There was a lengthy aside about Bush's rejection of the Kyoto agreement on page 2 of this topic.

Bush is vilified for rejecting it, but as G-man said earlier (quoted below), and as George Will details in the quoted column that follows, Bush is not alone in his assessment that it was/is not a good agreement:


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the G-man said:
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Originally posted by Dave:
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On Kyoto: I'm firmly of the opinion that the rejection of Kyoto was to appease Californian voters and American industry.



The Senate rejected Kyoto almost unanimously, meaning that Senators from every state rejected it. Why would, for example, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy need to appease California voters?
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Dave said:
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G-man points out that China and India are let off the hook as developing nations, and this is true. Their argument is that strict pollution controls would stifle their economic development. I don't know that I agree with that, given I suck in polluted air floating south from the properous Guangzhou province every day. Some pollution regulation would go a long way.


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Exactly. When nearly everything we own is "made in China," the idea that China is "developing" and should be exempted is ludicrous. The fact that China is exempted is further evidence that this treaty is simply some sort of anti-US rule.
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Dave said:In any event, the US, as the world's principal polluter, has no excuse of being a developing country.



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No, but they have the 'excuses,' or more accurately 'reasons' cited previously: that the treaty would be ineffectual at everything except crippling the US economy and sending millions to the unemployment line.

If, as you say, Europe and Japan are implementing Kyoto then let's wait and observe things for a few years. Let's see if they actually cut emissions and let's see how their economy is effected. Then the United States can make an informed decision.







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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29861-2004Jun9.html
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CRITICAL MASS FOR KERRY
By George F. Will
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Thursday, June 10, 2004; Page A19
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John Kerry recently stopped in Las Vegas to say: "Rest assured, Nevada. If I'm president, Yucca Mountain will not be a depository."
Back to mind comes Chic Hecht, a one-term Republican senator elected in 1982, who said he opposed using Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a nuclear waste "suppository."
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Also to mind comes the French sovereign known as Henry of Navarre (1553-1610). More about him anon.
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The problem of nuclear waste has been studied for 50 years. Twenty-two years ago Washington took responsibility for that waste --there are 49,000 metric tons of it-- stored at 131 sites in the 39 states with nuclear power plants.
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Seventeen years ago Congress selected Nevada --the federal government owns 86 percent of the state-- for the repository.
Beginning in 2010, the waste is to be put 1,000 feet underground, on 1,000 feet of rock, in steel containers in 100 miles of storage tunnels within the mountain.
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But in 1996 President Bill Clinton promised to veto any attempt to make Nevada even a temporary repository. That promise helped him beat Bob Dole there by just 4,730 votes, the smallest state margin that year.
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In 2000 George W. Bush promised not to make Nevada a temporary repository, but he said "sound science" would guide him regarding establishing a permanent repository there.
He beat Al Gore 50 to 46 (301,575 votes to 279,978).
A switch of 10,799 votes would have made Gore president.
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In 2002 Bush approved Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. Congress said Nevada's governor could veto the selection but that his veto could be overridden by majorities in both houses.
He [ Nevada's governor ] vetoed it; Congress overrode him.
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By this protracted dance of democracy the interests of an American majority --161 million live within 75 miles of today's storage sites-- prevailed, respectfully, over the objections of an intense minority, the approximately 2 million people who live in southern Nevada.
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Kerry's willingness to overturn this accommodation reflects a cold, and factually correct, calculation having nothing to do with the national interest: For the intense and compact Nevada minority, unlike for the diffuse American majority, this is a vote-determining issue.
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Kerry's message to Nevadans --essentially, "I feel your hypothetical pain"-- testifies to his readiness to do whatever it takes to win.
As does his vow last month that, if elected, he would renegotiate the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
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He would try to force signatory nations (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and, soon, the Dominican Republic) to adopt labor and environmental standards more pleasing to him.
The ostensible purpose of this would be to improve the lot of labor in those nations. But the primary purpose of the re-negotiation would be to raise production costs in those countries, thereby making imports from them less competitive with U.S. products.
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Time was, Kerry was a free-trader. Now he favors "fair trade," as defined by his labor allies. But he still is a critic of what he and like-minded people consider the administration's obnoxious tendency to tell other nations how to behave.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that "it would be unprecedented for a newly elected president to turn his back on a major trade deal negotiated by his predecessor."
Unprecedented and, in Kerry's case, inconsistent.
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When Kerry and kindred spirits criticize what they consider the Bush administration's hubris and bad diplomatic manners, they often cite its withdrawal from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
It is understandable that they do not dwell on the fact that the Clinton administration refused to submit it for Senate ratification, or that the Senate voted 95 to 0 for a resolution against proceeding with the protocol as negotiated.
The junior senator from Massachusetts said "no one in their right mind" would favor it as it is.
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As far as Yucca Mountain and CAFTA are concerned, Kerry's comportment reflects toughness -- call it Navarrean toughness -- about subordinating all considerations of principle to the exigencies of winning power.
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Someone in the White House has naughtily said that Kerry "looks French." The scalding truth is that he wears Hermes neckties, which are French, and, worse still, he speaks French.
But his real French connection is his spiritual kinship with Henry of Navarre.
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Henry was raised a Protestant but converted to Catholicism -- twice -- for political reasons. His explanation still resonates with those politicians -- a large tribe -- who believe, as Kerry does, in doing whatever is necessary:
"Paris is well worth a Mass."
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georgewill@washpost.com
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Staying more on-topic, here's a recent Ann Coulter column on the media portrayal of Reagan's death, and retrospective of Reagan's Presidency:



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So Now They Think He Was Charming
by Ann Coulter
June 9, 2004
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America's greatest president has gone home.
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God worked through Ronald Reagan on Earth and now He's taken him back. Reagan is survived by his wife, three children, and the hundreds of millions of people he saved by winning the Cold War.
Thanks to him, the United States of America never ceased to be, as Reagan said, "a place to escape to" -- the last stand on Earth.
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No thanks to liberals, I might add. More enraging than their revisionist history of Reagan, is liberals' revisionist history about themselves. Now liberals claim they liked Reagan at the time. This is extremely believable -- aren't we all fond of someone who regularly exposes us as liars, cowards and hypocrites? It's just human nature.
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In fact and of course, liberals loathed Reagan.
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Their European friends loathed Reagan -- the protests against our current president are positively anemic compared to the massive protests against President Reagan when he went to visit our dear "allies," whose sorry asses we spent billions of dollars defending against the Soviets for 50 years.
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Even the moderate Republicans currently trying to insinuate themselves onto Reagan's legacy weren't especially fond of Reagan at the time --especially when attacking him publicly would get them invites to the tonier Georgetown cocktail parties. Only authentic Americans loved Reagan.
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From the descriptions in the media, you would think the reason Reagan was beloved by Americans was that he was an affable fellow who could tell a good joke. That's a description of Bob Dole, not Ronald Reagan.
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Reagan was a March hare right-winger. He had enough faith in the American people to know that as long as the facts were clear, they would rise to the occasion and be March hare right-wingers, too.
As Reagan himself said, back in 1964: "Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and me believe that this is a contest between two men ... that we are to choose just between two personalities."
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Reagan forced Americans to confront the real ideological divide between conservatives and, as he said, "our liberal friends."
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But now liberals are trying to muddy the political waters by passing off Reagan's popularity as a result of his personal magnetism.
I note that liberals were strangely immune to that magnetism at the time. Only now do they talk about Reagan's outsized personality as if he worked some sort of beguiling magic over the electorate and tricked them into supporting policies they never quite understood.
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While Reagan had undeniable magnetism, what set him apart was that he had the courage to speak the truth and trust the American people.
In the 1964 speech that launched his political career, "A Time for Choosing," Reagan never smiled. He told no jokes -- though he did say some amusing things inasmuch as he was talking about "our liberal friends."
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In the throes of the Cold War --still hot in Vietnam-- Reagan forthrightly said liberals refused to acknowledge that the choice was not between "peace and war, only between fight and surrender."
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In words that would have come in pretty handy in Spain just a few months ago, he said liberals tell us "if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us." All who disagree with the "peace" crowd, he said, "are indicted as warmongers."
To this, Reagan said: "Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace -- and you can have it in the next second -- surrender."
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This wasn't sunny old grandpa carrying candy around in his pocket for children.
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After watching Walter Cronkite's coverage of the Vietnam War in December 1972, Reagan told President Richard Nixon, "under World War II circumstances, the network (CBS) would have been charged with treason."
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Reagan quoted "Mr. Democrat himself," Al Smith, for the proposition that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland, but was now the party of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. (And that was 30 years before they tried to push Hillarycare on us.)
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Reagan was a bulldog, completely, implacably right-wing on every issue. He was the right-wing Energizer Bunny. He never quit and he kept beating liberals.
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He cut taxes 25 percent across the board his first year in office;
he walked away from Gorbachev at Reykjavik;
he fired all those air traffic controllers -- and wouldn't let them come back even when they wanted to;
he gave speeches about "welfare queens" and polluting trees;
he nominated Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court;
and he enraged grim liberals when he warmed up his radio mike by saying, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
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But now they're telling us Reagan was a "pragmatist."
Well, not according to him.
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As he was wrapping up the Republican primaries in 1980 and moderate weenies in the Republican Party were trying to move him to the "center," Reagan said: "No, I'm not moving my positions any. ... I believe the same things that I've been speaking on for years, and I don't see any reason to change."

Thank God he didn't. Because Reagan lived, the world is a better place.






  • from Do Racists have lower IQ's...

    Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.

    EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.