The Trump Presidency

Hawk said:
Drilling, fracking ... what's the difference?

Obama had 8 years to literally shove alternative energy and its merits down our throats. And he should have. Instead, we were gifted cheap gas and a slew of last-ditch, absurd agreements and overzealous regulations.

Now, the other side gets it turn and we're practically back at square one with fuel costs on the rise again. Can barely give away electric cars, have continually attempted to marginalize the most important car company in our country (Tesla). Reliable and efficient public transportation hasn't grown in any significant way in atleast 3 decades.

Bravo, Barry. Bravo.
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The obama presidency will go down in this history books as one of the worst of all time.
 
Hawk said:
Drilling, fracking ... what's the difference?

Obama had 8 years to literally shove alternative energy and its merits down our throats. And he should have. Instead, we were gifted cheap gas and a slew of last-ditch, absurd agreements and overzealous regulations.

Now, the other side gets it turn and we're practically back at square one with fuel costs on the rise again. Can barely give away electric cars, have continually attempted to marginalize the most important car company in our country (Tesla). Reliable and efficient public transportation hasn't grown in any significant way in atleast 3 decades.

Bravo, Barry. Bravo.
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I'm not disagreeing with you or weso on this, though I think the problem is WAY bigger than Barry. I just don't want oil companies to have more free reign to eff up the environment, make millions and then leave the mess and the pollution/poisons for other people to clean up or for poor people to have to live with/in. And as useless as the Dems are (and good accomplices too) it wasn't the Dems who did photo ops and press conferences demonizing Barry for getting BP to pay for the gulf cleanup in advance, nor was it Dem governors sneaking legislation through the state governments to excuse them from having to follow through with cleaning up their messes.
 
Oklahomahawk said:
I'm not disagreeing with you or weso on this, though I think the problem is WAY bigger than Barry. I just don't want oil companies to have more free reign to eff up the environment, make millions and then leave the mess and the pollution/poisons for other people to clean up or for poor people to have to live with/in. And as useless as the Dems are (and good accomplices too) it wasn't the Dems who did photo ops and press conferences demonizing Barry for getting BP to pay for the gulf cleanup in advance, nor was it Dem governors sneaking legislation through the state governments to excuse them from having to follow through with cleaning up their messes.
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I actually don't agree with weso in his belief that oil is a necessary evil. I believe that we should take the fossil fuel industry to task, and that Obama had the credibility to do that - at least initially - and failed catastrophically.
 
Hawk said:
I actually don't agree with weso in his belief that oil is a necessary evil. I believe that we should take the fossil fuel industry to task, and that Obama had the credibility to do that - at least initially - and failed catastrophically.
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I don't disagree either, I just know how oil companies are when they want something (ie oil rights) and how they are after they gotten it and somebody expects them to clean up the mess. What assurances would you offer to make sure they don't rape and ravage the environment, then when their deeds become public they skedaddle in the middle of the night and declare bankruptcy so they don't have to make things right?
 
Kellyanne Conway told CNN that Donald Trump would work on Celebrity Apprentice "in his spare time."
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this is the same person that is with a group of people that blasted Obama for playing golf

but the reality start president will have spare time for celebrity apprentice

and people think this is going well.

if only we got his tax returns so we could know exactly how much he was worth before this plan to enrich himself
 
thethe said:
The obama presidency will go down in this history books as one of the worst of all time.
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if you believe it enough and only read fake Facebook news, then yeah, i'm sure this will be true

it won't but hey, 2016 again, facts obviously don't matter
 
"give him a chance" LOL

The Trump transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking officials there to identify which department employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation’s carbon output.

The questionnaire requests a list of those individuals who have taken part in international climate talks over the past five years and “which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.”

[Pruitt, Trump’s EPA pick, has both sides of climate divide girding for a major fight]

Trump and his team have vowed to dismantle specific aspects of President Obama’s climate policies. The questionnaire, which one Energy Department official described as unusually “intrusive” and a matter for departmental lawyers, has raised concern that the Trump transition team was trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama.

The questionnaire was first reported by Bloomberg News. The Post has obtained its own a copy of the document as well as confirmation from other people in the department. The Trump transition team has not responded to requests for comment.

Thousands of scientists have already signed petitions calling on the president-elect and his team to respect scientific integrity and refrain from singling out individual researchers whose work might conflict with the new administration’s policy goals.

This potential clash could prompt a major schism within the federal government, with many career officials waging a battle against incoming political appointees.

One question zeroed in on the issue of the “social cost of carbon,” a way of calculating the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. The transition team asked for a list of department employees or contractors who attended interagency meetings, the dates of the meetings, and emails and other materials associated with them.

The social cost of carbon is a metric that calculates the cost to society of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The Obama administration has used this tool to try to calculate the benefits of regulations and initiatives that lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

[The staggering economic cost of air pollution]

Another question appeared to delve deeply into the mechanisms behind scientific tools called “integrated assessment models,” which scientists use to forecast future changes to the climate and energy system. It also asked what the Energy Department considers to be “the proper equilibrium climate sensitivity,” which is a way that climate researchers calculate how much the planet will eventually warm, depending upon the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

“My guess is that they’re trying to undermine the credibility of the science that DOE has produced, particularly in the field of climate science,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate and energy researcher, in response to the question about the Integrated Assessment Models.

The questionnaire also appeared to take aim at the national laboratories, which operate with a high degree of independence but which are part of the Energy Department. The questionnaire asked for a list of the top 20 salaried employees of the labs, the labs’ peer-reviewed publications over the past three years, a list of their professional society memberships, affiliations, and the websites they maintain or contribute to “during work hours.”

The transition team list also asked how to keep open aging nuclear power plants, restart the controversial Yucca mountain nuclear waste site shelved by President Obama, and support the licensing of small modular reactors.

It included 15 questions for the Energy Information Administration, some of them routine but some questioning the way the agency uses data about energy production.

The questions called to mind past cases of conflicts between Republican administrations and federal agency scientists, on the environment and other matters.

In Ronald Reagan’s first term, Anne Gorsuch was appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency amid a major push for regulatory rollback. But after Gorsuch resigned amid controversy in 1983, Congress opened investigations into supposed “hit lists” at the agency used to track the views of members of scientific advisory boards, according to contemporary press reports.

During the George W. Bush administration, meanwhile, there were complaints that scientific documents had been edited to raise doubts about the science of climate change, and that researchers had been prevented from speaking openly to the media and sharing their expertise.

[Amidst funding fears, NASA announces another climate research mission]

Energy Department officials have not yet decided how to respond to the questions targeting the agency’s climate activities, according to federal officials who asked not to be identified to discuss internal deliberations.

“With some of these questions, it feels more like an inquisition than a question, in terms of going after career employees who have been here through Bush years to Clinton, and up to now,” said one current Energy Department employee. “All of a sudden you have questions that feel more like a congressional investigation than an actual probing of how the Department of Energy does its job.”

Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, called the memo’s demand that Energy officials identify specific employees “alarming.”

“If the Trump administration is already singling out scientists for doing their jobs, the scientific community is right to be worried about what his administration will do in office. What’s next? Trump administration officials holding up lists of ‘known climatologists’ and urging the public to go after them?” Halpern asked.

He added that lawmakers have attacked executive branch scientists in the past for doing “work they find inconvenient. It seems that they are about to get accomplices in the Department of Energy. But don’t expect the federal workforce to simply roll over. The new administration will find thousands of federal workers who still believe in their departmental mission and will work hard to resist attacks on their peers. Scientists outside government are standing by to expose these actions and fight back.”

Christine McEntee, the executive director of the American Geophysical Union, a large membership society of Earth scientists, added in response to the questionnaire that “we don’t know at AGU the intent of all these questions, but if you look at them without knowing that intent, they are raising alarm for us.”

McEntee said that in general when it comes to politics and science under Trump, “we’re hearing a lot from members, they’re quite concerned.” At the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco this December, where over 20,000 scientists gather annually, there will be sessions on the consequences of the election for science and also giving publicly funded scientists legal advice on how to respond to requests for their communications, she said.

The questionnaire spanned a broad area of Energy Department activities, including its loan program, its technology research program, responses to Congress, estimates of offshore wind, and cleanup of uranium at a site once used by the military for weapons research.

The Trump transition team meetings with Energy Department officials so far have excluded political appointees, one current official said.

At the Defense Department, Trump transition personnel are having multiple meetings a day with Pentagon personnel, but in some cases have asked Obama administration political appointees not to attend those meetings, officials there said.
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Hawk said:
Drilling, fracking ... what's the difference?

Obama had 8 years to literally shove alternative energy and its merits down our throats. And he should have. Instead, we were gifted cheap gas and a slew of last-ditch, absurd agreements and overzealous regulations.

Now, the other side gets it turn and we're practically back at square one with fuel costs on the rise again. Can barely give away electric cars, have continually attempted to marginalize the most important car company in our country (Tesla). Reliable and efficient public transportation hasn't grown in any significant way in atleast 3 decades.

Bravo, Barry. Bravo.
Click to expand...

Obama is damned if he do and damned if he doesn't

he can either go the executive order route to get something done cause Congress would only do whatever the opposite of what he wanted

or nothing would get done

it's amazing the standard he was held to

if he was the king and tyrant the sheep always said he was, i am sure he could have actually shoved those things down our throat but we had people choosing party over country
 
goldfly said:
if you believe it enough and only read fake Facebook news, then yeah, i'm sure this will be true

it won't but hey, 2016 again, facts obviously don't matter
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You're obviously a staunch Obama supporter... I'm curious what you think he did that was so good?

Was it the 8 wars? The drone program? The NSA mass spying? The NDAA? The laughable failure of ACA? The middling economic recovery despite the fed pulling every tool out of box? The continued widening of the wealth gap?

I liked that he opened up things with Cuba? I supported the Iran deal more than the alternative...

Curious what you thought was so amazing
 
goldfly said:
Obama is damned if he do and damned if he doesn't

he can either go the executive order route to get something done cause Congress would only do whatever the opposite of what he wanted

or nothing would get done

it's amazing the standard he was held to

if he was the king and tyrant the sheep always said he was, i am sure he could have actually shoved those things down our throat but we had people choosing party over country
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I think that high standard was his own creation. 'Black Jesus' and the faux Nobel Peace Prize and all that. He ran a campaign for the ages and glided into office with a rubber-stamp majority and a resounding mandate to lead. After that, it was really up to him to live up to his own words, and the battles he chose to undertake to fulfill his promises didn't provide the immediate impact necessary to hold onto that clear majority (which was whittled down and then completely lost). I don't blame conservatives elected during the 2010 midterms and thereafter for roadblocking Obama. Their promises to do so are what got them elected to begin with.

I blame Obama for not having better policy. His ideas were good - if not brilliantly progressive - but in practice, they flopped. The stimulus was one large pork-barrel and ObamaCare was/is fatally flawed. His international policy didn't work. He didn't move the dial on clean energy.

For as much as he is lauded for his pro-gay activism, he'll likely be remembered more for his utter failure to unite the races in any meaningful way. Trayvon Martin. Mother Emanuel. Ferguson. Baltimore. Charlotte.

He had the chance to shove ... anything ... down our throats. After 08' he could've told us sand was water and we would've tried to drink it.

But he didn't.
 
George Will:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.01217d0176c2

So, this is the new conservatism’s recipe for restored greatness: Political coercion shall supplant economic calculation in shaping decisions by companies in what is called, with diminishing accuracy, the private sector. This will be done partly as conservatism’s challenge to liberalism’s supremacy in the victimhood sweepstakes, telling aggrieved groups that they are helpless victims of vast, impersonal forces, against which they can be protected only by government interventions.

Responding to political threats larded with the money of other people, Carrier has somewhat modified its planned transfers of some manufacturing to Mexico. This represents the dawn of bipartisanship: The Republican Party now shares one of progressivism’s defining aspirations — government industrial policy, with the political class picking winners and losers within, and between, economic sectors. This always involves the essence of socialism — capital allocation, whereby government overrides market signals about the efficient allocation of scarce resources. Therefore it inevitably subtracts from economic vitality and job creation.
 
Hawk, I get what you mean to some degree but this isn't a vacuum and shouldn't be judged that way

The opposing party said their main goal when the American people gave the mandate was to hope he fails and is a one term president

To not at least acknowledge what was going on is crazy imo.

I mean, I would be the first to wish he pushed harder but obviously that isn't his way to just shove it down our throats.

I have told friends his blind optimism in the American people is crazy to me and even crazier the way he has been treated by a lot of them
 
sturg33 said:
You're obviously a staunch Obama supporter... I'm curious what you think he did that was so good?

Was it the 8 wars? The drone program? The NSA mass spying? The NDAA? The laughable failure of ACA? The middling economic recovery despite the fed pulling every tool out of box? The continued widening of the wealth gap?

I liked that he opened up things with Cuba? I supported the Iran deal more than the alternative...

Curious what you thought was so amazing
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@ goldy
 
Hawk said:
Looks like Tillerson is going to be tabbed for State.

****ing horrible pick.
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The narrative that's going to come out of this is he's too friendly with Russia, but why else do you dislike the pick?

I know nothing about him.
 
I find it strange how there is such an outcry against being too nice with Leaders like Putin but nothing about relationships with countries like Saudi Arabia. Whose to say which is worse at this point?

Some of these cabinet picks are sketchy at best. I just want pro-business environment, borders to be secured and restricted immigration from terrorist nations.
 
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