Trump lost before it started by being so incapable of civil or rational behavior they actually had to mute the president on live TV. Duh.

Slipping in polls, no money, failed pandemic response, failed trade wars, failed by sparking civil division, failed wall fraud, failed at race, failed economy, just failed all around.....but Biden lost by suggesting ending oil dependence, the only rational option?!

Are you saying being dependent on foreign oil, or massively subsidized oil at all, is good?! You like that kind of socialism, right? The kind where billion dollar companies get handouts they don't need, but citizens who are in need get the bills?!
Fuck, Bob.
Irrational desperation isn't a good look.

🤦‍♂️

Neither did a great job.

Biden lost from his saying he will end oil dependence and his lying about ending fracking

@MilkmanDan I'm just gonna outsource this to a post that I think nails the point I'm making home rather solidly.

The key graf is this:

Got it?
- So the statement they checked is factual.
- Politifact can't find a statement where the President takes credit, which is what they really want to fact check.
- So instead of fact-checking the fact, they instead fact check what they think the fact was meant to suggest.
- And for good measure, their argument is oil dependence went down because of the economic recovery and it would be unfair for Obama to claim any credit for the recovery.

Politifact's insane new standard seems to be:

There are no facts that a Democratic President can cite about the economy if they are good news. Once the President cites a fact, it ceases to be a fact... because facts might lead people to give the President credit, even if he didn't claim credit, and we can't have that.

Therefore, whether something is a fact or not a fact depends entirely on who says it, not on whether it's, you know, true.

Nothing you've said even seems to address this line of reasoning. The closest you come to it is by saying that you don't think there is really any difference between "half-true", "mostly true", and "true". Keep in mind that the other three ratings on their "meter" are "mostly false", "false", and "pants on fire". Clearly this is a spectrum that goes from truthfulness towards telling a lie that has no basis in reality whatsoever.

I'd be okay with a full truth rating that in the fuller text points out that Obama was implying some causation between his policies and the recovery, and try to weigh in on the state of expert opinion on whether his policies have helped or harmed the economy. But I think if their goal is to be fact checkers who rate statements with hard & fast true/false ratings, then they should stick to the clear cut and verifiable, rather than try to answer questions for which there are no objectively right or wrong answers.

@hpqp and @ghark The federal education department has very little to do with municipal and state run schools, directly. Once again, a false dilemma. Similar to the Department of energy, which was created to get us off of foreign oil, the ED has failed as a guiding beacon of federal funds as any number of tests will show...just as the DOE has failed to remove us from oil dependence. This isn't throwing the baby out with the bath water, it is throwing out the guy telling you to use jelly instead of water.

We clearly have a War addiction in addition to our oil dependency.

Well said raverman. The simple fact is that not enough people are willing to sacrifice their oil dependency. Technology is slowly moving in the right direction, but we'll need to have a critical mass of popular demand that will probably only happen when sustainable energy sources become as cheap as oil. I'm hoping that the Age of the Hummer was the last hurrah for oil waste, but only time will tell.

And in regards to oil, here is Rachel Maddow's take on oil independence: http://videosift.com/video/Oil-Independence-is-a-Myth

>> ^NetRunner:

I've got plenty of anger to go around. I'm mad about the fact that there is an entire political party whose purpose is to eliminate responsibility for the rich, and eliminate rights for the poor. I'm mad that their opposition party can often be bribed by corporations to water down any attempts to fix things into near meaninglessness, and that a media-led populace of morons will condemn them all the way up one side and down the other for daring imply that corporations do evil things because, well, the corporate owned media doesn't like it when anti-corporate sentiments break out.
Even after all that, I've still got more than enough anger left over to direct at the people who actually inflicted this particular wound on us, and who're whining about how it's really made them have to put in a lot of long hours.
As for why the government hasn't "stepped in", this is actually part of the rub. See, we don't have a government-run oil company in America (even though virtually all other oil producing nations do), so we have to rely on private expertise in fixing the damn thing. Even as it is, I don't think people grasp this, but if there were easy ways to plug the leak, or even expensive ones, I guarantee it would've been done by now. We're looking, I believe, at the limits of what man can do, and apparently we can't plug a damaged well under water of this depth.
Maybe this will change people's opinion about the risks involved, and our need to get off oil. My read on how the media and the right is talking about this is that it hasn't really had that effect. Other than partially strengthening the left's resolve on the topic, I mostly see people who once proudly chanted "drill baby, drill" still saying the same thing, just slightly less brazenly.


I'm kinda glad to hear you don't buy into the whole "Democrats are saints, Repubs are sinners" bullshit, because enough people on here do. Like Seric said in the post above yours, many different companies were involved on and around the offshore drilling platform, so it will take a while to figure out whose fault it was. In any case, accidents happen, and those are the risks we take in echange for a steady oil supply.

I believe the government hasn't stepped in, because they don't want any blame to be directed at them. Right now the general public are aiming at BP and their incapability to secure the leak. You might be right when you say that BP may very well be doing everything humanly possible to stop the leak, but there might just as well be more capable people outside of BP who could do a better job. However the government would rather keep their hands relatively clean and instead scrutinize BP for their failing efforts. Typical behavior of politicians.

It would be great if this would indeed get people thinking about our oil dependency, especially since it is becoming more of a coffin nail every day. Unfortunately that goes way beyond the grasp of the general public and would first and foremost require people to look at their own squandering of resources and how it creates such an enormous demand for oil, which corporations will always look to profit from.

Nah, too complicated. They'll just blame BP's CEO for everything.

[redacted]

^ you reolise that systems like national grid were set up on big government tax scheems ?

big government tax scheme's are a gr8 way of getting new industries or services of the ground that then allows a populous to thrive and benefit from it.

If uk goverment invests alot of mony and dose "tax scheems" in solor, nucular , and other infra structure that its not oil dependent then we will benefit from it greatly.

Curse me for saying this, but I agree with both Arnold and Palin (have mercy on my soul). Promoting development in green energy is great for the economy, the enviroment, and the day we run out of oil. But taxing the crap out of CO2 is not good for alot of countries, as it doesn't remove oil dependancy, only makes it more expensive. Add that to our current economic crisis and it's gonna hurt!

I vote nuclear!

It is bizarre to sit here in a social democracy close to utopia and listen to people from a country with no healthcare worry about spending and tax while supporting a war that has run the country into an unprecedented dept. where the fuck is your head, qm? When will people like you ever realize that your morbid fear of anything "red"* is a bizarre side-effect of cold-war propaganda? When will you realize that cutting taxes wont make everyone into Donald Trumps, but in the end just ends up making the actual Trumps even richer, while the average American has to work 3 jobs just to pay their health insurance.With higher taxing and more spending on USEFUL things, the state could provide people with a much better platform than you currently have. By SPENDING money on providing healthcare you could actually SAVE and MAKE money because people would be healthier overall, and by SPENDING money on things like science you could rid yourself of oil-dependancy and clean up cities, again making people healthier and in less need of healthcare, you could tax the filthy rich and provide support and tax-relief to small businesses, SPEND money on public transportation and save people's money for gas and so on and so on. Soon you would live in a welfare state.

*except the giant fumbling, massively destructive elephant in the room

^ I was thinking along the same lines. I'm all for public transportation and renewable energy, but until the masses demand it, big companies will suppress it. And I really can't see where the "conspiracy" is. At least not in terms of an illegal conspiracy. Part of business is competition, and you do what you can to beat your competition. It is up to the public to force businesses to progress through the use of purchasing power and local laws. If the citizens of Los Angeles were happy with the transit system, they should have stopped GM from changing it. They just didn't care at the time. It is apathy that costs us billions, not some diabolical shadowy conspiracy.

And if there is a technology that will free us from our oil dependancy, it will come when people demand it.

there are different, more radical answers out there, not just makeovers of the existing system like this bailout thing. to mention just one: a few months ago american people had the opportunity to choose the Ron Paul approach to getting the US from this financial disaster, but I guess in the long election frenzy media neglected to point out what's really happening with american economy and went back to covering the fake political discourse of the stereo-party. and the people fell for it again. so, politically such ideas are still impossible, it would seem. you certainly can't expect some concrete change coming from Obama's administration, that should be clear to anyone now. i hope. trying to put the patient out for a while and do a radical surgery, rather than this woodoo-style practice of patching up the zombie that is America with more fictitious money (btw: I love it how sift's spell checker won't allow for not using capital A in america), is not a popular move for any ambitious politician these days. it's much more fun to blame it on the non-existent clash of civilizations, global warming, oil dependence, the Chinese, the Russians, the terrorists=Arabs, etc. meanwhile, a few very smart and greedy people are stealing away what's left in your coffers (not unlike Russia or any former socialist country in the 90's), all payed by the american people - the two most abused words in any american political debate. Obama (btw: spell checker doesn't recognise Obama as a valid input) should have more balls and act more Putin-like: throw those responsible for this mess in jail and seize all their assets. i'm sorry, Barack, but calling their behaviour shameful on tv and then not do anything about it, just makes you a whiny pussy instead of an inspiring leader, people hungry for change project and see in you.

I'm happy to see a politician upset with the current status-quo, but as already mentioned above, nuclear takes too long. Not only that, but it's just as bad as coal fire. While yes, it doesn't produce the carbon dioxide but it requires tremendous amounts of water, poses a HUGE risk in the event something goes wrong . . . again . . . and the extraction process counteracts all the benefits we gain. Now, if we were able to create fusion and fission power from other sources, then by all means go right ahead. We'll need nuclear type power sources for space, but here on the planet we have plenty of weather systems to bypass most of the power requirements from nuclear and most of them can be built and in place in a matter of months.

On a more side note, while he mentions gas tax being regressive, this should be the stepping stone for bringing in the design principles of new urbanism and it's kin, as jwray mentioned, in places like Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin and numerous other cities I could easily cite. In order for us to end our oil dependence, we must first eliminate our need for it. Simply switching our fuel source doesn't always solve the problem because cars and it's kin use a lot of non-renewable resources in their making and quick disposal. But anyways, time to end this rant.

man, Google needs to help us break this oil dependency...

then the middle east and isreal can all go slap each other around while we figure out how baby boomers are going to get social security.