Greetings fellow Toastmasters! I
know that our Table Topics sessions are usually easy going and used as a combination of training and time filler. Well today I am upping the level of difficulty on questions. Many
of you may know that I am a political junkie. So today I am going to act like
a debate moderator. I will state some facts, present a question then call on
someone to answer the question. I will allow one twist, you may answer the question
I ask you or you may answer any of the questions that I have asked previously.
Q1) John Roberts graduated magna cum laude from Harvard
Law School, clerked for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, worked as a lawyer in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department
and White House, and served as principal deputy solicitor general in the George H.W. Bush administration. A decade of private
practice earned him the status of one of Washington's most accomplished appellate lawyers before the president put him on
the appeals court in 2003. Congress approved him before, has wide bi-partisan
support from his fellow attorneys, and has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court.
Why will the democrats in congress fight against Judge Roberts’s confirmation as Chief Justice?
Q2) The US Unemployment rate is at 4.9%, the lowest
level in four years. The Labor Department estimated Friday that the United States
added 169,000 jobs in August and that job growth in June and July was stronger than previously thought. The growth in jobs in August was less than Wall Street forecasters had expected, but the Labor Department
also calculated that the nation generated 44,000 more jobs in June and July than it had estimated.
Taken
together, the new data showed that companies expanded their work forces an average of 195,000 jobs a month over the last three
months - a pace that suggested that the economy was not slowed much by the sharp increase in gasoline prices earlier this
summer. Why are those in the Media reporting about our struggling and failing
economy?
Q3) Gas prices have eclipsed the $3.00/gallon mark. With the impact of the hurricane in the gulf region people are clamoring for the president
to do something about prices. Did you know that back in 1995 the issue was brought
before Congress about drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, if legislation were passed then we would be
benefiting from millions of barrels of US owned oil. The U.S. ranks number 11
in oil reserves, sixth in natural gas and first in coal. In 1979, we were told that the U.S. had only 30 billion barrels of
natural gas left in the ground and that we'd run out by the 1990s. Instead, over the past 25 years, we have pumped out 67
billion barrels, and strong reserves remain.
The
oil is there. The obstacles to putting it to use are strictly political: restrictions on drilling, on building refineries
(the number has dropped by more than half since 1980), and on making the distribution system more efficient. Remove the barriers,
and prices will fall. Why do the politicians keep putting barriers on
the US becoming more self-sufficient in energy matters?
Q4) Despite environmentalists' propaganda, there is
plenty of evidence to refute their claims that the globe is warming and that human industrial activity is significantly changing
global climate. In fact, more than seventeen thousand American scientists, including geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists
and oceanographers, have signed the Oregon Petition declaring that "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human
release of . . . greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's
atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." Also, the "Kyoto Treaty" which calls for reducing CO2 to 1990 levels does
not apply to the worlds most polluted countries and "Virtually all of the research since 1999 has been refuting [the theory
of human-caused global warming]. It is ludicrous that Kyoto can be as damaging economically as it is when there is no science
to justify it." New research, for example, has challenged Michael Mann's "hockey-stick"
formula, which asserts that temperatures have risen sharply, in an unprecedented fashion. In fact, warming was worse centuries
ago, before industrialization and automobiles. Why is the Kyoto treaty a good
thing?
