http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_Right

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

Amen.

We all know you don’t believe in global warming, but here’s a friendly tip for you. When you finally realize how badly you’ve betrayed humanity for your retirement fund, you’re gonna need to start saying you’ve been fighting the good fight all along, like you always do. To help you out, you might want to find some examples now of conservatives who DO believe the whole global warming thing. Surely there must be some? Don’t worry, in the meantime I’ll do my best to ensure that no one ever forgets who fought so dishonestly for so long to deny it.

Which do you like better:
“Conservatives: The ones who managed to delay meaningful action against global warming for 20 years.”
“Conservatives: The ones who put Big Oil ahead of humanity for 20 years.”
“Canadian Conservatives: The ones who are actually so stupid that, even in 20 years, they couldn’t figure out that global warming wasn’t a political issue.”
“Canadian Conservatives: The ones to blame when the ocean erases your small island country.”

I use the 20 year figure because it was 1989 that Global Climate Coalition was formed. Do you remember the Global Climate Coalition? They’re the ones whose own scientists told them in 1995 that climate change “cannot be denied”, yet they continued denying it until 2002.

The numbers aren’t so complicated, you might even understand them yourself if you finished high school, I can even show where the numbers come from:

Total CO2 currently in the atmosphere ~ 3,100 gigatonnes
Total 2008 CO2 emissions ~ 31 gigatonnes

Historic CO2 levels:
280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution
316 ppm in 1959
325 ppm in 1969
337 ppm in 1979
353 ppm in 1989
368 ppm in 1999
peaked over 390 ppm in May 2009

Models predict CO2 as high as 1360 ppm by 2100.

What value of CO2 do your experts say we should aim to stabilize at, how do we accomplish that and what effects might we face at that level? Remember that at 1000 ppm, people start finding the air stuffy.

My experts say 350 ppm and I believe them a lot more than I believe the American Petroleum Institute or Exxon Mobil.

Anyway, not expecting an answer anytime soon…

All my love,

stone1343

Today, for Blog Action Day 2009, I’d like to appeal to those who may be “on the fence” to get committed and take action.

The Problem, in a nutshell:

The atmosphere is currently about 390 parts per million CO2, and the world’s best climate experts believe we need to get back to 350 ppm. It was around 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Our global emissions amount to about 1% of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, every year. Regardless of all other natural factors, that has to have an effect. CO2 has been known to been a greenhouse gas for 150 years.

The Solution:

The experts recommend a reduction in CO2 emissions of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. To accomplish this, we need government, business and the public all committed to taking action. We all need to demand that our governments step up to the challenge and become part of the solution not part of the problem.

I have such a bad headache that I’m going to leave it at that for now.

Lost in all the talk about global warming, is some simple math that can help you understand the carbon dioxide (CO2) problem more intuitively. The executive summary of this post is as follows:
- Every gallon of gasoline used produces about 20 pounds of CO2.
- A car could produce 20 tonnes or more of CO2 per year.
- The world’s 500,000,000 vehicles could produce about 10,000,000,000 tonnes (10 gigatonnes) of CO2 per year.
- When you factor in all the other uses of fossil fuels, the estimate of global CO2 emissions of 27 gigatonnes per year seems reasonable.
- The entire atmosphere weighs approx 5,000,000 gigatonnes and it is currently about 390 parts per million (ppm) CO2, which would be around 2,000 to 3,000 gigatonnes CO2.
- 27 gigatonnes of human-created CO2 will actually affect the composition of the atmosphere, possibly causing the level to rise by about 1%/year.
- The pre-industrial CO2 concentration is estimated at around 270ppm, we are currently at about 390ppm, almost a 50% increase in 200 years.
- It has been known for 150 years that CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas, in the concentration currently found in the atmosphere. Anyone who says it’s a trace gas or a naturally-occurring by-product of life is misleading you, either deliberately lying or because of their own ignorance.

So far, you don’t need to be a scientist to comprehend the numbers, but the shock comes when you look at the number that scientists are starting to agree on that CO2 needs to stabilize at: 350ppm.

The worst part is that it’s mostly only in the US and Canada that acceptance of these numbers is split largely on political boundaries. Conservative leaders in both countries are absolutely willing to lie to the public to maintain the status quo, and regular people don’t have the ability to do the calculations for themselves. Now ask yourself why they’ve been lying to you – the answer is the same as it was for tobacco: money, politics and “free markets”.

Before the lying, astroturfing trolls get here and accuse me of incorrect science, let me say that I’m just a home dad who put this together in an afternoon of Google research. I’m sure I’ve made mistakes and it’s much more complicated than I’ve shown, but I think you’ll agree that we’re dumping CO2 at a scale that is actually capable of changing the atmosphere. Given that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, even at the current “minute” level, you can see that increasing it without boundaries could have potentially catastrophic consequences.

If you haven’t seen the numbers presented this way, verify them for yourself, learn about the subject and you’ll begin to see how blatantly the misinformation has been propagated. To me, there is no other conclusion but that the people who’ve made this a political issue have miscalculated and our children and grand-children will be paying the price for decades of obstruction. This is not something I’m willing to forgive and I hold you partly responsible (assuming you are what I call a “denier” and I am what you might call an “alarmist”).

I’ll even go so far as to issue a challenge to the despicable, lying, Astroturfing frauds, similar to the one at Greenfyre’s, show me evidence that I’m substantially wrong about any of these basic numbers:
- 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas
- up to 20 tonnes or more of CO2 yearly for a single vehicle, or perhaps 10 gigatonnes for 500,000,000 vehicles.
- total global CO2 emissions of about 27 gigatonnes a year
- total CO2 in the atmosphere about 3,000 gigatonnes
- explain a natural mechanism that accounts for measured increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1959 while somehow excluding the substantial amount of man-made CO2
- provide evidence that CO2 does not act as a greenhouse gas at current levels, and that doubling it (or more) will make no difference to melting ice caps and glaciers, sea level rise, climate patterns, etc.

I don’t want politics (“the lefties just want socialism”), anything about Al Gore (because I hate to tell you this, but regardless of how you feel about his politics, he has the facts on his side and all you have are lies), economics (“it’s too expensive”) or propaganda (“just a bunch of alarmists”), I want evidence, backed by scientific research, not just something that you read on someone’s blog.

However, if you don’t have any evidence, but you still just don’t see the possibility that it’s a problem we’re creating and that we have to get under control, take a stand for your position. Comment below for the rest of us to laugh at your stupidity. Who knows, maybe in 20 years I’ll be eating my words.

“Back of the envelope” calculations:

Generally, the gasoline your car uses is about 90% “octane” (that’s what the octane rating indicates, it’s more complicated than this, but for these calculations, it’s close enough) and 10% “heptane”.

The molecular formula for octane is C8H18, meaning it’s composed of 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogen atoms, while heptane is C7H16.

Octane combustion is given by this equation:

2C8H18 + 25O2= 16CO2 + 18H2O

which means that 2 octane molecules and 25 oxygen molecules from the atmosphere combine to produce 16 CO2 molecules and 18 water (H2O) molecules. The result of the reaction is energy released that is used to move the car.

Now, if you look at the “Periodic Table of the Elements“, you can find the atomic weights of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, which I will round off to 1, 12 and 16, respectively. You can use these numbers to compare the relative mass of the inputs and the outputs:

Octane: 8 C atoms x atomic mass of 12 + 18 H atoms x atomic mass of 1 = 8 x 12 + 18 x 1 = 114
O2 (an oxygen molecule in the atmosphere): 2 O atoms x 16 = 32
CO2: 1 C atom x 12 + 2 O atoms x 16 = 44
H2O: 2 H x 1 + 1 O x 16 = 18

You can verify that the equation balances:

2 x 114 + 25 x 32 = 16 x 44 + 18 x 18
1028 = 1028

This is conservation of mass, and this is the key part that doesn’t seem intuitively obvious to us. We tend to think we put gas in, it’s burned up and “disappears” because we don’t realize the mass of the exhaust. In fact, the equation tells us if you burn 228g (2 x 114) of gasoline, you consume 800g (25 x 32) of oxygen and the result is 704g (16 x 44) of CO2 plus 324g (18 x 18) of water. Expressed another way, for every gram of gas, you consume 800 / 228 (about 3.5g) of oxygen from the atmosphere and produce 704 / 228 (about 3.1g) of CO2 and 324 / 228 (about 1.4g) water. A litre of gas weighs approximately 770g and the resultant CO2 would weigh 770 x 3.1 (about 2.4kg).

For comparison, the combustion equation for heptane is:

C7H16+11O2 = 7CO2+8H2O

You can do the calculations yourself if you want to, but the end result for the purpose of this post is that it’s close enough to the octane equation and it’s a relatively small fraction of the gasoline, so it can be ignored.

There’s the bottom line, 1 litre of gasoline in produces about 2.4kg of CO2 out.

In gallons, 1 US gallon of gas produces almost 20 pounds of CO2!!! Here’s a separate citation for this number.

Depending on your vehicle and the number of miles you drive, you can easily produce 20 tonnes of CO2 each year (for example, assuming 15 mpg x 25,000 miles/year). Using fueleconomy.gov, you can estimate your own annual “carbon footprint”.

That’s one vehicle, multiply that by the number of cars on the road in the world, say 500,000,000 (estimates vary, but we’re looking for rough numbers here), you get 10,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2, just from vehicles, i.e. not including heating and generating electricity from fossil fuels or even burning wood. Current estimates of total CO2 emissions from human activity are about 27,000,000,000, or 27 gigatonnes, per year, so you can see that my numbers are close enough.

Now, the weight of Earth’s atmosphere is 5,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes or 5,000,000 gigatonnes, and it is approximately 390ppm CO2, which would translate to 5,000,000 x 390/1,000,000, or about 2,000 gigatonnes CO2. Here, Wikipedia says 3,000 gigatonnes, so I’ll use that number, but again you can see how close my calculations are.

So there’s currently 3,000 gigatonnes CO2 in the atmosphere, and we’re creating about 27 gigatonnes more each and every year. You might notice that’s 0.9% (27/3000), so if CO2 is increasing by that much each year, then it would seem from these calculations that it’s caused by us. In fact, it’s not even that much. In two years, from July 2007 to July 2009, CO2 went from 384.4ppm to 387.8ppm, >1.5ppm per year, but only an increase of 0.8%.

I’m not a climate scientist, but I think my methodology is close enough, and I believe it shows that the amount of CO2 we’re currently dumping into the atmosphere is actually significant enough to change its composition, which is another point that just doesn’t seem intuitive because we tend to think of the atmosphere as basically infinite. Remember that before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was relatively stable, the natural “sources” and “sinks” more or less balanced each other, the one thing that has changed is us producing almost 30,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

We’re currently at about 390ppm, and increasing by more than 1ppm each year, imagine where we’ll be in 10, 50 or 100 years.

At around 600ppm, people perceive the air as “stuffy” and CO2 poisoning starts around 1000ppm. We are in fact on a path to extinction. But the problem is not dying of CO2 poisoning, it’s the greenhouse effect, which John Tyndall discovered in 1859, exactly 150 years ago this year. It doesn’t matter whether CO2 is a naturally-occurring by-product of life or how minute the concentration of CO2 is, the point is, it does act as a greenhouse gas at the level currently in the atmosphere.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius calculated that if CO2 were to double, it would increase the temperature by up to 6C (almost 11 degrees F).

Any talk about “natural cycles” is also invalidated by this one point: The one difference between past climate changes and the current one is the amount of CO2 we’re creating.

The pre-industrial level of CO2 has been estimated at about 270ppm, so it has already increased by almost 50%. Anyone who tells you the CO2 level hasn’t changed since pre-industrial times is assuming you’re not smart enough to follow the basic math above. They would also have to account for how CO2 went from 390ppm down to 315ppm when measurements at Mauna Kea began in 1959, then has gradually increased back to 390.

The funny thing is, up until a few years ago, I was always a small-c conservative, and I’m still generally a fiscal conservative. But the current crop of conservatives in North America have me so enraged with both the Republican Fascist Party (that’s my new name for them) and Canada’s Neo-Con Party (led by George Bush’s lap dog, Stephen Harper) that I hope for the permanent demise of both parties.

It seems inevitable that, at least in some way, my dream is going to come true south of the border. The Republican Party is (probably) smart enough to realize that they’ll never win another election until they distance themselves from the extremist American Taliban and KKKhristian factions. I really do hope the racist, ignorant, homophobic anti-science, apocalyptic theocrats spend the next 40 years “wandering in the desert” without a political voice (or secede and become the Mexican State of “Tay-has”). The “moderate” Republicans will just pin the whole global warming denial thing on the Jesus Freaks, and move on.

Canada’s a completely different story. We have a Conservative government, who seem to have learned all their tricks from Dubya, Darth Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm and friends. They don’t believe in evolution, and they don’t believe in global warming. Their only reading material seems to come from Republican think tanks and they’ve already started their “elitist” attack ads and we aren’t even in an election campaign. Unfortunately, there’s no internal rift to hope will explode.

It’s the climate change issue that I think has the best potential to destroy the party and end neo-conservatism in North America forever. Recently, Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, passed first reading, since we have a minority government and the majority of our MPs actually have principles. Every single Conservative MP voted against the bill.

But things have changed quickly, I think. The public support for action on global warming has recently become overwhelming. The Conservatives will have to do the biggest flip-flop in history or risk losing support everywhere but our oil-producing areas. It is a given to me that most people in the oil business will continue to deny global warming as long as it is in their narrow short-term self-interest, regardless of future consequences. But the rest of Canada has caught on, and I hope they punish the Conservatives severely for putting short-term financial gain against the future of humanity.

BTW, a word on “flip-flopping”, before I finish. Everyone, including the media, seems to treat changing your mind as one of the worst things a politician can do, even worse than lying. Personally, I respect when someone looks at the situation in depth and says, “I was wrong.” Breaking campaign “promises” is not much different, we all know that party platforms are based on what the party thinks has the best chance of getting them elected. Once they get in power, a good politician will do what he has to do, regardless of his ideology. That’s the problem with the Conservatives, they will never let evidence get in the way of their ideology, and that’s what makes them bad for the country.

Conservatism: Where the rich get a free ride; where programs that I don’t need are wasteful; where regulations that get in the way of me making more money are evil; where liberty means I get to do the torturing to justify illegal wars and where freedom of speech means I get to push my religion in your face but everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi, a socialist, a fascist, a communist or just plain unpatriotic. In other words, it’s all about me.

Republicans: “The biggest threat to America is the gays… and the atheists… The two biggest threats to civilization are the gays and the atheists… and public health care… The three biggest threats to civilization are the gays, the atheists and public health care… and the Employee Free Choice Act. The four biggest threats… Amongst the biggest threats to civilization are the gays, the atheists, public health care and the Employee Free Choice Act.”

(with sincerest apologies to Monty Python)

Not to mention evolution,  climate change (you gotta love this blog’s name, “Axis of Right”, not only identifying themselves as right-wing but also implying “correct” and more patriotic than the left because of the awesomeness of their stars and stripes banner, not to mention putting the word “scientists” in air quotes and accusing the media and the UN of being in on the conspiracy.), NOT torturing, the Fairness Doctrine, pornography, gun control, a black man in the White House and of course not just Islamic terrorism, but Islam itself.

BTW, according to WorldNetDaily, Obama’s economic stimulus package “makes a deliberate – and unconstitutional – attempt to censor religious speech and worship on school campuses across the nation”, purely by prohibiting stimulus money being used to repair religious facilities.

The Republican party – We’re sorry we have deliberately engaged in a decades-long anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-truth, anti-democracy campaign which has caused America to lose its status as a world leader, making us into a fascist Third World country. We’re also sorry for using 9/11 ads, homosexuals, fake patriotism, taxes, etc to scare you into voting for us. Terrorism is defined on Wikipedia as the “systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion”. By that definition, the Republicans are the terrorists.

The media – We’re sorry that we allowed so many to be so dishonest for so long without calling them on it. People have mis-used our instinct to provide “balanced” coverage to cause a country which is paralyzed with hatred, ignorance and religious extremism.

The religious right – We’re sorry we have taken advantage of gullible Americans for our own personal power and financial gain, we have lied to you about evolution and made science and expertise into a bad thing. We have promoted “faith healing” over real medicine, and people have died because of it. We have deliberately kept Americans ignorant to advance our own political agendas.

Some stats:

- The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world (over 1 in 100 as of 2008, with 5% of the world’s population, the US has 25% of the world’s inmates) (another source).

- In 2007, only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan carried out more executions, and Iraq trailed close behind. Most civilized countries have abolished the death penalty.

- America is the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care.

- In a 2006 poll of 34 countries, the only country with a higher percentage of the population that reject evolution is Turkey.

- Among 18 countries ranked in the UN Human Poverty Index, the US ranks 3rd from the bottom (and has a policy of “welfare racism”).

- In 2003, Reporters Without Borders ranked the US in a tie for 31st place in press freedom.

Just this week, we’ve seen the “collapse” of American and global markets, widely attributed to a failure of deregulation.

Also this week, I’ve launched my own very insignificant attack on systemic conservative lying.

And just today, I saw this video, “American Denial of Global Warming”, where science historian Naomi Oreskes outlines the parts of a few players, including Fred Seitz and Fred Singer of the George Marshall Institute. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, I’ll give you my best summary:

The George Marshall Institute is a conservative think tank established to counter scientific resistance to the Strategic Defense Initiative (Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense plan). Their strategy was simple, confuse the issue by claiming that not all scientists are united in opposition to SDI. They subsequently used the same tactic with the second-hand smoke and global warming issues.

Don’t take my word for it, do your own research, google “marshall seitz singer jastrow nierenberg” and note that Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project website is alive and well as of Sept 20, 2008.

Oreskes makes it clear that Seitz, Singer et al were fiercely anti-communist, anti-regulation conservatives, and that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that political view (although this week is a bad week for that point of view). The problem is that they’ve used fake science to promote their political views. And they used the media to do it. This has confused Americans, eroded their faith in science & media, and has delayed meaningful action on global warming.

I say again, reasonable Republicans have a responsibility to reject this type of strategy, which is leading America down the path, not just away from global leadership, but actually to irrelevance.

I know this is supposed to be a blog about atheism, but global warming is (obviously!) another of my main concerns. It actually all fits together perfectly: Christians, Republicans, liars, deniers.

Here’s another reference about skeptics being paid to disagree with global warming…

More about Lawrence Solomon, apologizing for falsely calling scientists deniers. His book, “The Deniers”, is promoted as a “must’read” on freedominion.com, with no disclaimers. And he even admits that his subjects aren’t really deniers, from DeSmogBlog,

Solomon even says so. He says that while reflecting on his own research, “I … noticed something striking about my growing cast of deniers. None of them were deniers.”

Nigel Weiss, among others, objected to being used, Solomon and the National Post eventually had to apologize to him. But the series has been publicized on at least one right-wing site, freerepublic.com.

Let’s be clear, many of the deniers are status quo, small-government, right wingers with their own agenda. Many call themselves “Christians”, although there’s nothing Christian about their beliefs. They use the same techniques that Big Tobacco used (Fred Singer attacked a 1993 EPA  report on the dangers of smoking, calling it ‘junk science’) and they have successfully stalled action for over 25 years (if you’re skeptical of this story, here’s a reference to the 1979 report, JSR-78-07). They still have lots of believers, for example, Sarah Palin and junkscience.com. It all goes to reinforce the right’s war on science and the “elite”. They even shamelessly promote “Carbon Belch Day”, while Exxon and Peabody are committing crimes against humanity.

Here’s an excellent series, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.

On the point of lying, conservatives even have their own version of Wikipedia (with charming entries on homosexuality, Creation Science and lots more), here’s just one nice example of right wing hatred. The hard right is in a major battle all over the country to have creationism taught in schools (no reference needed, look it up if you don’t believe me).

I do still think there are reasonable people with legitimate reasons for voting Republican, however, I also think until the lying, hating, ignorant, largely “Christian” extreme right is marginalized to the point of irrelevance, voting Republican is voting to continue America’s loss of international credibility. Hatred and war are not the solution to terrorism, especially when America is mortgaging its future to the Middle East for oil. The US should take a good look at itself, and realize that they have a serious problem with the way they treat their poor and sick, the small-government model of capitalism is in tatters (dragging the rest of the world down with it) and the world needs the US to take a strong position on the environment. Four more years of right-wing hatred and ignorance

We all know America is extremely polarized, I believe that until reasonable Republicans disavow the tactics of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Phil Gramm, Dick Cheney and so many others, they are not acting in the interest of promoting an America that is a leader on the world stage. John McCain is no “maverick” to me and Sarah Palin is part of the scary right wing that should never get close to power.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s what Republicans do, and they do it very well.

They lie about the environment. Look at this story, The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP. Conservatives have a long, glorious tradition of not only denying the global warming problem, but virulently attacking it, here’s just one example, from newsbusters.org, where the writer repeatedly uses emotionally-charged words like ‘disgraceful’, ‘disgusting’, and ‘despicable’ (I hesitate to even link to it, but I hope rational people will see through the lies and distortions).

Or how ’bout this one, where Fred Singer, a prominent denier, is shot down for claims he never worked for Big Tobacco or Big Oil, with plenty of irrefutable evidence that he did. There’s one document on tobaccodocuments.org that I found particularly fascinating.

Of course, we can’t forget James Inhofe’s 400 deniers, thoroughly debunked.

Here’s a scientific study, “The Organization of Denial”, of 141 “environmentally sceptical” books published between 1972 and 2005, finding that over 92% were published in the US by conservative think tanks. And scientists have been offered cash to dissent.

Sometimes they make it too easy to see through, like when the Conservative Book Club features Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers, or our friend Fred Singer’s Unstoppable Global Warming. I can’t resist quoting from the opening paragraph of each,

Al Gore and the mainstream media tell us constantly that it’s all settled: global warming is an established fact…

and,

To Al Gore and his disciples, global warming is man-made and dangerous…

This is actually one of the problems, part of the reason these people can’t accept the truth is because Al Gore is so visible in the issue. It remains to be seen if Republicans can change their minds, as one did in this story, Generational Test for Republicans.

(The Conservative Book Club doesn’t stop there, it has entire sections on Global Warming, Radical Islam and The Clintons, appealing directly to the haters.)

Here’s a cleverly-disguised one from globalwarming.org, discussing Lawrence Solomon’s above-mentioned book. By the way, it turns out globalwarming.org is sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose website actually reveals a lot,

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.

Translation: they’re a conservative group working for old-fashioned, hands-off government. This week, we all know how well that has worked out!

Here’s a question, Climate change deniers – stupid or just dishonest? DeSmogBlog has a searchable database on global warming deniers, check it out (of course Fred Singer is there). Or see Exxon Secrets, for info on the individuals and organizations working to keep America ignorant, such as CEI and the Heartland Institute. At least the Rockefeller family tried to stand up to Exxon.

They lie about evolution, which is not up for debate. For example, Ben Stein’s “Expelled” (see “Flunked, not expelled, what Ben Stein isn’t telling you about ID”).  Scientists spend so much time and effort fighting back. At least my favourite Young Earth Creationist felon, Kent Hovind, who lied about his taxes is doing time for his crime (Not Safe For Work, but there’s a hilarious video on YouTube). Oh, speaking of YouTube, in 2007, his goons used fraud to remove critical YouTube videos.

We all know they lie about the economy, which McCain says is fundamentally strong. Maybe it is for these 3 Merrill Lynch officials who may get up to $200,000,000, but meanwhile the World Bank is shovelling up to $250,000,000,000 (!!!) into global money markets.

The US is clearly headed in the wrong way, consider these:

The Republican War on Science, Fascist America (where she forgot one, destroy the integrity of the electoral system), Idiot America, The Assault on Reason by Al Gore, a poll of Americans themselves, a poll outside the US, Making America Stupid,

Don’t forget the famous right-wing lying hypocrites Troy King, Mark Foley, Ed Schrock, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard or the haters Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Check out these blogs which largely feature Christians who get caught in their crimes and Republicons.

They even lie to their evangelical Christian base, as evidenced by this 2006 article, Christian Evangelicals: Enablers of the Wayward Republicans, even as the Religious Right is taking over the GOP.

They lie because it’s the only way they think they can beat Obama.

I can’t summarize it any better that the hard-hitting opening line from the “Exact Opposite” by Baron Dave Romm series,

A standard conservative Big Brother technique is to make wild random claims, sling mud and repeat lies until some of the mud sticks or one of the wild claims has a small germ of truth.

So I appeal to all reasonable Americans who are considering voting Republican – If you continue to elect these people, they’ll never learn. I can understand wanting fiscally-responsible spending, but I’m not convinced they’re the ones to do it.