Beaver was on the air, right?

What garbage!

 

[dmspilot00]

If my memory serves me correctly, I believe that the current infrastructure (meaning pipelines) can easily carry hydrogen. In fact they often use the same pipeline for many different types of fuels. One interesting thing to note is that all gasoline companies get their gas from the same sources and pipelines. It is also standard practice for, say, BP to place an order to a refinery for X gallons, and then immediately "retrieve" whatever comes out of the pipeline, even though the trip through the line takes several days. Also keep in mind how dangerous gasoline is now.

I suspect W has alterior motives. To me his speech sounded more like a campaign speech. He is telling us what he thinks we want to hear. Don't believe it until it happens. For example, while Bush is trying to look environmentally friendly, he has been the torch-bearer for the Yucca Mountain project, in which all the nation's nuclear waste goes to the site in Nevada, which is in a notorious earthquake area, in a volcano.

It's the easiest way out although safer solutions have been proposed. In my opinion, I truly think that nuclear power is the biggest mistake we have ever made. All Nuclear Power plants should be closed. We have proved that we can clean up air pollution; cleaning up nuclear waste is impossible. It will be there for millions of years.

Today, on my way to school, I got into a traffic jam because of two trucks carrying very large containers (so large the trucks took up 2 lanes). I was turning off the highway they were on, and as I passed them, I saw cute little signs on the containers, saying "RADIOACTIVE" and having the little atomic symbol on them. Great. So what happens when Yuccan Mountain opens for business?

"Waste shipments would be so frequent that Atlanta, Cleveland and San Bernardino would see shipments traveling through their neighborhoods on a daily basis. Chicago would see one shipment every 15 hours; St. Louis, Kansas City and Denver, every 13 hours; Des Moines and Omaha, every 10 hours; Salt Lake City, one shipment every seven hours. "

"According to one DOE estimate, there will be as many as 310 accidents in the course of transporting this highly radioactive waste across the country."

The waste containers cannot be designed so as to not leak, and they are expected to emit the equivilant radiation in one hour of one chest x-ray.

"In gridlock, however, a person sitting in a car next to a cask containing nuclear waste could get a radiation dose equal to that of four chest X-rays if the traffic jam lasted long enough."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Comments on the terrorism issue: Do you really know what was happening in the years and months leading up to 9-11-2001?

"President Clinton ordered two attack submarines to stand watch over the Taliban and bin Laden's terrorists. Bush ordered the subs to stand down. [See: The Covert Hunt for bin Laden: Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks, The Washington Post: 12/19/01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...ode=&contentId=A62725-2001Dec18&notFound=true] Clinton warned the Taliban he would hold the Taliban leadership personally responsible for any attack by bin Laden against Americans. Bush lifted that decree. [See: Clinton's War on Terror: The Covert Hunt for bin Laden, The Washington Post, 12/20/01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62776-2001Dec18?] But Bush eliminated these safeguards."

"Greg Palast reports Bush ordered national security agents to "back off" the bin Laden terrorists. "

"Bush sent $43 Million to the Taliban. His administration supported negotiations with terrorists on behalf of his campaign contributors. These included corporations seeking to build a pipeline [pipeline...now how could you not believe that!] through Afghanistan."

All of this came from http://www.bushoccupation.com/welcolumn.html. However that site is a little over the top so I suggest you go to the individual news articles instead.

If you disagree with the comments, don't kill the messenger.

 

[FastPilot]

Comments on the terrorism issue: Do you really know what was happening in the years and months leading up to 9-11-2001?

"President Clinton ordered two attack submarines to stand watch over the Taliban and bin Laden's terrorists. Bush ordered the subs to stand down. [See: The Covert Hunt for bin Laden: Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks, The Washington Post: 12/19/01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...ode=&contentId=A62725-2001Dec18&notFound=true] Clinton warned the Taliban he would hold the Taliban leadership personally responsible for any attack by bin Laden against Americans. Bush lifted that decree. [See: Clinton's War on Terror: The Covert Hunt for bin Laden, The Washington Post, 12/20/01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62776-2001Dec18?] But Bush eliminated these safeguards."

"Greg Palast reports Bush ordered national security agents to "back off" the bin Laden terrorists. "

"Bush sent $43 Million to the Taliban. His administration supported negotiations with terrorists on behalf of his campaign contributors. These included corporations seeking to build a pipeline [pipeline...now how could you not believe that!] through Afghanistan."

All of this came from http://www.bushoccupation.com/welcolumn.html. However that site is a little over the top so I suggest you go to the individual news articles instead.

If you disagree with the comments, don't kill the messenger.

If you believe all this **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED**, you are smoking crack

 

[TXCAP4228]

I suspect W has alterior motives. To me his speech sounded more like a campaign speech. He is telling us what he thinks we want to hear. Don't believe it until it happens. For example, while Bush is trying to look environmentally friendly, he has been the torch-bearer for the Yucca Mountain project, in which all the nation's nuclear waste goes to the site in Nevada, which is in a notorious earthquake area, in a volcano.

It's the easiest way out although safer solutions have been proposed. In my opinion, I truly think that nuclear power is the biggest mistake we have ever made. All Nuclear Power plants should be closed. We have proved that we can clean up air pollution; cleaning up nuclear waste is impossible. It will be there for millions of years.
If you disagree with the comments, don't kill the messenger.

I have two observations.

1) About campaign speech/ulterior motives. All political speeches are campaign speeches because politicians continually have to "sell" their constituents on their ideas. What you have said is in this case is not a criticism. Further, you go on to say that Bush must have ulterior motives because of the Yucca Mountain thing (that I talk about below) but you fail to provide any reason why the two would be linked.

2) About Yucca Mountain/spent nuclear fuel. You say Bush supports Yucca and you list reasons why this is bad, and then go so far as to list problems that will coe from the transport of Radioactive material. If you are going to criticize Yucca, show me a better alternative. I'm all ears.

You go on to say that all nuke plants should be closed down. This does not resolve the problem of current spent nuclear fuel. You have not addressed it.

I have said before on this board that it is disingenuous to criticize in a way that prevents a solution. You have made a criticism and then painted yourself into a corner. You are being disingenuous.

I am tempted to comment on your terrorism bit, but no. I think FastPilot called you on that somewhat eloquently.

 

[TXCAP4228]

Typhoon,
You were the one who brought your opinion into the fray about the State of the Union Address not being an appropriate forum for passionate references to faith in God......of course, you didn't say WHY.....and then you bailed out on answering any more comments about the one that you opened the door to.

And I ask, why not? This nation was founded by people with fervent Christian religious beliefs and the foundational principles upon which those people wrote the basis for our contry's government and its values are rooted in those beliefs and the founding fathers beliefs and faith in God.

I applaud the President for passionately stating his faith in God........Without that faith and that of the millions of Christians who were the majority in the conception and building of this country, we would not be where we are today.

And frankly, the decay of family values, the moral degredation of the country, and many other maladies that afflict our society today are, in my opinion, a result of not focusing our faith on God.

Good for you President Bush......

There have been at leat 5 threads in the last 3 months where this particular subject was discussed at length, ad nauseum. As much as I am tempted... I think this topic has been worn out.

 

[Timebuilder]

dms, you have given me a lot of great opportunities to spend more time in front of my computer today than I have planned. I will bypass the anti-nuclear alarmism, and go right to the "terrorism" portion of your post.

It is interesting (and somewhat disturbing) to see what can pass for professional journalism at the Washington post. From this assembled stack of notes which is passed off as an article, there are some "quotables".

"President Clinton ordered two attack submarines to stand watch over the Taliban and bin Laden's terrorists. Bush ordered the subs to stand down.

This one is actually funny. Clinton never ordered attack submarines to place themselves "on station". He was told in a briefing that this is what his intelligence agancies had done. Conversely, Bush was counciled that they were not of value in that position, and that other means of intelligence gathering had made them unecessary for that purpose. If you leave out the important parts of this scenario, it makes it appear that Clinton heroically took an active role in the hunt for Bin Laden, and Bush was somehow lax in his duties, when in reality Clinbton was interested in making a legacy as the American President who helped bring peace to the middle east.

The lines Clinton opted not to cross continued to define U.S. policy in his successor's first eight months. Clinton stopped short of using more decisive military instruments, including U.S. ground forces, and declined to expand the reach of the war to the Taliban regime that hosted bin Laden and his fighters after 1996.

Not until the catastrophe of Sept. 11 -- when terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon -- did President Bush obliterate those boundaries.

In other words, the boundaries established by military planners during the Clinton administration continued because we did not have evidence of a credible threat until September 11th, right? Yep.

More than once, advisers recall, Clinton sounded out Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the prospect of using Special Forces to surprise bin Laden's fighters on the ground. But Clinton declined to authorize the large-scale operation that Shelton said would be required, and he chose not to order a less ambitious option to which the general would have objected.

In other words, Clinton ignored Shelton's professional advice regarding what was needed to stop Bin Laden.

Though his government came to believe that the Taliban was inextricably tied to bin Laden, Clinton never seriously entertained the use of military force against the Islamic fundamentalist regime, still less the kind of broad campaign that removed the Taliban from power 10 days ago.

At least twice, Clinton dispatched senior emissaries to the Taliban with threats no less stark than the formula Bush laid out in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20. Bin Laden, they said, was an enemy of the United States, and a regime that provided him sanctuary should be prepared for the consequences.

This is key: Clinton dispatched emissaries. Bush dispatched action. The writer is attempting to paint Clinton's actions as being equivalent to Bush's actions. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!

Clinton administration officials believed the Taliban would interpret the warning as a military threat.

Clinton threatened, but failed to back up his threats.

There is, even now, no satisfying answer to the central mystery of the Clinton administration's covert war. How is it possible that the president had intelligence good enough to launch missiles at bin Laden within 13 days of the embassy bombings, yet never had it again? Did the intelligence task grow that much harder, or did the president and his national security apparatus grow less tolerant of risk?

Clinton was busily engaged in trying to rebuild his legacy, attempting vainly to become remembered for something other than being a philandering fool. A war would be unpopular with his party and hollywood supporters, people like Susan Sarandon and Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's (great ice cream, silly political ideas). Clinton wanted to provide a leagacy of Mideast peace, something even the Bible does not speak of until Christ returns after the Tribulation. Sadly, this is indicative of where Clinton's ego places him on the scale of God and Man.

It was easy for this Post writer to try and assemble this pile of notes into an article full of implication and assumption. I'm not buying his attempt.

 

[dmspilot00]

I realize that Yucca and hydrogen cars really have nothing to do with each other. The only thing I'm saying is: you people (to quote someone's response to my post) are "smoking crack" if you think Bush suddenly cares about the environment. I brought up Yucca Mt. because I was disturbed to see shipments of radioactive material going on right in the middle of morning rush hour.

I don't remember the details, but one plan for the waste involved burrying containers in the floor of the ocean, where they would leach deep into the ground and make their way to the Earth's core (a gross simplification; there was an entire website devoted to explaining this idea but I don't remember where it was). Even if that plan would have turned out not feasable, I don't believe that putting the stuff in an earthquake area in a volcano is a very bright idea, not to mention that it is on the total opposite side of the country as where most of the nuclear waste is already located.

Anyway, I don't want to get into a debate about the nuclear waste thing, I only mentioned it as a sidebar.

I'm not going to respond to the terrorism issue because those were the W. Post's words, not mine. If there are errors in their logic then you're right, it is a shame they made it to that paper.

So, what is behind this quest for a hydrogen car? Did you know that the money for the research is coming from the cancellation of projects that involve developing "80-mile- per-gallon" cars (which would only be a few years away), and because hydrogen powered cars for the masses are estimated to be some 20 years from being a reality, the decision "will delay the nation's freedom from foreign oil for years, fans and critics of the move agreed" (italics added).

Other quotes:

' "There is a continuous ploy by the car companies to create a vehicle that's just beyond the reach of technology," said Frank, a researcher and proponent of hybrid vehicles, which have both a gasoline engine and an electric motor. "They say, 'Just leave us alone and we'll make great cars,' and the administration has fallen for it."

Just as they did with the electric car, Frank predicted, automakers eventually will declare the hydrogen-powered vehicle impractical.

"They'll stop it and they'll say it's because it costs too much to produce and it isn't competitive with the gas-powered car," he said. "I guarantee it." '

Source: http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=6551

So, why can't we have both programs, with reduced funding for each? Or, better yet, why shouldn't the car companies fund the research themselves, and the government can instead "award" them financially once they actually come up with something? If we can double gas mileage now, that means we need half of the oil that we currently need, and half is still a pretty significant amount.

Also, most of you seem to have forgotten that Honda has already been developing hydrogen powered cars for awhile now.

 

[larry]

Since preemptive strikes are ok….

I’ve started punching people in the street that look like they might say something or do something nasty later on. Better to preempt the potential jerk with a punch in the nose than let him be a jerk later. I think its a good system. Watch out fellows, you could be next, but only if you were probably going to be a jerk.

Just last night I kicked my dog as a preemptive strike. He was thinking about drinking out of the toilet. I thought, "better preempt that with a kick in the butt."

 

[Timebuilder]

After broadcasting, and before pursuing flying, I repaired cars and trucks, from the smallest MG to the largest big rig. You'd be shocked at the amount of radioactive material that is transported EVERY DAY in America, and there is rarely an accident that results in any kind of release into the evironment. Stats about one vehilcle every few hours are more for shock value than anything else. If you include all radiological shipments, it's more like one every few minutes. The entire earth is an earthquake zone. Dealing with nuclear waste is a balance of several concerns, and decisions are based on the knowelge of the industry, which is considerable. When something better comes along, it will be tried.

Also from my repair (and sometimes "redesign") background, I can tell you that the manufacturers are the folks that MUST be in charge of the progression of vehicle types, just as NASA should be in charge of space exploration. They're the experts.

The manufacturers operate in an environment of capitalism. They have many people to satisfy: the government, the consumer, the production engineer, the insurance institute, etc. This is a big job. While the 80 mpg vehicle might be produced in ten years from an engineering standpoint, it may not be practical enough to be viable in the marketplace.

The hydrogen car design is a look ahead, which is always how we progress in this world, by constantly raising our sights. After we stabilize hydrogen for handling, the design can rest on much of what has already been done to further the idea of the electric car. If you produce power from hydrogen, for instance, you have solved the battery and the recharging problems, and retained the convenience and turn around time of a conventional fill-up at the gas station (which would really be a "gas" station, finally!). This is a VERY good goal for the auto industry.

Just as they did with the electric car, Frank predicted, automakers eventually will declare the hydrogen-powered vehicle impractical.

Impractical now? Certainly. Frank is a well known "naysayer".

Also, most of you seem to have forgotten that Honda has already been developing hydrogen powered cars for awhile now.

I haven't forgotten. Honda and Toyota make the cleanest, most efficient cars on the market. I can't wait to see what Toyota will do when they have a certified GA aircraft. Expect it to be innovative and reliable.

I don't blame you for the Post article, dms. It's typical fare from them, and the NY Times, etc. They have always been apologists for Clinton.

 

[Timebuilder]

Larry, that's pretty funny.

The corrected logic would be: your dog has bitten you on the leg before, and has recently threatened to pull your leg off and bury it in the backyard. Your "preemptive strike" would be to take him to the vet and have him put to sleep.

Nice try, though.