That was brilliant, a little whiny but still good.
Moot whats the point of linking the same post? Ego thing?
I linked to this
[Obama] has clearly indicated he will raise taxes on higher income earners, he will raise capital gains taxes which affects everyone in the stock market, he has said the "wealthy" will pay more tax but hasn't defined "wealthy" and he has said he will restore progressive tax.
Those are all tax increases.
Here is a sample of his voting record on taxes. He never met a tax he didn't like.
Voted YES on increasing tax rate for people earning over $1 million. (Mar 2008)
Voted NO on allowing AMT reduction without budget offset. (Mar 2008)
Voted NO on raising the Death Tax exemption to $5M from $1M. (Feb 2008)
Voted NO on repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax. (Mar 2007)
Voted NO on raising estate tax exemption to $5 million. (Mar 2007)
Voted NO on supporting permanence of estate tax cuts. (Aug 2006)
Voted NO on permanently repealing the `death tax`. (Jun 2006)
Voted YES on $47B for military by repealing capital gains tax cut. (Feb 2006)
Voted NO on retaining reduced taxes on capital gains & dividends. (Feb 2006)
Voted NO on extending the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. (Nov 2005)
Rated 100% by the CTJ, indicating support of progressive taxation. (Dec 2006)
After you said
You guys are a bunch of glass half full pessimists. Obamas has never said anything about raising taxes,
Do you not see the connection?
Now, Obama talks a lot of crap, especialy about nasa, and while it's a real pet peeve of mine, it's not wrong just because it's nasa.. It's not just nasa but one of the things that unarguably put the US at the top of the world, and it's not just a national imperative as such, it's also a human imperative in what it's responsible for accomplishing. Space isn't just some far out crackpot land, it's the same thing america was a few centuries ago. How did the USA turn out, from their tiny rebellious beginnings? It's the same thing the west was when Lewis and Clark went out in the boonies.. And they went out into that wild expanse and we now have metropolitan sprawls all over it, while back then there was nothing. All the resources in the whole planet are pebbles on the beach of space, relatively. All that useful material is just sitting out there waiting for someone to exploit and make something of it. That something's going to be to all of planet Earth what that which the USA's grown into is to what it begun as.
So NASA isn't some fancy useless cash eater, and what cash it does eat only amounts to 1% of the budget. And like I said further up, the guy you and a bunch of others are clamoring for is going to cripple this 1% part of the budget, to feed the crumbs to another part of the budget that's mismanaged - IOW it doesn't need MORE feeding, not before it gets a new management formula.
Now, nasa is mismanaged itself, but it's way more efficient than academics. Like others have said, the education system is pumping out students that are in some cases illiterate. A first hand example: when i got to the US, I was skipped one year. Even with that year jump, I was in honors classes where the stuff that was taught was as much as FOUR years old to me. Not just random stuff, but chemistry principles taught in the best class the school had to offer.
The pedagogy was bad too, not just the material. The teachers didn't really put the kids to work at high efficiency, e.g. they "taught the tests" and gave extra credit, so the kids just snoozed thru class and crammed to make passing grade at the end of the terms... In general there weren't the seeds of professionality you find way more commonly back in France, the UK, Germany.. When I looked at more than 9 out of 10 students, it was obvious they didn't see how all the classes fit together to tell a bigger story. All the stuff they memorized to pass the classes was just swimming together in an uncorelated soup.
I went to the finals for the last year of High School and just like the whole year, I missed just a few questions, and knew what the right answer to all but one or two out of 100-200 total within a few minutes of walking out of the test. How did I do so well? I'd worked pretty hard at the start of the semester, but realized it wasn't necessary for a 90+ grade. For the final, I showed up 2 hours before the start, and read the notebook... That was enough. That's how much of a piece of cake it is.
Even the state tests that evaluate the quality of the schools are mediocre.. In fact they're the worst: the teachers make even more efforts to ensure the students know how to answer the test.
Now what's Obama's solution for the US schools? I haven't read about it myself, but hearing from the more credible posters on the forum, he's just going to throw money at the system. "Change!"; maybe he could go "Hocus Pocus!" too. It sounds like he's doing the same thing with NASA. Like we said, nasa isn't some trifle thing, and yet Obama (and McCain too) is just going to bleed it for 5 years (when 1% out of the federal social programs could pay for 10x what he could get out of nasa, and those programs could definitely do without 1% a piece) and NOT ADRESS the exact problems that are plaguing nasa...
Because while nasa has a major part of responsibility in securing the USA's future commercial and technological international leadership, has been doing a pretty good job in the field, the higher management is pretty crappy. Maybe as bad as the education's, but it comes out ok, because nasa is a bunch of very educated and/or experienced eggheads and/or engineers working on a perfectly compliant substrate (technology), whereas academics act on a pretty flaky one (students largely K to 4yr Uni degrees). But overall the two are equaly important.
This is the sort of speech Obama would have to give to sound credible when he says "Change" over and over. Change, yes, but change what?? The above speech never gets into the scientific technicalities, but it gives specific and effective, really simple and down to earth solutions to the problems, and without requiring more government bloat to boot. The part about the ATC is a very good example of this.
Now, you take all that, and you take what (for example) Charon has said about Obama, and there's no chance you and Carrel and the other Obama Koolaid guys sound credible at all. And I'm not saying this to point at McCain as the better alternative, although he is. McCain sucks too, but not as bad as Obama, by quite a margin. If a verdict has to be given to the whole matter, it's that both parties blow, and that the whole damn system needs to be deflated and shaken up and recycled. Obama is definitely not who's going to do that.
