Posted on 09/07/2008 8:18:55 AM PDT by kralcmot
Palin floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.
The Democrats are in trouble. Sarah Palin has totally changed the dynamics of this campaign.
Period.
Palin's speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don't do well on defense.
Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don't want to be seen as defending the status quo.
From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions.
Whenever you start having to explain things, you're on defense.
I actually went back and watched Palin's speech a second time. I didn't go to sleep until 1:30 a.m. I had to make sure I got the lines right.
Her timing was exquisite. She didn't linger with applause, but instead launched into line after line of attack, slipping the knives in with every smile and joke.
And she delivered it like she was just BS-ing on the street with the meter maid.
She didn't have to prove she was "of the people." She really is the people....(snip)
As for Palin herself, she is going to be very, very effective on the campaign trail, especially if McCain's people can figure out how to gently keep her from getting into confrontations with the press.
If she can answer questions like she handled herself at the convention, Palin will turn out to be the most interesting person in all of politics, and the press will treat her like they treated Obama when he was first discovered.
And remember, the Palin bandwagon needs to roll for only two months....(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
She, her family, their faith, their values, and their story represent the absolute refutation of all the tired old liberal mantras and victimology that they malignantly use to mentally, psychologically, and financially enslave whole classes of people.
From women's rights, to family values, to gun rights, to abortion, to energy policy, to taxation, to envrionmentalism, to fundamental governing principal, to U.S. soveriegnty and independence, and on and on...she is a wrecking ball to the leftist, libneral, socialist house.
They need to begin planning to add a new face to Mt Rushmore.
BUMP
Thanks for posting that nice collection of pictures.
And, special thanks to Jeffhead FReeper fantastique for supplying the bandwidth to preserve and disseminate these images.
BS. John is speaking to thousands of people; he is presidential and his suit and her attire need to be appropriate to those roles. Save the shirtsleeves for small gatherings in the diner. Keep up the good work McCain and campaign.
Willie's been out there long enough to know BS from brilliance, and he's just trying to warn his fellow Rats not to dismiss Sarah as a brainless beauty queen. He's probably savvy enough to know that people outside of the bus routes don't automatically recoil when they think of hunting.
I think Willi Brown needs a MRI of the brain. He must have some type of lesion there which is blocking the commie wacko talking points. Sounds way too reasonable in this piece.
Not to worry, they'll be sucking up to here in no time.
This says a lot about Oakland.
Here in rural OR, I just make sure my .38 is loaded. Enough of us do that so the robbery never starts...
And just when is this going to start?
That was a dig at Ron Dellums, now mayor of Oakland. Willie always despised Dellums and co., and is a good friend of Jerry Brown (yes, “governor moonbeam”) who was in fact one of Oaklands best mayors. Dellums crew is basically pillaging and burning down all that Jerry Brown did.
Dellums is just as corrupt as Brown, but much less intelligent. And his machine is 100% thugs, weirdos and cretins.
Cindy? Cindy WHOM?
GWB and Cheney never stood up to them or held them to account for their lies. It is one of the things that disappointed me so about Bush. He would not stand up for himself or his actions, he just ignored the media and the dims and let them pound away time after time.
To be honest it is not just a failing of Bush, Republicans in general have not stood up to the media or dims for their attacks. I think one of the major components of Palin’s appeal is that she will stand up to both the media and the dims. That is why she is being so viciously attacked, the cry babies are not used to being called on their crap.
Cindy mcCain maybe who knows
The equation is relatively simple - get this country back into the business of PRODUCING energy, enough energy that we have some to export.
We have the resources, we have the means, we have the technology, what we need is the will to construct the infrastructure (a source of a CONSIDERABLE number of well-paying jobs) and the determination that we will pull up the energy out of sources now largely overlooked, and be the good stewards of the earth at the same time.
The equation for balance of resources to the energy extracted is only partly filled in now. The endless benefice of precipitation, which falls on the just and unjust alike, and of sunshine, can be harnessed in so many more ways than it already is. There is that almost magic intermediary, the ability of green growing plants to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it in the the fraction of the atmosphere that sustains us, oxygen, and into a fixed form of carbon called carbohydrates, sugar, starches, cellulose, lignin, and the building blocks of both fats and proteins. All of these substances are the source of energy and growth of plants for those hours of the day the sun does not shine, and ALL of the time for the rest of us. In fact, this range of compounds is produced in such profusion, that much of it just recycles itself back into its elemental parts and is reformed again and again, without any human assistance at all, in vastly greater numbers and quantities than all the human endeavor in the world can muster.
There IS a waste stream from human activity, but up to now, the earth has been able to take this waste stream and reduce it down to its basic fractions, to build it up again. We are a lot smarter now (well, some of us) than we were, say, fifty or a hundred years ago. We have always depended on the action of microbes to erase the effects of our waste stream. But we know how to duplicate some of the effects of this microbiological waste reduction, and in some cases, it is economically feasible to put it into operation.
A lot of the waste stream from human activity is, well, rather yucky. How about, we begin to apply a little of what we already know, and turn this waste stream into something clean and useful, free of pathogens, and leaving nothing harmful to spill out into marshes and waterways that feed the aquifers that provides our drinking water?
Something called Thermal Depolymerization, which has been used at industrial level, can be fed a slurry of organic matter and some water, into a retort which is sealed up, and the temperature raised to somewhere between 600º F. and 900º F. under a pressure maintained between two and five times atmospheric (30 to 75 pounds per square inch) for a period of about two hours. Presto chango, out comes a substance called “kerogen” which resembles crude oil, except it is not gritty and dirty like the crude oil pumped up out of the ground, and is ready for immediate refining and processing into a wide range of products we already extract from petroleum. The other product is water that is mostly a little brackish. It contains all of the minerals that were part of the organic material that went into the retort originally. With minimal additional treatment, this water is sufficiently safe to dump back into the water table, where it provides nutrients for the plants in the marshes and streams.
If you want to kick things up a notch, and destroy HUGE quantities of the waste stream rather quickly, there is something called Plasma Arc Trash Reduction. This technology already exists as well, and is a way to convert waste to energy. Not merely incineration, the heart of the design is ia a plasma arc, which when initiated, generates temperatures about three times the surface heat of the sun, some 33,000º F. When the coarsely shredded waste stream is fed into this blazing arc, everything organic is converted to elemental hydrogen and carbon monoxide, the stable forms at these elevated temperature. Everything else is stripped down to elemental form, which may either be the element itself, or an oxide of that element. The temperature of the mixed hydrogen and carbon monoxide, known as syngas, is about 2,300º F. and is drawn out of the reaction chamber, used to drive turbines that drive generaters. The syngas is then burned as fuel to fire up additional power generators. When the operation is up to optimum, it is generating about three to four times the amount of electrical energy needed to maintain the plasma arc. While all this syngas is being formed and drawn off to drive the power generators, there is white-hot slag being drawn off at the bottom of the reaction chamber, and depending on how it is cooled, forms an obsidian-like silica compound, like that formed by a volcano. This is an end result of all the trash that was thrown into the arc, much of which was stone and concrete rubble, and all the metallic elements and their oxides are dissolved in this silica compound. This substance is in fact an excellent ore for recovery of many of these elements, as they tend to separate out in discrete layers within the silica. For some elements, it is a more pure and concentrated form than that used in mining methods around the world now, so this is an excellent way to recycle so many things we now simply discard altogether.
Since most of the product is a form of silica, rather like glass, it may be broken up into finer granulations and used as building material, as concrete or aggregate for asphalt paving. Or it could be hot-formed into building blocks, a durable and fireproof material for construction of structures and housing.
These processes require some input of energy, and the cheapest and cleanest source we have is natural gas. This is part of the intermediary steps we have to take to get to real energy independence. The truth is, there are HUGE amounts of natural gas to be recovered, and we have scarcely begun. One of the precursors of natural gas, and the source of the deposits that do exist, is a substance called Methane Hydrate, a strange compound that is the result of maintaining methane, from the decomposition of organic material, under pressure while in water that is at 38º Fahrenheit, the temperature of almost all water at depths of greater than about 1,500 feet in the ocean. This substance that forms looks rather like ice. Not quite crystalline, it is amorphous, that has the methane molecules trapped in a lattice between the water molecules. Learn how to recover this substance on an economically feasible basis, and there is an endless supply of energy that can be harvested from the ocean floor.
Then there is coal. If left in place in the ground, and a flame is ignited and fed with oxygen plus water, syngas, the same substance mentioned above, is formed and drawn out of the ground, to power generators without having to mine the coal first, avoiding all its inherent dangers to men and the environment.
Thanks for the insight. It goes to prove I was correct forty years ago when I left the Bay area after a brief residency.
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