There's definitely a place for thoughtful conservative opinion. I enjoy reading a well-written, well-thought out piece with a viewpoint different from my own.

Reinhard, however, did not provide that. He's not a particularly skillful writer, and a less-skillful thinker.

And he should have been fired after he wrote a column suggesting that shooting Jimmy Carter "would be a good idea."

"Part of Nelson's "values" include killing a bill in the 08 session to establish a data-collecting system for greenhouse gas emissions. "

Good for him. Collecting data is a prelude to regulating. Regulating CO2 will cost Oregon thousands of jobs and increase our cost of energy. It will lower our standard of living. The poor will be hurt the worst.

Is it "progressive" to hurt poor people and lower everyone's standard of living?

PS: There is only one "alternative" energy that is ready to build but it is outlawed in Oregon. Solar will increase your $100/mo elective bill to $500 or more. Wind, like solar is comes and goes, so it must have fossil power on standby when it gets above a certain portion of generation.

Already the greens are complaining about windmills appearances, sound and effects on birds. How will they react to paving over a few dozen square miles of Oregon? (Can you spell endangered sand flea?)

How much are you willing to see your energy bill go up? Are you willing to lose your job? That is what is in store for Oregon.

Kari, you've forgotten to ask the followup question. If your family had neither the $100/month or $200/month, which would you chose? Neither or the street?

Kari, did you seriously just advocate overcharging Oregonians for energy for no other reason than to create a privileged group of energy producers, just because the privileged group lives (or works, or at least has an ownership stake) in Oregon? Is that progressive?

Not only that, but you used the fear of Islamic foreigners to justify it.

Some practice their politics as a thought excercise and do not remember that there are lives at stake. This is how policy is often made.

With a shrug and a Hallmark card slogan, "for the greater good", reality notwithstanding. People will land in the streets.

Some are carrying that NON-theoretical 100 dollar energy bill month to month never getting paid off or far enough down.

There has to be a more robust thought process than this.

Here's a thoughtful conservative opinion:

No principled advocate of liberty can even consider the candidates of the two “major” parties: both are thoroughly reprehensible, and would take the country even farther down the wrong path–toward economic dislocation and war.

Nader is the Eugene Debs of our times: he is brave, intractably committed to principle, and disdainful of the limousine liberals and their “conservative” counterparts who grimace in maidenly horror at the sight and sounds of such truth-telling populism. Most importantly, Ralph Nader knows who are the real enemies of the American people, and what is the source of their power. He, alone, is serious about breaking that power.

Naderism in Defense of Liberty is No Vice

Mr. Kershner: This is same Ralph Nader who was wondering out loud on Tuesday night whether Barack Obama would be "Uncle Tom for the giant corporations". And when later asked if he had chosen a poor turn of phrase, Nader smirked and said "not at all".

Nader is the Eugene Debs of our times: he is brave, intractably committed to principle, and disdainful of the limousine liberals and their “conservative” counterparts....

Right. Let's talk about cults of personality, shall we?

Kari Chisholm: Question for Billy. If you had a choice, as a policy-maker, between an energy policy that would cost the average family $100/month (but send that money to Saudi Arabia) versus an energy policy that would cost the average family $200/month (but keep all the money in Oregon, creating energy jobs here)... which would you choose? ME: That is not the real choice. The real choice is: 1. Continue as usual at $100/month, sending a portion of that to terrorists. 2. End the domestic energy extraction & pipeline prohibition & quit sending money to terrorists. 3. Pay a lot more than $200/month in an attempt to make unproven alternatives work as we shut down proven sources of energy and outlaw the only proven, utility scale alternative.

Note: There is known NO WORKING ALTERNATIVE energy source. See above.

Kari Chisholm: Me, I'd choose the latter. ME: Would you still choose #3? Why?

Steven Maurer: the scenarios depicted in an Inconvenient Truth seem to be much more conservative than what it happening. ME: HUH?? 1. The earth has been cooling for the last 4-10 years, depending on whose data you use. (This disproves the climate models because they did not predict this pause in the supposed race to some imagined tipping point, which mysteriously did not tip a few million years ago when CO2 was 10 times today’s level.) 2. The oceans are not flooding those islands that Gore said were flooding. 3. Antarctic ice continues to grow year after year. (A tiny peninsula that extends far away form the Antarctic is all that is shrinking.) Even NASA attributes Arctic ice loss to things OTHER THAN temperature.

BTW, a British court found a bunch of exaggerations in Al’s movie. And that was using the alarmist IPCC as a reference.

Steven Maurer: We have to move off oil now - at least if we want to keep the world's coastline looking approximately as it does today. ME: Where do you get this stuff? The oceans are rising at a SLOWER rate than in the past. The rising rate has been decreasing ever since the end of the last ice age.

The "buy oil from Saudi Arabia" routine is problematic, as somewhere between 80% and 90% of our imported petroleum comes from other countries. You can see at the same US government source that something like 70% of our oil imports are not even from the region we usually refer to as the Middle East. Thus the idea that importing oil necessarily indirectly funds terrorists has a problem prima facie.

PLEASE do not feed the obscurantist climate-change deniers. Billy is picking up where He Who Must Not Be Named And Who Got His IP Address Blocked left off.

Mr. Walls:

The DP, including Obama, is deeply racist in its complicity in the slaughter and torture of Arabs, both directly through its failure to defund the occupation of Iraq and indirectly through its support for US-Israel crimes against the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people. This anti-Arab bigotry has been expressed several times by Obama, including in his selections of Joe (I am a zionist) Biden and Rahm(bo) Emanuel, but most obviously through his pandering to power at the AIPAC convention.

Nader correctly calls this anti-Semitism. (Anti-Jewish bigotry is also involved, since the blame, instead of being assigned to the corporations and power elites who actually are profiting, is instead being attributed to the "Israel Lobby", but that's another story.)

Nader uses the term "Uncle Tom" to describe Obama's obsequiousness to corporate power in this context. When racists call other people racists, they are hypocrites.

This anti-Arab bigotry has been expressed several times by Obama, including in his selections of Joe (I am a zionist) Biden and Rahm(bo) Emanuel

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if some sort of support for Zionism (ethnic Jewish statehood) is identical to "anti-Arab bigotry", then you are condemning, I would guess, something like 90% of the US population.

As for Nader tossing around comments about Obama possibly being an "Uncle Tom", if Kershner thinks this elevates the level of political discourse, fine, Mr. Kershner, parse it and talk about context until you're blue in the face.

joel dan walls, since you are so convinced and you are a logical person, I'll bet you can show us at least one peer reviewed paper that actually proves CO2 can cause dangerous warming. (Absent such a paper, there is no proof that CO2 causes dangerous warming.)

It amazes me how conservatives have suddenly decided to embrace affirmative action - for Republicans that is. The same arguments cropped up again and again in the Senate race. That Gordon Smith was "entitled" to a senate seat because we need one democrat and one republican (why have a general election at all if that's the case? and of course, I'm sure the O believed this "balance" was good during the Hatfield/Packwood days. oh wait....)

Now poor David Reinhard is upset that there weren't enough quota positions for doctrinaire conservatives at his place of employment. Aside from the face that quotas are probably all that kept such a piss poor writer and thinker employed at all all these years.

I have news for the Davids and Gordons of the world - your ideas have failed, your governing philosophy has been a disaster. if you're being discriminated against now, it's because you choose to embrace a worldview that has proven wrong time and again. You are no innocent victim to your ouster.

Reinhard seemed to have intelligence, but in his column, with monotonous consistency, came off like a malicious, sadistic cartoon character. There's a market for him somewhere no doubt. I hope the O doesn't replace him with someone even more mean than he was.

Figures Ralph Nader would be one of the first high profile guys falling to the temptation of using the Uncle Tom cliche in criticizing Obama. I'm sure Obama is going to get plenty of criticism in the days to come, but in doing so, I hope people will be a little more original than Nader chose to be.

Hmmm.

Its fierce diversity efforts don't seem to extend to broadening the range of acceptable opinions in the trade.

The Big "O" wastes ink printing columns by Rich Lowery and Reinhard has the nerve to complain about acceptable opinions?

I suppose he means local "opinions", but still, Rich "Starbursts" Lowery who has been wrong 100% of the time?

I just can't help but be continually shocked at the level of coercion against citizens that progressives are willing to employ to promote whatever seems like a good idea to them at the time.

How I learned to stop hating and pity David Reinhard.

Reinhard will be a fundraiser. He has celebrity status as a syndicated columnist, no matter how unoriginal.

I applaud Carla, Kari and virtually every single blue who lines up and/or announces their loyalty to the Global Warming agenda. With the CO2-Global Warming matter being entirely concocted and very easily read to be so, this issue will be your undoing. The unraveling of our energy system, caused by your blind advocacy of a massive fraud, will cause great harm to countless people with not a shred of benefit appearing. All the while everyone will be witnessing global climate NOT following the fraud.
So as you block the use of our own oil, natural gas and coal know that you had ample opportunity to get it right and will have no ability to spin the weather to fit your delusions. I hope you keep posting your allegiance to this hoax on a regular basis so that the public gets a real clear understanding of exactly who it is perpetrating it. Despite the few Republicans who have lost their way the overwhelming super majority of the AGW regime is YOU. Now keep it up!

I'm not Joel Haugen, and the thread was way off topic before I got involved.

This thread is also about "Nelson's "values" include killing a bill in the 08 session to establish a data-collecting system for greenhouse gas emissions.

And Carla says:
"Or perhaps science will win out--as it always does"

Really? So you're banking massive policies on "perhaps". Not that science has already won out? That would be reckless. And as I stated it's an easy issue to discover the fraud.

Yet your "perhaps" has you certain of YOUR "outcome"?

The only denying here is your collective blue denial that CO2 is not doing what you claim is "perhaps" happening.
It's not even a complicated issue to understand. Yet you stand aside chanting the mantra.

But then earlier Kari has posted, twice that I noticed, that it doesn't matter if it is a hoax and fraud becasue we need all the policies anyway?

Well there you go. Keep up that approach. I'm sure you'lll be helping people understand the wisdom behind cap and trade.

carla axtman: Or perhaps science will win out--as it always does. You can deny it for as long as you like, but it won't change the outcome. ME: Science is slowly starting to win as more and more scientists risk their jobs and positions to speak out on the fallacy of man-caused global warming. More importantly, the leaders of the fallacy have openly admitted lying. Why do you continue top ignore this?

AL Gore: ”I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are...”; Al Gore in Grist, 09 May 2006, grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/09/roberts/ bold added.

Steven Schneider , Editor of Climate Change Journal: ... we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might. have. (DISCOVER OCTOBER 1989, Page 47)

This guy controls NASA’s historical climate records: Jim Hansen: Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time , when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as "synfuels," shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions. ( from naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh6.html, bold added)

Carla, please look deeper, you are being led into hurting people in order to make Al Gore and his wall street hucksters even richer. Why are you supporting big money grubbing Wall Street corporations!

If you are so convinced that man is causing global warming, please show us the peer-reviewed paper that proves that CO2 can cause dangerous warming.

Oh that's perfect Pat. The best you can do is a 4 year old piece of convenient counting? None of which includes any pieces showing how CO2 is warming the planet.

Carla said, "No. I'm banking policy changes on science. Try it sometime.

Yeah right Carla. You've used your blind adherence and ignored the science. I'll wager you have'nt the slightest understanding of the presumptuous means used to make the IPCC case. If you did you would know how their modeling failed to produce their desired alarm level until they added a specualtive and cherry picked theory of large increases in water vapor. You have nothing but worn out Gore propaganda on your side. Calling that science is an insult to science.

Pat Ryan: So..........out of 928 papaers evaluated, zero took your position. ME: Of course you didn't mention that she lied. And admitted it in a subsequent issue (21 Jan 2005).

BTW, please don't quote stuff from non-peer reviewed journals then ask me for peer reviewed stuff.

Do a little research & you'll find it, or I'll provide it when I have time.

Well well Carla, so it appears you have no understanding of global warming at all. But you DO KNOW it's your blue duty to fall in line and not question or sway.

With that you have nothing but to punt.

"I know that there are multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies which verify the fact that we are undergoing global climate change."

"Undergoing climate change"?

Are you trying to be slick?
You obvioulsy know this isuue isn't about "climate change". But rather the theory (hoax) that humans CO2 emissions are dangerously warming the planet.

YOU judge "values" in killing a bill in the 08 session to establish a data-collecting system for greenhouse gas emissions"?

The irrefutable fact with climate is that it is always changing.

All of Kulongoiski's emissions policies are based on no more than your poor understanding and the environmental movement that justifies the use of fraud.
The only way any of you can sustain your faithful adherence to the Global warming hoax is by keeping clear of all of the emerging scientific contradiction. Quite the progressive approach.

Mr. Kershner: You picked the wrong perennial candidate to associate Ralph Nader with. William Jennings Bryan is more apt - a crusader who picked up lots of money on the lecture circuit, a Prohibitionist killjoy, and ended his life tilting at windmills - the scientific theory of evolution.

Pat Ryan: Billy, Here's an umbrella eval from Science Daily in '04: That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

ME: Got anything credible, say for instance e from a peer reviewed journal? ME: The actual essay was not peer reviewed and appeared in Science 3 Dec 2004. Of note is the fact that the keywords you reported above are incorrect. The actual search was much narrower than she claimed namely “global climate change,” not “climate change.” (another interesting mistake form the warmers),

Pat Ryan: Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. ME: Well Duhh! You set the criteria so narrow that nothing will meet it, then claim a world shattering conclusion.

Pat Ryan: So..........out of 928 papaers evaluated, zero took your position. ME: Zero? Really?

How about these from my collection. Note that ALL strike at the heart of your fantasy and NONE contain the actual search phrase:

1. “The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 99, No. 7, (Apr. 2, 2002), pp. 4167-4171

2. “Surface winds and surface ocean hydrography in the subpolar North Atlantic appear to have been influenced by variations in solar output through the entire Holocene.” (Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene, (SCIENCE, 7 DECEMBER 2001 VOL 294)

3. The influence of solar variability on climate is currently uncertain. Recent observations have indicated a possible mechanism via the influence of solar modulated cosmic rays on global cloud cover. Surprisingly the influence of solar variability is strongest in low clouds �#3 km, which points to a microphysical mechanism involving aerosol formation that is enhanced by ionization due to cosmic rays. If confirmed it suggests that the average state of the heliosphere is important for climate on Earth. (VOLUME 85, NUMBER 23 PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 4 DECEMBER 2000)

4. “We observe large, rapid climate fluctuations throughout the last galcial period..” Nature 366, 9 Dec 1993

5. “Over the full 420 ka of the Vostok record, CO2 variations lag behind atmospheric temperature changes in the Southern Hemisphere by 1.3+/-1.0 ka,” (Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001) 583 -589)

Conclusion: Naomi Oreskes criteria missed many relevant papers. The claim that no peer reviewed articles oppose man caused warming is proven wrong.

So, please DO NOT EVER AGAIN CITE NAOMI IN A CREDIBLE LIGHT.

Pat Ryan: Now, stand and deliver. Show me some peer reviewed papers ME: I just did, now you can go back to the Sierra Club Weekly reader and quit spreading mis-information.

Pat Ryan: that are not funded by Industries With an Axe to Grind or some other kneejerk denier groups.......Or........Well you get the idea..... ME: What does this have to do with anything - intelligent people judge a paper by its content, not its funding. Of course some scientific illiterates (like Al Gore) cannot tell the difference. Sorry.

Note to Carla: the papers above are but a small sample of the papers that contain data that negate the catastrophic climate change claim. Take a look. If you have any interest in the truth, I can email them and a few more privately.

BTW, if anyone is interested is seeing that there is another side to the debate, take a look at these: Icecap (.us) ClimateAudit (.org) JunkScience (.com) surfacestations (.org) scienceandpublicpolicy (.org)

As another commenter posted above all Reinhard did was to re-write the talking points. Little if no original thought at all. Good riddance to bad rubbish. We stopped reading the Oregonian after they delivered that racist DVD. We will never buy another copy of that rag again.

As to Nelson's lobbying business. He has a track record of delivering in the past. Remember all he has to do is to buy a few Dem senate votes and hold the elephants. He is extremely well paid for this and has an unlimited bribe account at his disposal. How Reinhard fits into this scheme makes no sense at all unless his job is to hold the republicans while the real bag men buy donkeys.

US getting colder

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2008/oct/01_10_2008_DvTempRank_pg.gif

Blues will try and hide from the real debate and from the real science as they advocate for their sweeping liberal policies. In the case of global warming you'll cause tremendous harm while providing no benefit at all. All because you group think, have no ability to adapt to better informsation and policies, and prefer to inflict great harm under the impression that it will keep you in charge.

Oh joe how perfect. Why not call it climate chaos. I could care less what you willingly duped folks call it.
There is no more weather chaos happening than the Global Warming Bill Bradbury and Al Gore are still preaching. But I never under estimate the liberal mind and their imaginations.

Can you give me some Oregon examples of the "climate chaos" that our CO2 emissions are causing?

It's "quite clearly what we're experiencing"? Right?

We've disrupted the "System equilibrium"?

You see that real clear do you?

You are part of an amazing phenomenom.

Billy:

Steven Schneider , Editor of Climate Change Journal: ... we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might. have. (DISCOVER OCTOBER 1989, Page 47)

*** You bring OCTOBER 1989 quotes to a 2008 discussion?

*** Is this really David Reinhard???

*** Hey, pal, you might want to clear out those old magazines.

Randy2

That lingering perception you share on AGW is rising to new levels of dumb. It's almost as if you turned your brain off once the IPCC/Gore power point was prepared. So you have no examples of your climate chaos?

Of course not.

Randy2, The reason that a 9 year old article is relevant is that they are clearly still lying to us.

Al gore said he is lying, Schneider said he was lying, Hansen said he was lying. Why does this not matter to you?

It's just so perfect that a thread on David Reinhard's transition from covert opinion for hire to outright whore for Big Tobacco working for Boss whoremaster Mark Nelson is littered with climate denialist ravings. A fitting tribute to David Reinhard's legacy indeed.

George Seldes: ... littered with climate denialist ravings. ME: Great! You must be the one that can help me find those peer-reviewed papers that prove that CO2 can actually cause dangerous global warming. Please give me a link to it (from your comment, I assume that you have seen this key piece of evidence.)

Nope, Billy, I'm not your patsy. I don't debate evolution with creationists or discuss climate with denialists, it just gives them an appearance of rationality they don't deserve. Besides, as Twain said, "Never argue with a fool, observers might not be able to tell the difference."

And for those who, unlike Billy, actually want to understand what we know about the climate and how we know it, here are two well-written and accessible series of articles that explain exactly that.

Grist's "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" is a well-researched debunking of the standard nonsense. http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

"The Discovery of Global Warming" is a fascinating book, all available on line, here: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/

"And for those who, unlike Billy, actually want to understand what we know about the climate " ME: I probably know more about science and climate than you do.

If you know so much, why can't you come up with the most important single piece of evidence required before you can convict mankind of affecting the weather?

You refuse to "debate" because you cannot answer the most basic questions.

Show us that evidence: the peer reviewed papers that prove CO2 is capable of causing dangerous warming. You cannot because there is none because CO2's effects have maxed out due to basic physics. (Which you apparently do not understand.)

As a famous person once said:

Some people will do anything to save the Earth. Except study science.

George Seldes: Grist's "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic" is a well-researched debunking of the standard nonsense. gristmill.grist.org/skeptics ME: Does it have a link to proof that CO2 can cause dangerous warming? Don’t forget this gem from Grist, where Al Gore admits it is OK to lie: AL Gore: ”I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are...”; Al Gore in Grist, 09 May 2006, grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/09/roberts/ bold added.

Why do you blindly follow liars?

Steve, you are right about Billy.

But about this: "I really wish Kari would get around to forcing people to sign their full names so that morons like "billy" can have their ravings attributed to their real persons."

Have you heard about Obama's list of questions to all potential employees? Besides all the usual questions, they ask for the URL of any website where the person might have said anything inflamatory, and any screen name they may have used in a blog or elsewhere.

I have no problem with a login/register system like the Jeff Mapes blog where screen names and passwords are used. But I would quit blogging before I'd blog using my full name. Employers check web usage to find out if the potential employee has anything online they'd want to know about. I don't do Facebook or any other such pages, and I like my privacy, thank you very much.

The day that I realized what a complete idiot Reinhard is was when, during a OPB debate on ownership of Portland's utilities, he declared that the very concept of public ownership of utilities is so ridiculous that it should not even be debated. Long-time residents of the Columbia Gorge (which, by the way, is being destroyed from one end to the other because of Portland's wealthy elite) have had enough brains to primarily have public-utility districts (especially on the Washington side), and thus we didn't have the huge rate increases in recent year and haven't been sending millions of our ratepayer dollars to Reinhard's buddies at Enron. I've tried to rationalize that the Oregonian has purposely had such an ignorant person as their right-wing commentator to discredit those views, but that's hard to believe, especially since yours truly and the other local activists who began the (now failed) campaign for Columbia Gorge protection have been totally banned from The Oregonian since it put the Oregon Journal (which supported us) out of business. One needs to look no further than the Big O to see the evils of monopoly "journalism" — with or without Reinhard.