Ted Cruz To Oversee NASA and US Science Programs 496
romanval sends word that U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) will become the new chairman of the subcommittee that oversees NASA and government scientific research. Cruz has both spoken in favor of NASA and attempted to cut its budget, but he's most notable for his opposition to the science supporting climate change. From the article:
His vociferous opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his support of extreme budget cuts could spell trouble for NASA's less prominent programs, such as its own climate research and sophisticated supercomputers. His role on the front lines of the 2013 government shutdown, which critics say had lasting negative effects on public safety, NASA research and EPA scientists' ability to visit contaminated sites, also suggests at best a narrow focus on NASA's largest projects and at worst a disregard for agencies that require science funding.
Goodbye SpaceX (Score:2, Insightful)
Hello pork projects for Boeing.
Re: Goodbye SpaceX (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be pointed out that SpaceX has a huge presence in Texas, with the Texas state legislature doing some rather recent.... enticements as it were... to get SpaceX to spend a few hundred million dollars more in their state.
In other words, Ted Cruz would be crucified in his home state and would even hurt his future presidential ambitions if he were to be in public opposition to SpaceX as a company. I certainly expect to see him show up at the ground breaking when SpaceX starts to pour concrete at the Brownsville spaceport that is being built.... in Texas. For that matter, I wouldn't put it past him to show up at McGregor for an engine test or a test flight of the Falcon 9-R. A great photo op and with his dual hat as the chairman of this committee it is going to be an extra reason to appear for stuff like that.
As chair, he will also get a good insight into space policy issues, which I think will be a good thing too. Somebody with presidential ambitions would be good to become educated on those issues too.
What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
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A head of NASA who thinks his agency's "foremost" task is to make Muslim's "feel good"?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html
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Dishonest decontextualization, as usual. The complete quote:
Re:What's next? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what you get when you elect a man with three Muslim names. His middle name is the best, though: "Hussein". I love saying that! "Hussein". It drives the lefties into a rage!
You know why it tweaks people? Because the only reason you use it is because you consider it an insult. You're so insular and so fucking isolated from the rest of the world that you can't imagine someone else also having that name, or it actually being a popular name in the rest of the world.
So let go of the childish antics and grow the fuck up.
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As befitting their history, the digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9) are also known as Hindu numerals or "Hindu-Arabic numerals". The reason that they are more commonly known as "Arabic numerals" in Europe and the Americas is that they were introduced to Europe in the 10th century by Arabs of North Africa, who were then using the digits from Libya to Morocco. Europeans did not know about the numerals' origins in ancient India, so they named them "Arabic numerals".[4] Arabs, on the other hand, call the system "Hindu numerals",[5][6] referring to their origin in India. This is not to be confused with what the Arabs call the "Hindi numerals", namely the Eastern Arabic numerals used in the Middle East, or any of the numerals currently used in Indian languages.[7]
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
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She's been on the Select Committee for quite some time. No news there. She was actually the voice of moderation on a few issues regarding Pakistan back during the 2012 primary debates. No one was more surprised than I; I guess it's sobering when you get the sort of briefings that she's getting as a member of that committee.
Re: What's next? (Score:4, Funny)
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Charles Manson to head the FDA. News at 11.
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Problem is the alternative is Corporate money. Corporate money ALWAYS comes with strings attached, doesn't matter which political party they happen to be calling the shots for.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the funny, yet totally brain-dead part of this anti-government argument. Rather than having citizens have input into the process, they would prefer that the 1% should simply own the process. Instead of trying to make America better, they are keen to make either smaller or private. How is a smaller and more privately run America better for the average American?
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
they make it work for the people that fund their campaigns
it's a false narrative: people believe government is an impediment
of course government and bureaucracy can screw things up, but lack of government is far worse, and a corrupt government that serves plutocracy is far, far worse
the idea should be to treat the sick patient that is government by removing the corruption. but too many morons think killing the patient is a viable option. weaken government and that simply means the power vacuum is filled by the very forces that are corrupting government. works for them: less effort to get what they want at your detriment
government is not the problem. corruption is. of course corruption will always be a problem. the idea is to minimize it. but currently in the usa, we have legalized corruption: revolving door employment between regulator and industry. corporations openly buying candidates in election campaign funding. these are our real problems: corruption. not government itself
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"Funding for science under Republic administration's has been historically higher than other Democrats."
Perhaps you don't understand that the Administrations do not set the budget and that Congress controls the purse strings. While the White House can ask for whatever it wants in a budget, Congress gets to do whatever they want and then send it back to the president to sign or veto.
You giving credit to President Bush for things he didn't do while slamming Clinton for things he had almost no say in.
If you wish to educate us all, the least you could do is have a passing knowledge in the subject.
We deserve this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what democracy is all about.
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True, but he doesn't represent my state so I couldn't vote for or against him, yet he will have lasting impacts on my state.
That sucks.
Of course, so does Ted.
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Re:We deserve this guy (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Dems received nearly 20,000,000 more votes national than the GOP, which goes to show just how badly the GOP has gerrymandered the Congress.
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything though, Cruz's constituency is overly large, meaning that he represents more people, and therefore likely had more raw votes, than most of his Senate counterparts - Texas's population is somewhere on the order of 25-26 million, easily more than the 10 least populous states. In the 2012 election, he received 4.4 million votes out of about 7.8 million or so
Overall though, the Senate is grossly disproportionate in a lot of ways. Large states like Texas are grossly underrepresented, not only because all those people who voted for him don't have the same influence as a state less than 10% the population of Texas, but also because the number of people who voted for his Democratic opponent alone (3.1 million), nevermind 3rd party candidates, is larger than the full population of something like 20 states, and larger than the average number of Senate votes in many more than that. Those people get absolutely zero representation in the Senate.
To illustrate just how far off it can get, the 26 least populous states have somewhere around 56 million residents (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population). You could elect a Senate majority with half that, and if we go by the national voter turnout rate from the 2014 election of 36.3%, and not considering how many of those individuals are ineligible to vote (due to citizenship status, age, etc) you'd only need about 10 million votes, in a country of roughly 320 million people to have full control of the Senate.
Now, that's a bit of an extreme example, and it discounts that some of those smaller states lean left (VT, DE, RI) while others lean right (WY, AK, ND/SD), just as the same is true for some of the very populous states (CA, TX), but it serves to illustrate just how skewed and disproportionate the Senate can be in terms of representation.
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:4, Informative)
Overall though, the Senate is grossly disproportionate in a lot of ways.
This is intentional and deliberate. The Senate was never supposed to be even an elected body in the first place as it was supposed to be essentially a counterpoint to the UN General Assembly. In other words, it was supposed to be a body made up of representatives of the various state governments and definitely not supposed to be remotely representative of ordinary citizens.
You might be advocating an elimination of the Senate in the fashion that the House of Lords has sort of faded into obscurity in the British Parliament, but there is definitely no reason for it to become even more of just a horrible copy of the House of Representatives, something that was never the original intention in the first place. The disparity is that for better or for worse, the U.S. Senate seems to have grown even more with regards to political power, where individual senators sort of think of themselves individually as vice-presidents ready to step into the "top job" at any time and definitely command their staff as if they will be the next president. The ego needed to become a senator is definitely something right now that basically is a waypoint for many who have presidential ambitions.
Complaining about the disproportionate nature of the Senate is just downright silly and ignoring its purpose in the first place.
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This is intentional and deliberate. The Senate was never supposed to be even an elected body in the first place as it was supposed to be essentially a counterpoint to the UN General Assembly. In other words, it was supposed to be a body made up of representatives of the various state governments and definitely not supposed to be remotely representative of ordinary citizens.
There's a bigger problem than that, we've gotten away from civics in general to the point that I'd wager most Americans could not guess who their state legislators were even if you put them on a multiple choice exam. We care (sadly) about federal offices, first and foremost. Then whomever is governor. And some might care about who the mayor is. Waaaaay at the bottom of the list are those guys you send to the state capital, whoever they are, where they can cause trouble for the governor you actually voted fo
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:4, Informative)
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No, both actually called for bigger NASA and science budgets. Let's not try to bear false witness, even if doing do has become Fox News' business model.
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Yeah, some idiots a couple thousand miles away voted for this fool and now we all get to deal with it.
I feel so free. My voice was heard. I'm sure that Cruz will readily accept he doesn't JUST serve his party and ideology, and will take a reasoned approach to dealing with topics that have a vast array of opinions, evidence, and reasonable motivations behind them. He'd never just kowtow to specific interests. I have faith this will be the case because our democracy assures this. ....
Anyone that thinks we hav
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Yeah, some idiots a couple thousand miles away voted for this fool and now we all get to deal with it.
The American people, collectively, chose the Republican Party to be in charge of the Senate. This is the result.
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who didn't vote are just as responsible as the people who voted for a Republican Senator.
If you think "they're all the same anyway", then fine. Just don't complain when Ted Cruz is a committee chair.
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Yes, the Republican strategy of disgusting and confusing their opposition with the state of US politics, while simultaneously drumming up their base with fear mongering worked
People who are not right-wing zealots need to hold their nose and vote against the goper scum, even if they only find that the opposition to those righties smells only slightly less bad
It's a game that must be played, even if you feel a little dirty at the end of the day
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Your last four 2-term presidents - Reagan, Clinton, G W, and now Obama - have faced both both houses controlled by the other party in the last 2 years of their term.
Seems your presidents just wear out their welcomes before their full 2 terms are over.
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Tough shit. Don't vote? You can suck it, because you deserve to sit on the sidelines while the people who did vote get to have their decisions implemented. That's what voting is all about. If some people want to give up and spout of platitudes about how their vote doesn't matter... well they matter a hell of a lot less than if they did vote. It's a cheap cop-out and excuse for laziness.
No, corporations deserve him (Score:3)
This is what democracy is all about.
You get what you pay for - oh, you're not paying? Then you're probably not getting. Welcome to the Corporatocracy (tm).
Re:No, corporations deserve him (Score:5, Informative)
> Corporatocracy (tm).
We _already_ have a word; plutocracy, and/or oligarchy
There is no need to coin a new word -- although yours isn't bad.
Re:No, corporations deserve him (Score:4, Informative)
Plutocracy is the better term. Oligarchy simply refers to few ruling many and can include any structure where a small number of people rule the masses. The USA is a plutocracy, which is rule by the wealthy elite (and, by definition, one form of oligarchy).
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This is what democracy is all about.
Somebody here commented a while ago that in Texas they don't flush their toilets, they collect what's left in the bowl into big bags and elect them to congress. I must say the result looks quite a bit better than I expected, it must be the odour that gives them away.
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:We deserve this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
With Ted Cruz running US science programs, its far more likely that the Chinese will be our new overseers. They already hold a massive amount of our debt, they are out investing us, for example $93B/yr vs $51B/yr in solar, and they are currently orbiting the moon as we speak. Given recent deals to prop up Russia, they are likely to become Russia's overseers as well. Then again, this is the price we must pay for the GOP to make good on their anti-Obama, anti-science agenda.
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Chinese will be our new overseers. They already hold a massive amount of our debt
The whole Chinese holding our debt thing is a bit of a myth. First off, they barely hold more than Japan (occasionally less). Secondly, they only hold about 1/18th of it. Thirdly, if anything the leverage all goes the other way; there are plenty of parties out there willing to buy US debt, but there aren't a lot (some would say any) equivalent alternatives for someone looking to buy safe government securities. IOW: China needs us way more than we need them.
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Good grief. One bureaucrat on one trip to the Middle East said that one of several goals of that one trip was to annoy one group of people slightly less than the rest of the buffoons sent from DC do on a regular basis, and the wingnuts wind that up to make it NASA's primary reason for existence. What the fuck is wrong with you people?
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we keep putting people who have a history of being enemies of the scientific community to the scientific subcommittees in Congress? This does nothing productive except give people like Jon Stewart more material.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we keep putting people who have a history of being enemies of the scientific community to the scientific subcommittees in Congress?
"We" don't, the Republican Party does. They don't like pesky science - It keeps contradicting the bible.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't like pesky Bible - It keeps contradicting their worship of the rich.
FTFY
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They {demorcrats & republcans} don't like pesky Bible - It keeps contradicting their worship of the rich.
FTFY
FTFY :-)
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This is the correct answer.
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Perhaps not, but saying that the fundamental idea in biology comes "straight from the pit of hell" surely does.
Inhofe in charge of the EPA is scarier (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inhofe in charge of the EPA is scarier (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Inhofe in charge of the EPA is scarier (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Obama has executed fewer executive orders than any modern president, but now that bearing false witness no longer a sin in GOP circles please proceed.
Re:Inhofe in charge of the EPA is scarier (Score:5, Insightful)
" PRESIDENT OBAMA addresses the U.N. General Assembly: The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country’s resources – it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs; workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the men and women that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.
The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. "
It'd be really nice if we could be intellectually honest and admit that one-sentence out-of-context quotes are meaningless.
Oh what the hell, one-sentence out-of-context quotes are our life-blood, they are what allow us to never be able to debate, never have us stare at the truth, and never be able to change our opinions.
Re:Inhofe in charge of the EPA is scarier (Score:4, Insightful)
And if he did go you'd complain that he wasnt somewhere else putting out some other fire.
That's how the game works: the President has a million things to do on any given day, so no matter what he does, you have 999,999 other things to blame him for not doing.
http://www.bloomberg.com/polit... [bloomberg.com]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
Let’s dispense with this specific question with no more than the attention it deserves: It would have been all but insane for President Obama to participate in a march, in public, in a foreign country, with a couple million people around him. The security requirements necessary to protect him make it impossible. The Secret Service has to do an extraordinary amount of work and planning for him to drop by Ben’s Chili Bowl a mile from the White House; the idea that with a couple of days notice he could walk through the streets of Paris in an enormous throng of people is absurd.
There was also an attempted NAACP bombing, but no one cares about that.
there was also 2000 killed in Nigeria, but no one cares about that either.
We're presently in tremendously important trade talks with India, but that's also not important.
At least unless Obama had gone to France, in which case you would be blaming him for:
a) ignoring terrorism within our won country
b) ignoring terrorism in Africa
c) ignoring the needs of our economy by leaving a valueable trade partner in the middle of talks
When I first read this... (Score:5, Funny)
After some thought, I think that would in fact be better than Ted Cruz. All we would have to do was tell him the commies are building X and we would get funding to build X twice as big.
Re:When I first read this... (Score:5, Funny)
or Mars is the best place to go elk hunting....
Third World Status, Here We Come! (Score:2)
Nigeria is laughing at us. I'm waiting for other nations to start sending us foreign aid.
Surely, next time I look up the definition of irony in the dictionary, it will contain the quote "Ted Cruz heading Science Committee" -- or perhaps that's an oxymoron, like "Military Intelligence" or "Jumbo Shrimp".
We've been getting loans from China for decades (Score:2)
> I'm waiting for other nations to start sending us foreign aid.
You can stop waiting. Foreign aid is most commonly in the form of loans. We've been borrowing from China for decades. As Slash would say, "First we did a little, but a little wouldn't do, so the little got more and more."
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So let me get this straight, in 1776 the Founding Fathers got together to protest the mass poverty and bad British tea, and started NASA so we could lob said tea into space. It eventually made us so rich we became the best developed country on the Earth and now we're exploring how to cultivate tea and coffee on Mars.
Uh huh. If it were that easy to create developed nations, we'd be going into third world countries handing out space programs, not rice (and all the less lovely stuff our foreign aid props up)
Hahahaha (Score:2)
Republicans in charge of NASA's budget. What could go wrong?
The conversation went like... (Score:2, Insightful)
Who amongst us is the biggest bible thumper?
That would be Ted Cruz..
Good, he has the job.. Now we can blame all of the stuff Nasa doesn't do on Obama in the next election and cut Nasa funding at the same time!
But wait, you say, This is Obamas last term, he can't run again..
But you also forget, Jeb Bush is going to try to run for president so the republican mandate is to screw up as many things as they can while Obama still is president so the right wing can do what it has been doing since 2008, which is to
Geeks don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
To the average American, NASA is just a huge portion of the budget (Billions! of dollars) spent to put some clown in orbit a couple of times a year. This is, in fact, exactly what they want based on their knowledge of what NASA does. All the technology gained by what NASA has learned over the decades by doing the hard and impossible things is entirely lost on Joe Sixpack. And, unfortunately, government / private interaction is not an efficient (in the economic sense) sense, so that the effects of cuts won't be felt where the average person lives for 20 years. It's our own damned fault for living in a country filled with morons.
Re:Geeks don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Surveys show that the vast majority of people think that NASA and foreign aid take up large portions of the Federal budget, a large percentage think that the two aspects take up almost half the budget. Only a small percentage are aware that the Pentagon sucks up over half of Federal spending.
Re:Geeks don't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
Your bullshit. [motherjones.com] The imperial budget is as fake as the unemployment rate, because spending that is obviously military in nature - like the VA or the Department of Energy managing America's nuclear weapons - isn't counted as military spending.
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NASA funding since the Nixon administration has been pretty flat and generally is something like social security.... a death trap politically speaking if you try to cut it. Just look at how quickly Barack Obama changed his tune about NASA when he was running for President and needed the votes in Florida after he proposed a virtual elimination of NASA (if anybody has that kind of memory). People talk about shutting down programs at NASA, but it really doesn't happen.
There have certainly been some disasters
Lettergate (Score:3, Funny)
Panic way over-blown (Score:3)
Just because he doesn't want the EPA running around making overbearing rules that help no-one, doesn't mean he has anything against further NASA climate research and ESPECIALLY means nothing about being against a bank of supercomputers, which can you realize be used for any purpose?
The very fact he;s spoken in favor of NASA before is a GOOD THING. It didn't have to be that way and there are plenty (Democrat and Republican) that would not be nearly so favorable of NASA.
Bad press you see around Cruz in generally farmed up by people trying to prevent him running for president.
Re:Panic way over-blown (Score:4, Informative)
Talk is cheap and even the summary pointed out that Ted Cruz has voted to cut NASA's budget in the past. Follow the actions of politicians instead of their words because they have a reputation for speaking out of both sides of their ass.
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Follow the actions of politicians instead of their words
I'm not really concerned about previous NASA cuts as some roles will transition to private industry (like SpaceX).
I agree actions mean much more, we'll see - I just don't think it will cause any real issues.
Re:Panic way over-blown (Score:4, Insightful)
For the most part, the private sector only cares about products and services that can make a profit within the next few quarters. That is not and never has been the purpose of government research. Government research is often done in areas where there is no immediate path to profitability, but the results of that research can be used to generate lots of money depending on what we learn from the experiments.
We used to have a good balance of public and private research in the U.S. but now public research is considered vile and to be avoided at all costs. People honestly believe that the private sector alone should be responsible for performing all research tasks despite its unwillingness to take on big projects that will greatly advance our understanding of the universe such as the large hadron collider. I'm not too worried since other countries seem content with the decline of U.S. research and are using a combination of the public and private sectors to pick up our slack, but as an American it was nice when we had the courage to invest in our future using both sectors to become the leader in scientific research. Maybe we'll eventually come to our senses, but based on the current cynicism against all things government, I'm not holding my breath for that to happen anytime soon.
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If you are not 100% space will CONTINUE TO BE be militarized going forward, you are a fool.
What's wrong with the Rod From God idea anyway? Would you prefer we keep nuclear weapons around? Seems kind of stupid to prefer something with far more harmful side effects.
Broken. Government is just .... broken. (Score:2)
I smell a big Carly Fiona moment coming...
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My vote in 2016 is going to (Score:2)
Don't blame me... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Also, explain to this Canadian why NASA is researching climate.
Studying climate generally requires lobbing things into the sky.
That's covered by the ASA part of NASA.
Re: Is it just me... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Is it just me... (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately this is one of the reasons for all the cuts. Allowing NOAA and other agencies to commit heretical measurements whose results contradict both Industry and God is one of NASA's crimes, with their "satellites" and their "high altitudes" and their "data".
Is it just me? (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason that NASA and just about every other scientific organization in the world is now focusing on climate change results from the fact that the rate at which the Earth is now heating is 36 times faster than it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago, when in just a mere 10-30,000 years, Wyoming went from having redwood forests to having palm forests and nearly entire mammalian fauna in the Northern Hemisphere died out and was replaced by other species. Keep in mind
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Not everything under the sun.
Everything above the earth.
Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Space flight happens because we want to study things from space. NASA is the "host" for principal investigators who often work outside of NASA. In fact, a major NOAA installation was constructed right across the street from NASA - Goddard (in Greenbelt, MD) to allow closer interaction between the two because their missions are so closely aligned.
The aeronautical and aerospace research NASA does isn't in a vacuum; it's meant to ultimately serve a useful cause, and that includes studying the planet. It does do wind tunnel research; it does explore other planets; it does advance optics, and thermal management, and fluid flow, and all the myriad pieces which go into spaceflight and airborne hardware requirements. And much of it happens to flow down to terrestrial uses.
And this is more about Ted Cruz, who doesn't believe that they do anything useful, in charge of their mission. Imagine if they put Aunt Jemima in charge of the Canadian strategic maple syrup reserve. Yeah, it's that crazy.
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Also, explain to this Canadian why NASA is researching climate. Isn't NOAA supposed to be the agency for that?
When I worked at a US Geological Survey office that also archives all the US Govt satellite and aerial imagery, there was a memo that was sent out around 1993 or so. All research projects had to show how they were helping the study of global climate change. If they didn't, they were candidates for having their funding cut. The only exceptions were the ones that were being paid by external agencies or governments. So NASA is researching it for the same reason other agencies are: they have some expertise
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NASA won't get shut down. Rather we will just see peer reviewed science squeezed out to fund more pork-barrel spending of the type created by Roger Wicker, who forced NASA to complete the construction of a tower-vacuum chamber at the Stennis Space Center for $350,000,000 that was then mothballed the day it was completed. The modern GOP have become what Lysenko was to Soviet Biology, where ideology becomes paramount to actual fact and science.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
As most people don't realize that Muslims have contributed extensively to the sciences [wikipedia.org] during the medieval age.
And so did the Catholic church. Between the two of them Muslim scholars and Catholic monks are pretty much single handedly responsible for salvaging much of the collective knowledge of the classical world.
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
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How far they have fallen.
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Way to Elevate the Debate.... (Score:2)
"Conservative" is clearly a subset of "stupid."
You've just put down 35% - 50% (depending on definition of 'Conservative') of your fellow countrymen. Good job.
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"Conservative" is clearly a subset of "stupid."
You've just put down 35% - 50% (depending on definition of 'Conservative') of your fellow countrymen. Good job.
Better correct than popular.
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Nice try. Kennedy took the top tax rate down from 91% to 70%. He also got Congress to pass his economic agenda, which included [npr.org]:
Still think he'd be welcomed by today's Republican Party?
Re:Way to Elevate the Debate.... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, seeing as 50% of all people are below average, that sounds about right...
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"Republican" is clearly a subset of "stupid."
FTFY
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Looking over your comments in this thread, it's pretty clear you are trying to appeal to people that think angry name calling constitutes a persuasive argument.
Good Luck with that.
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And it appears this happens every time Republicans get into office.
When will they learn that science research == business development?
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Imagine Eisenhower was in today's Republican party and put forth his policy list...
Taxpayer-funded road construction to link up the entire country - what, like Hitler did?!?!
Taxpayer-funded road construction to allow the military to move easily across sections of the country.
Taxpayer cash going to fund improved science teaching - SOCIALISM!??
The science funding happened to be critical to boosting America's technical superiority over the Russians and Chinese. NASA was created during the Sputnik Crisis, when Eisenhower and other Americans feared that lack of US involvement would cede space to the Russians.
Support for social security - MORE SOCIALISM?!?!
Well, got me there. :-)
Setting up NASA? - Since when is space rockets in the Constitution!???
See above. NASA was in response to a perceived military threat. Once the Russians were 'beaten,' all that impetus for sp
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