you might take a cue a wonder what inflating our money supply recklessly is going to do to our dollar. unlike this, i maintain, preposterous global warming/climate change/whatever makes for a good sounding name for the ignorant public, we have several precedents for monetary crack-ups. and we show every sign of ignorance and hubris in thinking we’re so very different!

The problem is that all too often, we engineers and scientists don’t get the last word.

We lost Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia, because while engineers knew there were serious engineering flaws, non-engineers had other plans.

Ever read the sci-fi novel “When Worlds Collide”? Or see the movie?

In it, a bunch of astronomers discover through their telescopes a planet that’s on a direct collision course with Earth. They announce that our world will end, and that we must build spaceships to evacuate as many people from Earth as possible.

Does anyone pay attention? No. Instead, the astronomers are ridiculed as alarmists and crackpots.

Because politicians considered it an attack on their authority.
Businessmen considered it bad for business.
Investors didn’t like how the announcement dragged down the stock market.

Folks don’t start to pay attention until the planet can be seen with the naked eye in the night sky, getting larger and larger as it races toward Earth.

That’s when the panic starts for real.

It’s clearly a scam, and the data supports it. I guarantee nothing will pass, and if something does, will be ineffective at curbing emissions. Until people actually believe there is anthropogenic global warming, which they’ll do when they can sense it, feel it, pay the cost of its consequences, there will continue to be little political will.

Even the countries that passed that utterly ridiculous Kyoto Protocol could not keep to the targets, and the governments didn’t bother enforcing. It’s funny – the U.S. cut emission growth, as a percentage, more than Canada. They signed the protocol; we did not.

“But what I’ve heard from the GOP base goes much further than skepticism.”

I don’t disagree, but our former oilman/president gave the fanatics cover by opening the door to the idea that the scientific community was still widely debating the issue, which it is not. He lets the hardcore Global Warming deniers shout down the science via FauxNews, talk radio and the blogs, and then he has clean hands.

On Redstate.com and Townhall.com, the GOP base clearly regards anthropogenic global warming as a “scam” created by liberals and anti-American foreign scientists to cripple America. They don’t just regard global warming as false; they regard it as a left-wing plot against America.

Now where did THAT come from?

Bush 43 never even hinted at anything like that.

It sounds like the kind of thing you might here on a talk show, or maybe on one of the new Howard Beale wannabes on cable news.

so let me repeat my earlier arguments.

During the Cold War, the U.S. spent far more, both in real dollars and as a percentage of GDP, on national defense than we are spending now. As I recall, during the JFK administration, 12% of our GDP went for national defense. If we did that now, the Pentagon would have a budget of $1.44 trillion.

Why did we do that? After World War II, the U.S. disarmed, relying on nuclear weapons to keep the peace. That proved disastrous, as the USSR started subverting Western nations everywhere and the U.S. couldn’t just nuke them all. So we rearmed.

Today, the U.S. military budget is only about 4% of U.S. GDP. That’s an entirely sustainable percentage, only 1% more than our NATO allies spent from their budgets during the Cold War.

The decision to fight in Afghanistan after 9-11 was forced. No President could look past the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans with just a token response like a few cruise missiles or something.

The decision to fight in Iraq was in error, a mistake due to a false strategic perception that Saddam was a major terrorist threat to America.

We had HOPED that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be temporary. But as long as you’re at war, you’re chewing up military equipment at a very high rate. Our F-15 fighters have started to crash due to stress and old age. Our combat vehicles have taken a lot of abuse in the sands of Iraq. All that equipment has to be replaced–at a high cost.

Does that answer your question already?

You can stop ranting about “security states”. Any nation that spends only 4% of its GDP on defense is not a “security state.” We spend far more than that on Social Security and Medicare. Maybe you should call America a “senior citizen state.”

Wow, the grammar and syntax sound remarkedly like our old trolling friend balconesfault or BlankHead… any chance we can pull the white hood off the new BarryS?

Of course not; the first rule of trolling on a conservative/GOP blog for the trolls is to lie, distract, dissuade, disrupt, annoy, irritate and inflame. We can’t get “truth” from the trolls –it’s not in their rule book.

” I don’t know where they got that idea from. It certainly didn’t come from Reagan, or Gingrich, or any of the Bush family.”

I think your point about Gore as the global warming “spokesperson” and why that’s the reason Republicans resist the idea is an interesting one. I’m certain that any cause Cheney got behind — no matter how benign — would be dismissed as unworthy by most Democrats.

Still, I think your statement about how the Bushes didn’t encourage skepticism of climate change is disingenuous. Bush II dragged his feet on any exploration of the topic and — as he did with creation “science” — only spoke of teaching the “debate,” lending credibility to the lie that there was rampant doubt within the scientific community.