Or is it that they just love corporate money so much?
Either way, this session of the 112th Congress has seen the House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, vote to weaken environmental law 191 times – more than an anti-environmental vote for every day that the House was in session.
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
I don’t how understand how anyone that claims to love birds and care about their conservation can be Republican. Their entire political philosophy seems based on the selfishness that most people learned was wrong in kindergarden (it’s my toy=”it’s my hard-earned money”).
It’s not just the environment..I don’t see much love for education, health care for poor and disabled…food for the hungry…it’s an equal opportunity party…if you can afford it ..and don’t care about others.. human or not…
I don’t see how anyone that claims to love their country can be a democrat. Libs are all about entitlements we cannot afford. I am a republican and a naturalist. To say all republicans hate the environment is just stupid, but something we have come to expect from the left, as lies are all they are about!
So, JC, do you support the anti-environmental voting record of this Congress?
JC, please provide us with ONE reason why we as birders and environmentally conscious people could support the Republicans. NOT a reason why the democrats are a bad alternative–certainly I am unsatisfied with the dem’s environmental during the past couple of years, and Obama’s in particular–but seriously one positive environmental position (or heck, even just attitude) in which the repubs could possibly be called pro-naturalist/pro-science/pro-environment.
Hi Corey – First off, I’m not interested in taking political sides here as everyone is aware that politics and religion are two subjects that really tend to polarize and incite strong feelings.
As I don’t follow closely (I should though) as I’m under the impression that you do, I just have a couple questions I guess.
And I’ll start by saying of course I am not in favor of non-environmental votings. But I think this needs to be weighed against cost, and most bang for the buck.
I know it is a sad state of affairs, but that is how it is now. The money. Should I vote in favor a x amount of dollars to create a wetland, or should those dollars go to renovate a neighborhood and hopefully create jobs and help out an inner city area. I don’t know.
Another question, prior to the current Congress, it was democratic. Given a comparison, how do their voting records stack up against each other. Republicans seemed to be painted with a broad brush that all they are in favor of is big business. But by helping business, they are putting paychecks into the pockets of the majority of Americans who work for these evil corporations. Not all of us can work for non-profits and Greenpeace and still make rent. By creating stricter and stricter regulations on business, they are then forced to outsource, downsize, change locations, etc.
On the other side, democrats are painted as wanting a nanny state, no personal responsibility, the government owes me a living, health care, free food, free rent, etc. And explain how a person gets more in their tax refund than they paid in. I can’t understand that at all. And all you hear is “it” should be free. In reality world, free does not exist. Someone somewhere somehow must pay for “it”.
We know that the truth lands somewhere in between. It has to be a give and take.
I don’t know the answers. I’m just curious. Although they may have voted against environmental concerns, what did they vote in favor of? Anything of benefit? I don’t know.
I do know, I am finding it more and more difficult to believe anything any politician says, no matter his political leanings. And unfortunately, I really haven’t seen our current president do much expect play a lot of golf, vacation, and blame our nations difficulties on everyone else but him.
I’m saddened to see where our once great nation is headed and hope it is not too late.
Joe
Well Corey, since you asked. From what I can see, Republicans have lots of money and they want to keep it. What I don’t understand is how they can say that they worry about running up debt that their kids are going to have to pay off but it doesn’t bother them that, if they keep degrading the environment, their kids will have to live in a world with dirty air and water, if they have water at all. Maybe they don’t believe that they are destroying the planet for their children?
Oh, and as far as the national debt goes, anyone that looks at the government figures can see that George W. Bush and other Republicans were the real culprits of running up the national debt.
Hi Larry – Not trying to start a war here, but it is pretty much common knowledge to anyone who has Google that this current president has increased our debt more than all the previous presidents combined, from Washington on.
Here is a CBS network link and the gov’t commerce dept. also reports this as well.
http://m.cbsnews.com/blogsstorysynopsis.rbml?feed_id=71&catid=20095704&videofeed=null
Joe
@Joe- Not to jump in in Corey’s place, but I’d say that if you’re in the position of making a decision between funding a wetland restoration and creating inner city jobs, you’ve made a series of terrible decisions leading up to that point. Making good and productive decisions for the environment and the economy does not have to be a zero-sum game, and treating it like it is is a disingenuous argument.
I’m not saying you’re making that argument, just that it’s unfair to characterize it that way.
And for the record, simply stating something like “this current president has increased our debt more than all the previous presidents combined”, outside of any sort of context, is sort of disingenuous too.
For instance, the nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities finds that the primary drivers of public debt in the coming decade are nearly exclusively Bush-era tax policies (the famous “Bush tax cuts”) and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. See chart here: http://www.offthechartsblog.org/what%E2%80%99s-driving-projected-debt/
Note especially this passage: Altogether, the economic downturn, the measures enacted to combat it (including the 2009 Recovery Act), and the financial rescue legislation play a smaller role in the projected debt increase over the next decade.
So, yeah, the “current president” was in office as the debt increased, but his actions were not the primary driver of that debt. So let’s strive to be honest here.
Nate – Im seriously violating one of my own rules about commenting on politics or religion because those topics always end up in my guy is better than your guy. All you have to do is look at xyz.com and it is right there.
So, this post is all the more I am going to say. For any topic you choose, there is a website to confirm it.
And I still maintain that if you have a limited amount of dollars, with an extra x amount of pork attached to it, it will be spent where the hue and cry is the greatest. Why would any politician spend 15 million to save a portion of wetland that a small conservation group had an email campaign for, instead of repairing the 5 miles of interstate that the residents of two towns and their county commissioners have been screaming for. And don’t forget the professional lobby groups hired by virtually every special interest group out there. Many of which in time become White House or Congressional aids.
I will say is that anything that any politician does nowadays is driven by votes and by money. I don’t care which side of the aisle you sit. I personally do not think that the best way to get out of being broke is to spend more money. Never worked for me 😉 And I still long for the not so long ago days when the sitting president would not bad mouth the previous one, at least in public for the world to hear, No matter how lousy he turned out. It shows lack of respect for the office itself. And for goodness sake, take some personal resposibty already and do something. Dust off that old TelePrompTer screen that had your campaign promises on it and see how many you can tick off. It would be like working on your life list. 🙂
I bet Corey throws a topic like this out there then has a good time at the generated responses.
Please have a good holiday and maybe someday we can have the opportunity to do some birding.
Joe
Joe – For any topic you choose, there is a website to confirm it.
Not true. For any topic you chose there are facts and there are those people and websites who would ignore those facts to further their own ends.
I know Corey throws these posts out for the response, though. You can’t deny it drives page views… 🙂
Nate – Ha! You got me there! 🙂
I would add the caveat to your website comment that this could be said for any website trying to further whatever agenda they are pushing or trying to create a controversy over.
But you are correct – most sites (if not all) tend to slant one way or another in their favor.
Take care!
Joe
Hey guys,
A lot of debate on Democratic vs. Republican seems to be arguments from ignorance because every republican is different and every democrat is different. It seems here that you all are fighting against the most polarized ideas of the opposite party, and I think we can all agree that either of those won’t work for anybody. The more moderate members of the political parties always tend to be the successful ones, and the ones who take action on the right things. The recent economic crisis has caused a genesis of a whole new group of people with polarized ideas, and that’s exactly the opposite of what we need. So I just say I support which ever political party is more moderate and supports the environment because that’s the only way that anything will happen.
I know this topic got far off the original question. I would just like to ask who ever said republicans hate the environment? That is just a stereotype, and a false one at that. But say we are going to go with stereotypes… Republicans=Christians=people who believe we need to preserve God’s work. okay… But aside from all stereotypes, there are probably republicans that don’t care about the env. but there are also democrats who are the same. There’s one in every crowd! There are a lot of republicans who care about the environment. But like Joe said, we have bigger issues right now, and you just have to pick one over the other, not saying that both aren’t important. Think about it this way, if we fix something, we have to hire people, which is good for the economy which then gives us extra spending money for wetlands okay? Right now, we don’t have extra spending money, and i’m tired of hearing “bush did it,” you know what someone needs to tell obama- “grow up!!!” He is spending so much money that we can’t afford to spend. And yes he does spend a lot of times golfing. last year he had already been golfing on Andrew AFB almost 200 times, I’m sorry but that is ridiculous he has a country to run!… just saying… and now back to the enviornment… most democrats are liberal… right? So liberals tend to be more into socialism and technology and things like that. Technology is basically ruining our environment if you think about it. We all care about global warming right? well yes, but liberals (that i know and that is a lot) are always texting and doing something on their computers (and I’m not trying to stereotype, im just saying from what i see…im basically the only rep. in a world of liberals[where i live]…) from what i’ve experienced they are the first to advocate for the environment until it means giving up something they like. liberal=change=new… well guess what if we went back only a few decades and stayed we wouldn’t have to many problems with the environment. To sum this up (b/c I could go on and on) there are republicans who care about the environment and there are democrats who do… but there are people who don’t on both sides, you can’t blame republicans b/c they’ed rather fix the economy before the wetlands so at some point they can fix the wetlands…
@that girl: That was one of the dumbest things I have ever read. The current crop of Republicans are, across the board, the most anti-environment ever elected. “Both sides do it” just isn’t true when you are talking about the current Congress.
Every single Republican in the House voted to open up our pristine national forests to unlimited logging and mining. Every single Republican voted to allow coal waste (laced with arsenic and other toxins) to be dumped untreated into rivers. Anyone who says that there are Republicans who care about environment is clearly delusional.