Have you ever met a human being?

Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis of the conservative fundamentalist American Family Association, on Thursday told a so-called “expert” who denies climate change that not using God’s fossil fuels would be like “crushing” someone’s feelings by rejecting their birthday present.

The Cornwall Alliance’s Calvin Beisner, who has previously said that believing in climate change “is an insult to God,” explained on Thursday that the Bible said it was also very rude to not use oil, coal and natural gas.

“The wicked and lazy master was the one who buried his talent in the ground and didn’t do anything to multiply it,” Beisner explained. “That’s essentially what those who say we need to stop using oil, coal and natural gas are telling us to do. Just leave those resources buried in the ground, rather than pulling them out and multiplying their value for human benefit.”

Fischer likened the situation to a birthday present he was given at the age of six.

“I opened up a birthday present that I didn’t like, and I said it right out, ‘Oh, I don’t like those,’” the radio host recalled. “And it just crushed — and the person that gave me gift was there. You know, I just kind of blurted it out, ‘I don’t like those.’ And it just crushed that person. It was enormously insensitive of me to do that.”

“And you think, that’s kind of how we’re treating God when he’s given us these gifts of abundant and inexpensive and effective fuel sources,” Fischer added. “And we don’t thank him for it and we don’t use it.”

“You know, God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them.”

CoB - I may be an atheist and untutored in such things, but that there, that's some kind of crazy.

Yes, me too; between that and the stats showing increased House incumbency,

Someone should tie Joe to a chair and force him to read and re-read that article, until it finally sinks in on him that his entire set of assumptions about the 2012 electorate were based largely on wishful thinking.

Bryan Fischer, the director of issues analysis of the conservative fundamentalist American Family Association, on Thursday told a so-called “expert” who denies climate change that not using God’s fossil fuels would be like “crushing” someone’s feelings by rejecting their birthday present.

***
“The wicked and lazy master was the one who buried his talent in the ground and didn’t do anything to multiply it,” Beisner explained.

Fischer likened the situation to a birthday present he was given at the age of six.

“I opened up a birthday present that I didn’t like, and I said it right out, ‘Oh, I don’t like those,’” the radio host recalled. “And it just crushed — and the person that gave me gift was there. You know, I just kind of blurted it out, ‘I don’t like those.’ And it just crushed that person. It was enormously insensitive of me to do that.”

“And you think, that’s kind of how we’re treating God when he’s given us these gifts of abundant and inexpensive and effective

“And we don’t thank him for it and we don’t use it.”
“You know, God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them.”

Some good background on paleolithic and neolithic entomophagy here.

There are lots of different kinds of fictional zombies.

The assumptions that you make in defining exactly what a zombie is and how it works will make a zombie apocalypse seem more or less realistic.

I'm a straight white guy with a Ph.D in a hard science; Nixon is also the last Republican presidential candidate I would've voted for.

If you ignore all the weird paranoia and terrible, terrible atmosphere of secrecy, which admittedly is a big deal, Nixon actually has a hell of a record. He ended Vietnam, he founded the EPA, he normalized relations with China, he was a faithful steward of Harry Truman's foreign policy.

Johnson, Clinton, and Eisenhower were probably stronger

He also pointed out that both parties are pretty good at pissing off (small-L) libertarians right now: Republicans socially, Democrats economically.

“And you think, that’s kind of how we’re treating God when he’s given us these gifts of abundant and inexpensive and effective fuel sources,” Fischer added. “And we don’t thank him for it and we don’t use it.”

“You know, God has buried those treasures there because he loves to see us find them.”

One you start with the assumption of "there are zombies", you are way off the edge of the bell curve on realism, so the rest of the assumptions are really window dressing.

Uh, yeah.

What do you mean "allegedly"? And don't be too surprised if the final popular vote margin is closer to 5% than to 4%.

Except that Romney's overhyped "momentum" stopped on about October 12th, well before Sandy. Just because you never noticed it doesn't make it any less real. And I distinctly remember Republicans citing polls saying that the gender gap had virtually been eliminated.

I'm not sure whether those exit polls were coming from Karl Rove or from that Barack O'Fraudo guy, but you really need to go out and get some fresh air.

EDIT -- Okay, I forgot about Welfare Reform. That was something of an accomplishment, even if it sounds more like a Republican one.

The Republican Party's key electoral problem doesn't come from social conservatives or nativists. It comes from the economic policy demands of the party's wealthy donors. Murphy allows that Republicans "have lost much of our once solid connection to the middle class on kitchen-table economic issues." But his prescription won't do anything to fix that problem.

What are the "kitchen-table" economic concerns of the middle class? They're high unemployment, slow income growth, underwater mortgages, and the rising cost of health care and higher education. Democrats have an agenda that is responsive to these concerns. Republicans don't -- and they don't because the party's donor class specifically doesn't want one.

Right, That’s essentially what those who say we need to stop using marijuana are telling us to do. Just leave those resources buried in the ground,

What are the "kitchen-table" economic concerns of the middle class? They're high unemployment, slow income growth, underwater mortgages, and the rising cost of health care and higher education. Democrats have an agenda that is responsive to these concerns.

(a) That "minuscule 3-percentage-point difference" doesn't go in somewhere between a 0% and 100% reelection rate. The incumbency return rate has always been high; in recent years, it’s moved higher still. So a 3-percentage-point difference within an 8- or 10-point functional range of possibility would be kind of noticeable, yeah.

(b) I listed 60 years of House election data which contradicted your confident hunches. What do balanced sample sizes or reasonable endpoints look like on your planet? Do I need to check whether Henry Clay ever got primaried?

(d)“Increasingly frequent changes of majority between the Dems and the GOP”? Yes, three of them. The reasons for which have been explained.

And weren’t you just whining about insufficient sample sizes earlier in the same sentence?

These nutters will never go away until they are allowed to run on their platform and beaten to a bloody pulp.

Uh, no, I pointed out imbalanced sample sizes.

"Their platform" did quite well in 2010

Anyone seen Training Day with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke? Awfully good. Hawke's tentativeness often makes him unconvincing as an actor, but here it works to his advantage in playing a new officer in menacing circumstances.

Reading Nixonland will relieve one of any nostalgia for his Presidency,

"Their platform" did quite well in 2010, and without "those nutters," the GOP would have Charlie Crist and David Dewhurst instead of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

His presidency coincided with my High School and College Years. That is prime nostalgia time for anyone, regardless of who is in the White House.

Three weeks after the presidential election, President Obama continues to slowly build his margin of victory over Mitt Romney. The political analyst most closely following the tally now projects that Obama to eventually best the Republican by about 5 million votes and earn 51% of the total.

That would make the Democratic incumbent the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to twice get 51% or more of the popular vote. Ike ran up massive 55% and 57% landslides over Sen. Adlai Stevenson (D-Ill.).

As of Thursday, Obama had 65,089,940 votes, putting him at 50.9%, according to totals being compiled by David Wasserman, an editor at the Cook Political Report. But Obama’s margin stands to continue climbing, as many votes remain to be counted in Democratic-leaning states. (Obama ended up with 52.9% of the vote his 2008 run against Republican John McCain.)

Wasserman estimates there are 100,000 votes outstanding in New Jersey, 300,000 left to count in California and as many as 1 million in New York not yet tabulated. Election officials blame Superstorm Sandy, in part, for the slow tally on parts of the Eastern Seaboard. Many voters there cast provisional ballots, whose legitimacy must be verified before they can be counted.

The final numbers may upset some of the conventional thinking that had begun to congeal early around the 2012 outcome. It now appears that a total of 130 million votes may have been cast nationally for all candidates. That would only be 1.3 million fewer than in 2008 — when the unprecedented ascendancy of an African-American to a major party ticket was thought to have driven high turnout.

In arguing against an Obama mandate from the 2012 election, some Republicans had noted that the incumbent would get 7 million fewer votes than he did in 2008. Now it appears that difference may end up being something closer to 3 million.

Wasserman is U.S. House editor for the Washington-based Cook report. He already spends long hours tracking every House race in America but said he added on the presidential tally “for kicks.” With most (or maybe all) big news organizations giving up the labor-intensive work of tracking results county by county in the weeks after election day, Wasserman now has the work mostly to himself. That makes him a go-to source for politicos and journalists.

Bush II had a re-election margin of almost exactly 2.5%

Their platform in 2010 was "The economy sucks and it's all Barry's fault!" and "Obama will take away your Medicare!" That same platform didn't hold up a second time around.

Imagine if they had been joined by Dick Lugar, Mike Castle, Sue Lowden, Jane Norton, and Sarah Steelman/John Brunner. We'd be looking at a 50-50 split in the Senate. Instead the GOP nominated two legitimate nut jobs in Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle and three well-below average candidates in Mourdock, Akin, and Ken Buck.

Everyone at Vassar wore black the day after his reelection, but most of my professors gave extensions on papers due that week so it wasn't all bad.

3. All issues are connected. Abortion isn’t just a social issue or even a moral question. It undercuts the family, which devastates the economy. It also eliminates future workers and consumers, reducing growth. Men fight and die for their families, not something called society. Thus, stable families are the linchpin of national security as well as the economy. America’s industrial engine helped win World War II. A weak economy leaves us vulnerable militarily and burdens families. Those who call themselves economic conservatives — or values voters or Neo-Cons — miss the big picture.

1. Understand that the left intends to destroy you. Your opponent isn’t a nice guy or a misguided idealist. He’s a dogmatist cut from the same cloth as Robespierre and Lenin — a storm trooper waiting to be fitted with jack boots and issued a truncheon. Look at the way the left runs academia, where it’s achieved near total dominance: brainwashing, rigid censorship and draconian punishment for thought crimes. This is what it’s planning for the rest of America. It lies, loots and manipulates. It is driven by envy, bitterness, disdain and a relentless power-lust. It ruins careers to make a political point. It would suppress conservative talk radio and send men to prison for the exercise of First Amendment freedom. Last April, when I heard Romney say, “The president is a nice guy, but we can’t afford him for four more years,” My first thought was, “Mitt’s a nice guy, but how in the hell did we end up with him as the alternative to Obama?” We consistently underestimate the opposition by assuming it’s well-intentioned and plays by the same rules we do. It isn’t and it doesn’t.

We recently did a confidential survey of more than 20,000 hourly workers to see what's really on our associates' minds. Some 86 percent responded they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the statement "I really love my job."

If he's going to play the heavy, I much preferred the way he did it in American Gangster.

The final numbers may upset some of the conventional thinking that had begun to congeal early around the 2012 outcome. It now appears that a total of 130 million votes may have been cast nationally for all candidates. That would only be 1.3 million fewer than in 2008 — when the unprecedented ascendancy of an African-American to a major party ticket was thought to have driven high turnout.

In arguing against an Obama mandate from the 2012 election, some Republicans had noted that the incumbent would get 7 million fewer votes than he did in 2008. Now it appears that difference may end up being something closer to 3 million.

This presumes that Sandy was the deciding factor in their vote,

which conveniently ignores:
A: Sandy struck in a heavily populated, overwhelmingly Democratic area - the universe of "Sandy" voters would reflect this.
B: The universe of Sandy voters would would preclude many who already opposed the President, as they would hardly find it their most important reason for doing so.
C: The universe of Sandy voters would include many from non-affected areas who were predisposed to vote for the President, and found his efforts to be particularly compelling, but would have voted for him anyway.

I thought I was the only Vassar guy here.

Per the numbers Kiko posted, 12 percent* of respondents claimed Sandy was their top issue when it came to voting. 12 percent of ~126,000,000 votes is roughly 15,000,000 votes, which went 3:1 for Obama. Obviously, in a 51-47 election, a large percentage of those votes were going to Obama anyway, but if 15 million people actually allowed a storm to decide their vote, a million or two of those votes were probably up for grabs and available to Romney if Sandy hadn't hit.

Sandy alone might not have been enough to swing the election away from Romney,

but it might have been enough to swing the election away from Romney in Florida (hurricane state)

and Virginia (hit by Sandy),

even before getting into the "war on women" nonsense.

Bull ####. "Sandy was my top issue" does not mean "I was going to vote for Romney, but I changed my vote because I like what the President did WRT Sandy."

Nonsense? It's in their freakin platform for Crissakes. The nutjobs in Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota merely highlighted that fact.

Rank speculation

and ignores B and C in my above post

I simply pointed out that of the ~15,000,000 people who said Sandy was their No. 1 issue, over 11,000,000 of them voted for Obama. If there was no Sandy, then at least some of those ~11,000,000 people presumably would have been up for grabs, given that it was a 51-47 election and not a 75-25 election.

(* It might have been 8 percent, but they still went 3:1 for Obama, and that's still an awfully large number of people basing their presidential decision on a storm — or, more accurately, basing their decision on a photo op after a storm.)

Good lord. Joe is still litigating an election wherein his candidate was soundly beaten? Amazin'.

How unlike the ominous presence of the New Black Panthers.

It didn't? Romney wasn't a Tea Party standard-bearer in the presidential race, while the GOP held the House.

I think Perry would probably have lost (the fundamentals pointed to Obama +2-3 or so), but he might have done better than Romney. Hard to tell if he was so bad because he was hopped up on goofballs, or if he was so bad because he was just stupid.

Huntsman probably would have done ok head to head with Obama (still losing though), but failed the purity testing during the primary for the sin of consorting with Fartbongo - hilariously despite being quite conservative. Perry, Gingrich, Bachmann, or Cain would have been utterly landslided.

Sorry if this is inflammatory but these political threads were way better pro-Kehoskie.

They think Romney lost because he pivoted to the center in the debates. They think Romney lost because he didn't run *toward* the 47% comments and fully embrace the Ryan-Randian positions. They think the problem was that the GOP "abandoned" Todd Akin and the rape-gate Senate candidates.

Denzel is typically treated like a movie star, but he's a hell of an actor.

The GOPers are playing the counter-factual where their candidate has a trace of charisma and isn't a nutjob, which really shouldn't be as absurd as Kate Upton in a Zombie Apocalypse, but for whatever reason was in 2012.

I do agree with #11173 about Perry. Who else was there...Bush is named Bush... I don't think Palin seriously wants it... I can buy that Daniels doesn't want it either, and I don't see him doing any better than a Huntsman anyway. Huckabee's an interesting one, I don't get why he didn't run. I guess maybe he likes being a Fox News guy more, but I'm not sure why...

Who else was there...Bush is named Bush... I don't think Palin seriously wants it... I can buy that Daniels doesn't want it either, and I don't see him doing any better than a Huntsman anyway. Huckabee's an interesting one, I don't get why he didn't run.

From your link (@11122) to g*d's ears, spike. These nutters will never go away until they are allowed to run on their platform and beaten to a bloody pulp.

Absent #2, perhaps one or the more of the folks mentioned in #1 would have done what Obama did in '08 and went for it anyway. But it probably didn't seem like the right call to go that route against an incumbent whom you (again, at the time the decision had to be made) expected to win.

I honestly don't get this. (Not saying you're wrong, only that I'm baffled at who did and didn't take a shot at the nomination.) The chances to run for President and have ANY kind of shot at winning are scarce as hen's teeth. Running against a President dealing with a grave economic crisis seems like as good a time as any, as does the (presumed) awareness that the field was going to include Romney and a bunch of shmoes.

Buchanan was as gifted a political speaker as I've seen

Why Israel is opposed to the Palestinians creating their own state

Because the Palestinians haven't recognized the Israeli state's right to exist.

That Israel has the power to collect taxes and withhold them in Palestian areas

Because the Palestinians don't have a state. The Israelis are the occupying power.