[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][02.07&08]

KiKi~淇水滺滺UID: 2679824

我们好久没有做eco debate 了啊 那今天来做一个吧~

政治类的~

我们都知道Obama拿了诺贝尔和平奖~ 我们现在也知道美国对台出售武器~美军会从伊拉克撤多少军也是个悬念~那么他到底值不值这个奖呢。。。。。。。

然后 美国财长盖特纳又逼我们人民币升值 人民币升值对我们要出国的肯定有好处啦 那人民币升值到底对中国有多大好处呢。。。。。

Obama也出台了很多新政 那这些新政到底有没有效呢~请看debate~

The moderator's rebuttal remarks

Feb 5th 2010 /  Robert Guest
It's round two, and our distinguished debaters are once again politely slugging each other on the jaw.

David Boaz concedes that President Obama still commands great personal respect. Then he goes on the attack. Addressing Elaine Kamarck's worry about the lack of trust Americans have for their government, he retorts: "One thing that surely reduces trust is the growing size and scope of government." A government that takes on more and more responsibilities is bound to disappoint more and more people, he says. "If government is going to fund and direct health care, then people are going to fight over whether it will cover abortion or Christian Science treatments; which providers or patients will get less than they expected; which treatments will be denied; and so on. Each one of those decisions will reduce someone's trust in government to do the right thing."

Mr Boaz accuses Mr Obama of using the financial crisis as an excuse to lengthen the government's tentacles: "[Since 2008], we got expanded powers for the Federal Reserve, Wall Street bailouts, takeovers of financial companies and car makers … the kitchen-sink spending bill known as stimulus [and] expanded federal control over energy, education and health care."

Some people think that Mr Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, is doing a good job of standing up to reactionary unions and promoting reform. But I'm guessing Mr Boaz would rather leave that job to the states.

Ms Kamarck says that Mr Obama has had problems in his first year because he tried to do everything at once. "Congress and the administration should make one simple rule for themselves," she says: "No more 1,000-page pieces of legislation." No one understands mammoth health and energy bills, she says, so it is easy for misguided voters to imagine that they include "death panels".

But she thinks Mr Obama is on the right track. His policies are "sensible and centrist". Americans like environmental and consumer protections, she says. She challenges Mr Boaz "to find anyone in the country who thinks it's a good idea to allow health insurance companies drop coverage when people get very sick". And she would like to see Mr Obama use all his rhetorical skills to push for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. "There are plenty of people out there who got flim-flammed" into taking on debt they couldn't afford, she says. She doubts they would object "to the government making sure that that doesn't happen again".

This is no doubt true, but if Mr Obama makes it harder for less creditworthy Americans to borrow, sooner or later another politician will start a campaign to make it easier again. People have short memories.



The proposer's rebuttal remarks

Feb 5th 2010 | David Boaz

If the measure of failure for President Obama is whether it looks like he is on the road to slowing the rise of the oceans, ending a war and restoring our image as the last, best hope on Earth, then he doesn't look so good. Elaine Kamarck proposes a stricter test: Has he encountered a swift and deadly drop in his personal reputation to Nixonian depths?

If we set a standard somewhere between these extremes, then Mr Obama does seem to be on shaky ground. His policies are not working, his ability to drive his agenda seems to have ground to a halt and the political environment has shifted sharply against him.

Ms Kamarck is right to say that Mr and Mrs Obama still command great personal respect. He looks good by comparison with such scandalous rivals as John Edwards. A recent Washington Post feature hailed the inspiring example he has set for young African-Americans, and given the plight of young people in many black communities, that is an achievement worth celebrating.

Actually, his personal approval rating has fallen from near 70% to just above 50%, though I do think the broad centre of Americans still admire him. But he has lost his aura—that "tingle up my leg," "agent of transformation," "quantum leap in American consciousness," "sort of God" image—that journalists and many voters swooned over. That matters when your personal power is part of your political strategy. A Democratic congressman told his home-state paper last month that Obama had wooed Blue Dog Democrats by telling them that health care would go better this time than in 1994 because "the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me".

One question here is how do you measure a politician's failure. Is it, for instance, a failure to get his policies enacted, or his success in enacting bad policies? Surveys of historians always give high marks to presidents who expanded government or fought wars. Washington's most-quoted political scientist, Norman Ornstein, recently defended the productivity of the current Congress; his article illustrated that to the Washington establishment the very definition of a productive Congress is the spending of more taxpayers' money, the creation of new agencies and bureaucracies, and the concentration of more power in the hands of federal regulators. Citizens might prefer a government that kept us out of war, let the economy grow, and left us alone.

That gets us to the problem of trust in government, which Ms Kamarck warned him back in 2008 not to ignore. One thing that surely reduces trust is the growing size and scope of government. When the federal government confined itself to a limited range of constitutional duties, voters trusted it more. Over the past few decades, as government took on more and more duties, trust fell. An expansive government is less able to satisfy everyone, even as it doles out more benefits to more people. The more complex and encompassing a policy gets, the more different aspects of life it touches. If government is going to fund and direct health care, then people are going to fight over whether it will cover abortion or Christian Science treatments; which providers or patients will get less than they expected; which treatments will be denied and so on. Each one of those decisions will reduce someone's trust in government to do the right thing.

In her 2008 study Ms Kamarck warned that Americans were evenly split on whether they want more activist government (43% for, 43% against). The numbers may be worse than that. As I mentioned previously, in a January Washington Post-ABC News poll, Americans said they prefer "smaller government and fewer services" to "larger government with more services" by 58% to 38%. And when you remind people that the cost of more services is higher taxes, and ask them whether they prefer a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes or a more active government with more services and higher taxes, you get a margin of 66% to 22% in favour of smaller government (Rasmussen Reports, December).

In a country where government is already larger than the voters would prefer, and trust in government is low, it is difficult to advance ambitious activist programmes, unless there's a crisis. For 200 years the US government has tended to expand during wars and economic crises. After the 9/11 attacks we got the Patriot Act, federalisation of airport screeners, the Department of Homeland Security, rapid spending increases and arguably the war in Iraq. After the financial crisis of 2008 we got expanded powers for the Federal Reserve, Wall Street bailouts, takeovers of financial companies and carmakers and the kitchen-sink spending bill known as stimulus. Moreover, the Obama administration tried to present its programme of expanded federal control over energy, education, and health care as a response to the crisis.

Mr Obama now seems to have switched tactics. He is campaigning as a trust-busting, bank-bashing populist who is here to take on the big boys. But that is a problem for him. Not only was his career boosted by the biggest boys in Washington—Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy—he has also been a Wall Street man. He took in more money from Wall Street than John McCain did, and four times as much money from lawyers and lobbyists, and he reappointed or promoted two of the three architects of the Wall Street bailout. Huey Long he ain't.
And then there is the basic cognitive dissonance in his new theme, as George F. Will noted after the state-of-the-union address: "Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic—yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc."

Some analysts note that Ronald Reagan had low ratings at this point in his term, and a bad midterm election, but came back strong. As it turns out, tax cuts, spending restraint, deregulation and sound money tend to create strong economic recoveries. Threats of tax hikes, unprecedented levels of deficits, a wave of new regulations and fears about Fed monetisation may not.

Has Mr Obama failed, a year into his term? Of course not. But that's the direction he's headed.


The opposition's rebuttal remarks

Feb 5th 2010 | Elaine Kamarck

David Boaz begins his piece by quoting President Obama's soaring 2008 convention rhetorical opening that is not particularly relevant to the topic at hand. American presidents (or American presidential speechwriters, to be precise) are all about promising the moon. The fact that they over-promise and under-deliver may be a problem for American democracy but it is a bi-partisan problem. Who can forget George Bush's second inaugural address? In it he promised: "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors." George Bush did not deliver the world from oppression. But in a media-savvy country like the United States where we know in our heart of hearts that a new hair colour will not give us everlasting youth, did anyone really expect him to? No.

But Mr Boaz is correct in identifying the anti-government sentiment that has motivated the American pubic for decades, a factor contributing to their low trust in government discussed in my opening remarks. What he is wrong about is the substance of Mr Obama's policies. In robust, healthy capitalist societies government is important on two counts: it regulates markets and provides a social safety net that protects their citizens from the creative destruction of capitalism. Does any American really want to live in a country where there is no effective regulation of the market? Does anyone really want to live in a place where there is no social safety net? There is no large-scale migration to Russia, Nigeria or any one of the dozens of countries where there is no effective government.

The fact of the matter is that Americans are very angry about big government in the abstract but not government in the particular. Democrats never understand the former but Republicans never understand the latter.

Let us walk through some of the issues of Mr Obama's first year. As he was beginning the general election campaign the bottom fell out of the US economy. As the housing bubble burst (with no warning or preventative actions on the party of the Bush administration) the possibility of a US and a global meltdown was terrifyingly real. The stimulus package (ridden with pork as it was) did indeed prevent a much worse situation. Highly respected economists like a Nobel prize-winner, Joe Stiglitz, think we need more, not less. But Mr Boaz sees this as the first in a series of big government takeovers. He ignores, however, the fact that most of the big banks rushed to pay the government back in order to get out from under the government's thumb. In the process they created a new problem for Mr Obama: the massive bonuses they paid themselves.

But wait a minute, if they were under government control this wouldn't be happening!

By and large Americans like environmental protection laws, especially when it keeps the air clean and fish in the lakes and deer in the woods (for shooting). Mr Boaz calls the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to regulate greenhouse gases "previously unknown". Well, three years ago the United States Supreme Court, a court heavily influenced by conservative appointees, decided that the EPA did indeed have the right to regulate greenhouse gases. Americans are also very fond of government that protects them against pollutants and against health hazards like bad hamburger meat at fast-food restaurants. In the mid-1990s Newt Gingrich led a conservative revolution against big government. He took over the Congress but in the end he failed to do anything about big government—a political victim of cryptosporidium (a parasite found in polluted water.)

Americans like environmental protections and they like consumer protections. I hope that as the Obama White House picks itself up from its bruising first year that it will use all the president's rhetorical skills to pass a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. There are plenty of people out there who got flim-flammed into houses and credit cards that they cannot afford. I doubt that they would object to the government making sure that that does not happen again.

The fact is that most of Mr Obama's policies are sensible and centrist. I challenge Mr Boaz to find anyone in the country who thinks it is a good idea to allow health insurance companies drop coverage when people get very sick.

To the extent that Mr Obama has had problems in his first year it is because he fell for a style of legislation and a political strategy that called for doing everything at once. I am not sure where this propensity to solve every conceivable problem simultaneously came from, but Congress and the administration should make one simple rule for themselves: no more 1,000-page pieces of legislation. Those pieces of legislation provoke suspicion, as well they should. They are dense and incomprehensible. They are larded with special deals. It is easy to read death panels into such legislation. How on earth is any normal person expected to read this kind of bill and conclude: "No, Mildred, there really aren't any death panels in here."

There is no reason why the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration shouldn't pass pieces of their agenda in an orderly sequence. For instance, first pass insurance reform, then expand Medicaid to the parents of poor children, then offer some subsidies to the middle class. And why take on the boogey man of the "public option" when you could put more money into the already existing public health service? Similarly on climate change, why not pass tough standards for new buildings and follow it up with a new look at nuclear power, as the president suggested in his speech the other night?

The strategy of trying to do everything at once allows people like Mr Boaz (who is more like most of America than Democrats want to admit) to conjure up the spectre of big government.

It is time to step away from grand plans and move towards financial reform, health-care reform and climate-change legislation in a series of bills that the public can understand. There is no better way to show that the big government boogeyman is nothing more than a figment of the conservative imagination.

链接 http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/458

ieyangj08UID: 2743219

Sentence

1) It's round two, and our distinguished debaters are once again politely slugging each other on the jaw.
2) If the measure of failure for President Obama is whether it looks like he is on the road to slowing the rise of the oceans, ending a war and restoring our image as the last, best hope on Earth, then he doesn't look so good. Elaine Kamarck proposes a stricter test: Has he encountered a swift and deadly drop in his personal reputation to Nixonian depths?
3) In a country where government is already larger than the voters would prefer, and trust in government is low, it is difficult to advance ambitious activist programmers, unless there's a crisis.
4) David Boaz begins his piece by quoting President Obama's soaring 2008 convention rhetorical opening that is not particularly relevant to the topic at hand.
5) The fact of the matter is that Americans are very angry about big government in the abstract but not government in the particular.
6) To the extent that Mr Obama has had problems in his first year it is because he fell for a style of legislation and a political strategy that called for doing everything at once.

Comment

Whether Mr. Obama deserves the Nobel Prize for peace is a problem difficulty to declare. On one aspect, he is only a one year American president who hasn’t done great contributions to the country and the world; however, on the other aspect, he is the first black president in the United States that is an inspiring example for the poor attacked black young men.

After reading the debates, I am totally absorbed by one sentence ‘Americans are very angry about big government in abstract but not government in the particular’, which conveys the arts of politics. Congress and the administration should stand in a balance place when determining the power range of the government if they still care about the popular support. If they service more, it will cause more people find their dissatisfactions within the government’s policies. Nevertheless, they can’t do nothing, for Americans can’t live in the area without the control of the government.

plukaUID: 2721764

囧，发错了，占楼先

tequilawineUID: 2702008

1 It's round two, and our distinguished debaters are once again politely slugging each other on the jaw.
2 Then he goes on the attack. Addressing Elaine Kamarck's worry about the lack of trust Americans have for their government, he retorts: "One thing that surely reduces trust is the growing size and scope of government."
3 Mr Boaz accuses Mr Obama of using the financial crisis as an excuse to lengthen the government's tentacles: "[Since 2008], we got expanded powers for the Federal Reserve, Wall Street bailouts, takeovers of financial companies and car makers … the kitchen-sink spending bill known as stimulus [and] expanded federal control over energy, education and health care."  kitchen-sink   
v.
同时宣布公司所有财务上的坏消息。 语源：来自二战时期的成语"everything but the kitchen sink" ，当时是指敌人炮火猛烈（除了洗碗槽外，各式各样的炮弹齐发）；现在指太多的东西
4 If we set a standard somewhere between these extremes, then Mr Obama does seem to be on shaky ground.
转折很好His policies are not working, his ability to drive his agenda seems to have ground to a halt and the political environment has shifted sharply against him.
5 That matters when your personal power is part of your political strategy.
6 Mr Obama now seems to have switched tactics. He is campaigning as a trust-busting,取缔垄断 bank-bashing populist who is here to take on the big boys.人物，大亨
7 The fact that they over-promise and under-deliver may be a problem for American democracy but it is a bi-partisan problem.

8 In robust, healthy capitalist societies government is important on two counts: it regulates markets and provides a social safety net that protects their citizens from the creative destruction of capitalism.
9 I doubt that they would object to the government making sure that that does not happen again.双重否定
10 It is time to step away from grand plans and move towards financial reform, health-care reform and climate-change legislation in a series of bills that the public can understand. There is no better way to show that the big government boogeyman is nothing more than a figment of the conservative imagination.

comment:
I think it is still too early to judge President Obama in such a haste that we even can not see the outcome of his enacted legislation. So does the Nobel Prize. To praise a incumbent president, in common sense, it is a little inappropriate, because of what we mentioned before. In the light of this, i think this flattering compliment mostly contribute to some stimulus of his action without considering the real consequence.

To illustrate that motive, let us take a look at what our president did during his first year of administration. Indeed, he really did some good actions to prevent USA mired in the crisis more deep, however different voice exists too, but i think it is unavoidable to be a big government if we want to salvage our sinking ship of Wall Street.
But this is not to say that there are no flaws in his policy. I mean as the protestors provide, our big boy does have little tolerance to initiate his big masterplan of our nation, which in fact, some important events often transmutes form little twitters.