Last month, Australia tossed aside its Labour government and installed a conservative one.
Two weeks ago, voters in Norway followed suit, installing a center-right government.
And over the weekend, German voters defied polls that pointed toward a slim win for Angela Merkel’s center-right Christliche-Demokratische Union (Christian Democrat Party, or CDU), giving the CDU what exit polls show may well be an absolute majority in the German Bundestag (Parliament):
An early projection by the state broadcaster ARD on Sunday evening showed Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrat party (CDU) winning 301 seats in the 598-seat Bundestag, enough to form a government without a coalition partner. Later projections suggested, however, that she could fall just short of an absolute majority.
Exit polls and early results put the CDU on 42.5 per cent of the vote, a lead of 17 points over the main opposition.
It had been expected that Mrs Merkel would be forced into a “grand coalition” with her main socialist opponents, the Social Democrats. The early results suggested that she might avoid this.
We’ll see.
I try not to take too much comfort in historical parallels – but in the late seventies, you saw a similar wave of countries whose voters woke up to the fact that the economic system couldn’t be sustained under the liberal status quo.
Why is it conservatives on this side of the Atlantic appear to lack the intelligence of Germany’s conservatives?
I’ll take the bait. What specific policy’s or governance do you offer as demonstrating intelligence by Germany’s Conservatives DougieG / his alter ego “Emery”? Also, do you include Canada’s PM Steven Harper as a Conservative on this “side of the Atlantic”?
Romney swam with the sharks on Wall Street and came out a winner.
Obama has an affirmative action law degree (yes, he admitted it).
Thesis disproven.
but in the late seventies, you saw a similar wave of countries whose voters woke up to the fact that the economic system couldn’t be sustained under the liberal status quo.
Of course, they fell asleep later on.
This how it works in the US:
If the GOP candidate is undeniably a good person, the Democrats and their allies in the media will portray them as being stupid (GW Bush, Sarah Palin). If the GOP candidate is undeniably a smart person, the media will portray them as being evil (Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney).
We have to give dim Emery a break here.
Very little political information is presented in crayon, and the cartoon pictures require a higher level of cognitive skill than he’s capable of applying; tough for the li’l fella to get a grip on what’s going on.
BTW, how are the democrats and the media portraying undeniably smart Ted Cruz?
“BTW, how are the democrats and the media portraying undeniably smart Ted Cruz?”
Take your pick –
He’s CRAZY (translation for Doggone, DougieG / his alter ego “Emery” and other low info folks: “Hims Cray-Cray”)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-stanford/ted-cruz-president_b_3790215.html
He’s INSANE: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/09/23/ted_cruz_princeton_conceit_sad_sad_sad_stuff.html
He’s EXTREMIST
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-rome/ted-cruz-the-most-dangero_b_3792113.html
He’s DANGEROUS
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-rome/ted-cruz-the-most-dangero_b_3792113.html
Remember when Lefty was running the Soviet Union and anyone who didn’t conform was deemed “Insane” or “Dangerous” and sent off to the gulag, er, um the “Asylum” to get their head right?
If the GOP candidate is undeniably a good person, the Democrats and their allies in the media will portray them as being stupid (GW Bush, Sarah Palin). If the GOP candidate is undeniably a smart person, the media will portray them as being evil (Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney).
That’s the most accurate and profound thing I’ve read in several weeks, PM. Nice job. Succinct as a bonus as well.
Angela Merkel is a so-called conservative who holds a PhD, actually knows how to run an economy and also believes in climate change.
Does this sound like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin ?
Who doesn’t believe that the climate changes, Emery? It just turned Fall, fer God’s sake.
Bachmann has more legal education that Obama does, Emery.
Romney believes in Global warming. So does McCain. So did GW Bush.
You aren’t half as smart as you think you are.
I wonder how Obama supporters explain the fact that Obama managed to transfer from Occidental, a school that is not even a top fifty feeder school for Harvard Law, to Columbia, ranked number seven as an HL feeder school, when Obama admits that he was a ‘so-so’ student at Occidental?
A threadjack? Possibly, but I think that it helps explain why conservatives have had a more difficult time getting elected lately, at least in the US at the national level.
Bill Keller, executive editor of the NY Times, 2003-2011, had an op-ed piece in the Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/opinion/keller-a-jury-of-whose-peers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
It’s about the pleasures of jury duty, and he makes much of the fact that in CA they will soon allow legal permanent residents to sit on juries as well as citizens. He uses the occasion to make a swipe at foxnews.com:
“The State Legislature passed a bill last month opening jury service to permanent legal residents (not, as foxnews.com misreported, “illegal immigrants”) and it is awaiting the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown. We’ll get to that shortly.”
The problem here is that the foxnews.com article is a distributed AP piece, using the AP’s headline. The AP screwed up, not foxnews.com. Other media outlets have reported on the error and assigned the blame to AP, where it properly belongs.
The AP’s article, with its incorrect headline, was published last April. Until two years ago Bill Keller was the executive editor of the most elite newspaper in the world.
Yet there are still people who think that the NY Times does news, and not propaganda. It is mind boggling that anyone would trust the times to accurately report on any political event or personality.
“BTW, how are the democrats and the media portraying undeniably smart Ted Cruz?”
I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Cruz is not an honorable man. I also have no doubt liberals are praying for Mr. Cruz to be the 2016 GOP nominee. Outsized ego is a common factor for all politicians, not least all would-be Presidential candidates. So perhaps the reason Mr Cruz is trying to run with such a small niche is that he simply doesn’t realize (or refuses to realize) just how small a niche he really represents. It’s part of the hazard of living in a political echo chamber, if you only ever hear from those who agree with you, it’s easy to assume that they are a lot more numerous than they are.
I hope we never elect another senator to the presidency again. Senators are lousy at building cross-party coalitions (as demonstrated by the Current Occupant), they get elected by spending money, or by pushing tax cuts, and they never have to balance a budget.
American politicians, while often venal and occasionally corrupt, actually have a pretty good feel for the feelings of their constituents. In the debate between “let’s compromise to fix the country” vs. “let’s guard what we’ve got”, I think the American public is firmly in the latter camp. They don’t want a higher retirement age, a less generous Medicare, or an end to mortgage interest deductions, or higher taxes. They also believe the status quo, while not ideal, is sustainable. So they only support raising other people’s taxes and lowering other people’s benefits. The actions of the representatives reflect the beliefs of their constituents.
0bumblerCare is a Status Quo? People want it? Due to toilet paper shortage in Soci@list Venzuela, an asswiper is required. Time for you to go, EmerytheUSAHater – you qualify.
“Does this sound like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin ?”
So we go from “conservatives on this side of the Atlantic” (a pretty big group) to two that happen to be female and in the news a lot. Whatevs dude.
Emery, given that the IPCC computer models are being rather conclusively demonstrated not to work wth historical data, one would think that refusal to accept their hypotheses would be a sign of intelligence, not stupidity. This is especially the case when you consider the fact that the primary hypothesis about why these models don’t work is that the scientists made the assumption that our climate has positive (unstable) feedback mechanisms when in fact it’s more likely that it has negative (stable) feedback.
Now think about this a minute; the climate is said to have been largely stable for how long, and the working hypothesis for these scientists is that the feedback mechanisms for our climate is unstable. Sounds an awful lot like a politically driven assumption, since I can’t assume these guys are stupid.
What is needed has not changed. Policies which move us away from using coal as a source for electricity, and decreasing the rate of carbon generation per ton-mile of transport, remain the primary goals. Fortunately the need to reduce air pollutants and the high price of oil provide drivers to push us in that direction irrespective of climate change, but it is not enough.
Climate change is a long term problem and needs a long term solution. First and foremost, we need a long-standing commitment into research into low-carbon energy. Second, we need a price on carbon emissions which can be predicted well into the future. Cap and trade produces a wildly varying carbon price as energy use from carbon sources is elastic only in the long run. That wildly varying carbon price makes it impossible to justify the sort of long term investment required to install low-carbon energy sources. In contrast, even a very small, but permanent, carbon tax is something that CFOs can bank on when doing their calculations. A constant carbon tax that gradually rises over time stimulates investment, more so than a wildly varying carbon price from cap and trade, even if that price is on average higher.
I can tell you’re very new to this area of science. Maybe you should read up a little before sharing further insights.
Emery said:
“Maybe you should read up a little before sharing further insights.”
If we only took our own advice, we’d probably hear a lot less from you.
Emery, if your response to a serious comment on the state of the art is to parrot the IPCC’s abstract statement and accuse others of being “new” to the subject, suffice it to say that you can see the person who doesn’t understand the science when you shave every morning.
Sorry, but a basic error in whether the system is stable or not is not a minor thing, especially when climatologists have huge records indicating that historically, the system is stable. It’s a hint as to whether the scientists involved are practicing science, or politics.
Yes, just look at it, a comment on the Internet without venom. Truly a ‘man bites dog’ moment. The very banality is dazzling. Not even the STiD’s comment section presents anything like a consensus. The exception being, the usual suspects patting each other on the back
I would encourage those who share doubts about man’s effect on the climate to look at parallels in history to the current effort to accelerate the end of carbon-based power:
1. Y2K problem — The response dwarfed the threat, as evidenced by the absence of any harm that befell those who put little or no effort into the preparation. On the other hand, we updated a lot of computers and software, avoided a few weeks of problems in the finance world, and created a software industry in India, which thrives to this day.
2. Race to the moon — The threat which this massive government program countered is still hard to define, but had something to do with the Soviet military, and never really materialized. The program boosted American interest and education in science, advanced computer and materials technology, and provided the seeds for the civilian space industry. Plus it made Americans very proud of themselves for something that didn’t involve guns.
3. Adoption of the railroad — At the time that railroads were first being built, canals were at least their equal economically, but railroads were sexy new technology and investors flocked to them. Huge rail networks were built in Britain and America (most by investors who went bust), which provided the infrastructure for the next 100 years of the second industrial revolution. Canals could never have coped with the volume.
So carbon emissions may not be as big a threat to mankind as the apocalyptic messages we hear everyday. I’m certainly skeptical myself. But there are at least some ill effects to high CO2 levels, and if the response is the accelerated, premature investment in new energy technology which is coming anyway, that’s not that bad a thing. There’s no way the world economy will be powered by coal 50 years from now, AGW or not.
Or, another scenario–and the one endorsed by the IPCC–would be that moves to reduce carbon emissions when those reductions are not necessary would cost trillions of dollars, and that millions of people would lose their jobs in the process.
Or, to use your analogy of railroad subsidies, those–along with preferential treatment to northern industries–gave us the Civil War and the Indian Wars, along with 150 years of crony capitalism fueled by government largesse in addition to UP/CP lines. I’m not persuaded it’s an overall benefit, to put it mildly, especially if you identify yourself as “Crow”, “Lakota”, “Dakota”, or “Ojibwe”.
Did you miss the redefinition of crony capitalism? You must remember that as far back as 2008 Sarah Palin was putting out the idea that crony capitalism isn’t what we think it is, but what Democratic policies do. Michele Bachmann picked this up explicitly, defining crony capitalism as Democratic policies that subsidize and thus distort or tilt the free market system away from, well, free markets.
The idea at the time was pretty clear: change the terms of discussion away from the traditional definition of cronyism as big business getting big breaks from big money wooing and coddling with lawmakers to saying “cronyism” is the subsidization of what became called “the lucky duckies,” meaning those too poor to pay income tax. The idea was that these people, those Romney labeled so famously, are the real cronies of government.
So when you talk about crony capitalism and use the old terms, you miss the entire point the GOP is trying to make and thus fail to answer them in a meaningful way.