Speaking of Reasons He Shouldn't Be President...

"You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it's probably not rising to your No. 1 concern," Mr. Obama said. "And if people think, well, that's shortsighted, that's what happens when you're struggling to get by."

This is the argument we get from the oil companies, the extraction industries, and all the politicians they have sublet over the past 40 years -- that environmental concerns are the province of the liberal elites, as though small farmers are not being killed by drought, small businesses being killed by what's killing the small farmers, and small homeowners along both seaboards being killed by increasingly massive storms. The interested parties have done a good job selling this bag of manure to the American people. To see a Democratic president making essentially the same argument [...] is more than simply distressing. [...] Climate change [...] touches everything, including people's personal economies. And there is a huge propaganda apparatus in place to convince the public that the problem doesn't exist at all.

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And if the president approves that damned pipeline, the acceleration may go into the red zones.

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There will not be that many jobs created and the oil, assuming it's not spilling out all over Nebraska, will be headed to China.

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I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that not a single one of our major institutions, within government or without, is capable of confronting this problem. And if we can't, that's rather the ballgame, isn't it?

  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.