You said: Originally Posted By: HClThe news media does not clearly favor Obama. Please don't construe your personal opinion as fact.Then you said: Originally Posted By: HCLObama gets more news coverage overall because he is an oddity. What's new about a rich old Republican running for office, versus a charismatic, highly-educated black man, the first black man in the history of the nation to receive the nomination? and Originally Posted By: HCLA.W., you don't need unbiased news as much as you need a basic understanding of what's going on, informed by the knowledge that practically all sources have a bias. Contradict yourself much?
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Press favors Obama
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You need to read with more understanding. "Gives lot of negative attention to" does not mean "favors". And do you think it's really weird that the media would be more interested in a young charismatic black candidate than another old white guy who's already been around the track? Man bites dog and all that.And the last point is valid as well. Obama may get a fair amount of negative coverage, but it does not mean there's no useful information in that coverage. It means that you have to understand you're not getting the whole story.A lot of the coverage you get on television, including cable, is utterly superficial. They obviously have a large focus on ratings, to the detriment of conveying information. And in the time allotted, they have precious little time to cover anything in depth.Fewer people are reading newspapers, and more people are getting information from indisputably biased sources, like blogs. They gravitate toward the ones whose ideology they agree with, and become even more hardened in their positions.You're not going to convince a lot of the people in that Tennessee town that Obama is not Muslim, much less Arab.How do you feel about McCain's air gauge campaign, and all the coverage it's gotten? (By the way, Obama's Web site has a lot of info on his proposed energy policy, for what it's worth.)
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His energy policy is to spend 150 billion dollars over 10 years on new technologies research. Have you looked at the economy lately? We're billions of dollars in debt and adding another 150 billion dollars on something that may not result in a new technology is completely wasteful. It would also mean he would have to increase taxes drastically to get the money for it. He's looking for money that isn't there. I would suggest lowering the amount of money to 25 billion and space it out over 25 years. That way, it's only a billion a year and if we do end up with a new technology it could easily pull us out of debt. There aren't too many innovations that can save an economy from a 150 billion dollar deficit, but a 25 billion dollar one could be fixed in 50 years.
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This article is pretty interesting http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9803819-7.html
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Just for perspective, Congress puts the cost of the Iraq war at over 100 billion dollars a year.How do you think the vast majority of medical research is funded in the U.S.? Through government grants (and to some extent, at government laboratories). Once a pharmaceutical company starts thinking about researching a drug to market it, most of the scientific research has already been done. OMG that's like socialism! (Not really.)How do you feel about infrastructure maintenance? Do you think bridges should be allowed to crumble, because it just costs too much to fix them? Our energy infrastructure is as much a part of our infrastructure as our highways are.The problem with absolute beliefs, such as a belief in the free market, is that they're almost always wrong. The free market is a great idea, but a completely unfettered free market turns out not to be the most efficient, and certainly not the one that causes the least pain.Jesus Himself seemed to agree. He in effect said, don't wait for the market to take care of all your problems (such as helping "the least among us"), go do it yourself. Share your stuff. Give a needy person the shirt off your back. Interesting how some people can call themselves Christian and adhere to Ayn Rand's ideas at the same time. (By the way, she was an atheist.)
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Thanks to both Clinton and Bush we've dug ourselves into a hole that we aren't going to be able to get out of in 4 years or even 8 for that matter. So I don't understand how anyone is going to solve these problems at once. I bet a bridge collapses again or maybe even more. Watching CNN today, they said that they're working on a deal to withdraw most troops by Dec. 2009 and all the troops by 2010. I think we need to split Iraq up into 3 countries and put a 50 mile DMZ at the borders with constant troop patrol. At least that way we don't end up wasting billions of dollars for no reason.
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It depends who wins. McCain said a timetable is unacceptable. Has he changed his mind?
Bush and Clinton are responsible for what, exactly? No one since Jimmy Carter has even tried to formulate a non-trivial energy policy. The Republicans mocked Carter when he gave an address while wearing a sweater, just as they're mocking Obama with air gauges. There has been little leadership since 1980 from either party on energy.
In terms of budget deficits, Reagan ran up a big one, and Bush is now running up a huge one. Little is being spent on infrastructure, and research spending is declining (it certainly is in the most recent budget).
If we wait for the market to address the energy issue alone, there will be a lot of pain and disruption. The free market tends not to solve very-long-term problems very well. If gas quickly goes up to $15 a gallon and stays there, solutions will be found, but it won't be as easy as it could be.
(The irony of the tire gauge thing is that, if everyone inflated their tires properly, we'd reduce oil consumption way more than what we'd gain from drilling in the gulf (like 3 1/2 times), and we'd gain it right away.)
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I really think the most we can do for now is work on cars that get 100 mpg or more. That would give relief to both yourself and the oil reserves. Think about it, a 20 gallon tank, that's 2000 miles! Now what we can't do is start making it mandatory for mpg to be at a certain level. But I think we should put pressure on car companies to make SUVs and trucks to have far better fuel efficiency. My dad's truck is like 15 mpg, I think in the future we could have trucks and SUVs getting 40-45 mpg or even more. That's the technology we need to work on first, then we can start looking at other ways to run cars.
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There has been research done on the coverage during the campaigns that shows that Obama is not being favored by the press in the way you're making it out to be.
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And to accomplish that, you'd need a lot of money from the government to spend on this research, which would probably be included in the $150 billion you were referring to. And you make it seem like doing these things aren't all that hard. Some increases aren't too difficult, but the increases you want are a lot harder to figure out a solution to. Sure, a 100 mpg car isn't hard to make, but it's safety is completely crap and does not have a very large tank. You have to keep the safety of the current vehicles while increasing fuel efficiency, which isn't an easy task.
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I'm sure SUVs and trucks could be produced that would get much better gas mileage than they currently do (one easy fix would be to swap in smaller engines), but they'll never get the mileage that an optimized car would. A lot of people drive big vehicles because it's cool, not for any utilitarian purpose.But how about thinking outside of the box? How about electric-powered vehicles, plug-in or fuel cell? Hybrids, using only electric motors for propulsion, the way diesel trains have worked for a long time?How about wind power? How about making solar power more affordable? How about more efficient solar cells to generate electricity?There are many, many other ideas. Did Clinton and Bush think oil would be cheap and plentiful forever? Bush and Cheney were creatures of the oil industry anyway, and the oil lobby would have done anything they could to crush research into alternative energy. Their interest is in shareholder value, not what's best for the nation. I'm not criticizing that; it's how the system works, and it's fine. But the representatives of the people (in our republic) need to keep the best interest of the people front and center.
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To that I say, "It's not my problem."
Oil can last for another 500 years for all we know. We don't have the technology yet to extract all of it.
Currently there's 3 trillion barrels. From day 1 of our use on, we've only diminished 1 trillion and an estimated 1.5 trillion by 2012\.
And there could be more oil underground we haven't seen yet.
For all we know, we might not even be in an oil crisis. Only time and technology will tell. -
I wouldn't take the opinion of an oil industry executive as the last word on oil reserves. Many people think we've already passed peak oil. I'm not aware of anyone who thinks that the rate of oil production will increase for another 500 years.The problem is that demand for oil is accelerating. China and India are rapidly industrializing, and their growing middle class wants more of the luxuries that we take for granted. Demand is outstripping supply.If we just sit around and wait for the supply to get really low and the price to get really high, we will put ourselves through a lot of pain that could be prevented through the development of alternative energy sources. We will also remain beholden to the foreign suppliers that are not our strategic friends. We'll have to stay in bed with the dictators because we won't be able to afford to have our oil supply disrupted.
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Hi guys did you know that some man named Raymond Hunter Giesel made a threat to assasinate Barack Obama?
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An important issue when considering oil reserves is whether it includes oil shales and oil sands. There was some talk about different countries' reserves in another thread that definitely did include oil shales. The problem with these is that although they contain a lot of the world's total oil reserves, it's much more expensive to get it out - it means mining lots of rock, extracting the oil at high energy cost, then finding somewhere to put the spent rock. In practice, I think coal-to-oil technologies will end up cheaper than oil from shale (but by no means cheaper than current oil).About the plastic in the oceans, it's important to recognise that plastic bags dropped in streets usually end up, via stormwater drains in rivers and thence to oceans. One issue that has recently been discovered is that as plastic degrades, it forms smaller and smaller particles, eventually producing microparticles that readily enter the digestive system of fish, and can act as carriers of toxins that don't dissolve in water. Rubber particles too - all the rubber worn from tyres on roads ends up in the ocean.
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Those are some interesting points.
It's funny that companies are making "biodegradable" plastic bags, which as far as I know are finely-divided pieces of plastic in a starch binder. But most bags go to landfills, where not much bio-degradation occurs. Most of the rest probably wind up in the ocean, where the bags more rapidly become fine plastic particles.
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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/07/10869/This is a really interesting article on the original topic.
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That and there was his famous interview response. It came up during a conference that he'd smoked weed in his childhood and the newsreporter asked him whether he inhalled and he simply responded;"Isn't that the idea?"Lol, it's like Boris Johnson, the new mayor of London, who when asked "Have you had sex with a man?" he just said; "Not yet!"Absolutely quality responses, next president and prime minister i say i say!
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Originally Posted By: CiderThere has been research done on the coverage during the campaigns that shows that Obama is not being favored by the press in the way you're making it out to be. Liberal MediaI said liberal...not Obama specifically. But it would be hard to argue he's anything else but liberal.
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If your perspective is that Fox News is fair and balanced, then yes, it would be hard to argue. If you're Bernard Goldberg, who writes books on the subject as if they're academic treatises but actually contain no references and are merely opinion pieces, then it's all very simple. Likewise if you live in a black-and-white world where everything is easily categorized, then maybe it's obvious.Your reference says that the debate is over, but it is not. And what are their criteria for negative coverage? If they report that ten soldiers died in Faluja, does that count against Republicans? If they report on poll results of Bush's popularity, does that also count against the Repubicans? And how do they explain the fact that Obama gets more negative and critical coverage than McCain does?If you actually take the time to think about it instead of following your prejudices, then it's not so simple. All large media are commercial, shareholder-owned for-profit enterprises. They're trying to sell newspapers, magazines, and airtime. The corporations have ultimate control. In some markets, ownership of major media outlets is concentrated (especially with the FCC's ruling from last December).The left thinks the media is very conservative, the right thinks the media is very liberal. Could that mean that maybe it's neither, overall? This article will show that your cherished beliefs may be wrong. Is it possible you might be a white conservative Christian with a persecution complex?The "conservative" media was in the tank for Bush when he invaded Iraq. The major outlets all rolled right over. The media is supposed to investigate and challenge, but they were cheerleading.Television news organizations are more brain-dead than political. The just repeat what the candidates say, giving everything equal weight, not instigating claims. Instead of doing research on a candidate's accusation of his rival, they will go to the attacked candidate and keep saying that "so-and-so said...", over and over.And you wind up with air gauge nonsense instead of useful content, which TV media seems to think is just too boring to draw viewers. Among the results are things like a large percentage of Americans thinking, even years later, that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, and that Obama is Muslim.So no, it is NOT a slam dunk for a thinking person to think that the media is liberal.By the way, if someone from the media called you out on your fantasy about WMDs being trucked out of Iraq and into Syria, would you say they are liberal? The world still waits for your proof, along with your photos of Bigfoot.