Talk:Presidency of Barack Obama: Difference between revisions

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Lots of times appear in the main article the word "health", but 0 times the "flu". Could you tell me why? Just to remind you some facts, WHO raised the pandemic alert level to five, the second-highest level. More than half of the confirmed cases are currently in US (today 4714 from total=8310). Dinprog (talk) 22:09, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The article 2009 swine flu outbreak is the most appropriate central place for the facts about the swine flu. This is neither very significant, nor relevant, to the life and times of Obama at this point as compared with the many other things in this article. The matter has been discussed on this page (available in the archives) and that is the consensus here. Wikidemon (talk) 22:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What do you know about pandemic flu/5-th level? It doesn't starts with 10 millions of deaths. The increase is exponentional. And I wouldn't call this minor thing, currently it is proved that this is in 47 states in US (probably in all), and that nearly 5,000 isn't small, including deaths. Dinprog (talk) 22:41, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't matter what I know. What matters is what's in the sources. If 10 million people die then of course sources will write about it, then we can cover it. We're not in charge of prognosticating future disease spread. BTW, I should have said "presidency of" instead of "life and times of" in my first response above. At this point I would say the weight of Obama's flue response vis-a-vis his presidency overall is worth somewhere between zero and 1/2 of one sentence. If there is, or comes to be, a section on his public health policy I would support a phrase like ", including the federal response to the 2009 swine flu outbreak" but any more detail than that belongs in a sub-article. Wikidemon (talk) 23:55, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See: Anger at Obama Guantanamo ruling

It's quite interesting that this is not in the article: "Civil liberties groups have reacted angrily to US President Barack Obama's decision to revive military trials for some Guantanamo Bay detainees."

, only closing Guantanamo. Dinprog (talk) 22:55, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, but this is relatively new information (at least to me). I heard about it on the news yesterday, so it probably hasn't had time to make it into the article just yet. Feel free to add the information. --Dudemanfellabra (talk) 22:59, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I also agree that that info should be in the article. Grundle2600 (talk) 19:01, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to add this info to the article, but I guess it's better to ask other people here what they think of it first.

CAFE Obama -- Proposed Mileage Standards Would Kill More Americans than Iraq War

Grundle2600 (talk) 21:25, 20 May 2009 (UTC) [reply]

I added this to the article, but someone else removed it - I think my use of the word "forever" is against wikipedia policy. If I remove the word "however," can the rest of it be put back into the article? Other than that one word, there's nothing here that goes against the rules. And it's certainly a topic that received widespread media coverage. I think all of this info should be in the article.

While Senator, Obama had voted for the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,[103] which included corporate welfare for American International Group. [104] As President, Obama signed a stimulus bill that protected AIG bonuses. [105] Prior to signing this stimulus bill, Obama had said, "when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely." [106] However, after signing the stimulus bill that protected the AIG bonuses, Obama expressed surprise and outrage at the bonuses, and said that he would "pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses." [107]

Grundle2600 (talk) 15:14, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The section talks about how the website recovery.gov was going to post info on how the stimulus money was being spent. I added info from the Washington Post saying that this promise has not been kept. Since the section already mentioned the promise, then in the name of balance, it should also mention that the promise has not been kept. Grundle2600 (talk) 15:53, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

From the article you cited:

Devaney says the site will not post much spending data until October, when recipients must file their first full reports. "I'm not being particularly apologetic about where this site is today," he said. "I would be if someone could show me anything that has happened that isn't on this site."

If not much has been submitted to put up on the site, then it's hardly surprising that not much is on it, is it?--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 15:59, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

But it also says the private website has the information. So why doesn't the government website have it? Grundle2600 (talk) 16:49, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Because the private site is posting WAGs?--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:04, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Wag is a highland district in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia and was once a medieval province." Grundle2600 (talk) 17:33, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

S/he wrote "WAG", all capitals. See here what it means [3]--The Magnificent Clean-keeper (talk) 18:01, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I quoted what was at the link. It said, "Wag is a highland district in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia and was once a medieval province." Your link says, "a rough estimate." I think your link does a much better job of making its point in this discussion. Grundle2600 (talk) 19:00, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion was closed, but it said, "discussion has degenerated. Please re-start if there is a viable proposal here"

Great. Let's have a civil discussion about this.

I would like the environment section of this article to have the following:

"Obama has proposed to address global warming by substantially increasing the CAFE standards for gasoline mileage. The National Academy of Sciences, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Congressional Budget Office, and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have all separately determined in multiple studies that CAFE laws have already forced automakers to build smaller cars, which has already led to thousands more deaths in crashes annually. Concerns have been expressed that Obama's plan to strengthen the CAFE program would make this death toll even worse. ^[1]"

That is based on what the source says.

According to the source, there is no "may have" about it. It is 100% definite that those four studies show that those deaths definitely did occur. I want the article to match the source.

The person who had replaced my wording with "may have" was not going by what the source said. I want my exact words to be in the article, without use of the word "may have," because I want the article to match the source.

Grundle2600 (talk) 05:49, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'd rather the above discussion had not been closed, because now we are starting over. You never really responded to my suggestions about how to go about this Grundle, but I continue to think that we need to actually check on some of these studies (and when they happened - if they are 20 years old it's a problem) rather than simply assume USA Today got it right. Better yet, I think we should build a whole paragraph on this topic which covers it from all sides, rather than only putting in what you have suggested, wording which amounts to "some people say Obama's plan will kill more people." I think it's a great idea to talk about CAFE standards and the debate surrounding them (possibly including something along the lines of what you have in mind), but we need it to be NPOV. Are you willing to put in some work to help research this topic and present it in a balanced manner? That's what we need here, I don't think what you have proposed can go in the article, but it can be a starting pointing for building text that is actually NPOV and not sourced to half of a USA Today article (since you are still leaving out the parts of the article that describe Obama's proposal positively). In sum, we need more (and better) sources and we need to present a neutral and overall view of the policy proposal and the reaction to it. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 06:01, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While of course I agree with the points in the collapsed section above about this addition violating issues of sourcing, weight and tone, I'd like to address the reference's actual claims, because that article uses specious logic to leap to shaky conclusions which everybody seems to be taking as gospel. It is simply not true that smaller cars are the only way of increasing fuel economy. It may have been true looking back on the 1960s or in the Reagan era, but in the real world of the 21st century in which we live, hybrid and electric car models are a reality at long last, and would of course be a primary factor. The Chevrolet Volt is likely to get 50 MPG or more. The Tesla Roadster is said to get as much as three times as much. To the degree it would be about size, the point wouldn't be to make vehicles like the MINI and the Beetle smaller—though these light cars and others like them already exist and have been around for several decades—it would be to make vehicles like the Hummer smaller. Yet even with those SUVs, they are beginning to manufacture hybrid SUVs, which are of comparable size and weight to other SUVs.

We don't need to make small cars smaller in order to reach the 35 MPG average goal. We do need to stop selling the absolutely biggest (they have already stopped making the biggest Hummer), and start making most other models available in a hybrid or electric version. But even more important is every truck, bus and large vehicle. Trucks consume 48% of our fuel. In January, Coca-Cola bought a fleet of 185 hybrid trucks including 150 tractor-trailers, which are 30% more efficient and have 30% fewer emissions compared to diesel, which itself has gotten better over the years. They already had about 140 of the hybrids, so this move doubled the hybrids in their fleet. There is a market for electric cars, particularly sexier models like the Tesla, and that will push up the MPG on the high end. The rest of the work is done by getting rid of the worst offenders on the low end.

As to traffic fatalities, they have decreased for decades, even as smaller cars have become more prevalent. While most cars in 1950 were plenty big and heavy, there were about 7.5 deaths per 100 Million vehicle miles. Now there are 1.5, a decrease of about 80%. The sharpest declines in deaths per vehicle mile actually came at two times in history when a new wave of smaller cars were introduced and became popular—the late 1960s/early 1970s, when Japanese cars flooded the market and VW Beetles were all over the place, and American carmakers made smaller models as well; and the early 1980s, after late-70s fuel standards were enacted and the Government-aided Chrysler K cars were released and '70s "boats" including Cadillac and Lincoln grew smaller. Reagan and Clinton both undercut the effectiveness of those standards and enabled the current situation by pushing back these fuel standards repeatedly. The shallowest decline in deaths per vehicle mile has been since the 1990s, despite the return to larger cars including SUVs and Hummers. This fact alone would seem to fly in the face of the allegation. Fuel economy, which increased from the '50s through the early '90s, during the periods of sharpest decline in fatalities, has not improved since the '90s, which is when the rate of decline virtually flattened.

I will grant that the late-'60s/early-'70s decline had a great deal to do with the advent of seatbelts as standard features, and the '80s decline had something to do with laws mandating their use. On the other hand, the rise of the SUV was contemporaneous with the rise of the airbag as standard equipment not only for driver/front but side and passenger airbags, and it seems that one cancels out the other, especially when you factor in the use of cellphones and other electronic devices, all of which contribute to an increase in accidents. Yet another contributing factor in the decrease in traffic fatalities has been the adoption of lower speed limits. Measures to combat drinking and driving has contributed to a decrease, as have increases in street lighting, traffic lights and stop signs, other road signs, painted lines, in-road reflectors and grooves, and other safety measures. (Many of these developments are supported by grass-roots organizations [think Ralph Nader in the '60s], and all were implemented by federal, state and/or local government, and paid for by tax and/or consumer dollars.) You can view a five-decade chart of traffic fatality rates by year here.

Interestingly, when gas prices rose last summer, shippers worked to find ways to use trains for long hauls instead of trucks whenever possible, as trains get more miles per gallon for their weight than on-road vehicles like trucks and cars. Removing some of the need for trucks in this way both helps the increase in fuel efficiency and removes some of the dangerously heavy vehicles from the roads, making all cars safer and roads less congested (further helping reduce the waste of fuel and emissions in traffic). Increasing the accessibility of public transportation for commuters—which is one of the infrastructure plans for the notoriously traffic-addled Northeastern U.S.—will also raise fuel economy standards and decrease the rate of traffic fatalities by reducing the vehicle miles per person.

Which brings me to my final point. Vehicle miles per person is the metric by which traffic fatalities are measured, something conceded by the author. So anything that raises vehicle miles per person will make traffic fatalities be and/or look worse, and anything that lowers vehicle miles per person will make traffic fatalities be and/or look better. The author oddly presumes in the article's formulation that the price of gas will decrease by a dollar from current prices, which he construes as causing an increase in vehicle miles per person. It is this increase in vehicle miles per person that from a purely mathematical standpoint would have to raise the fatalities. However, this dollar-a-gallon decrease is highly unlikely over the long term, unless stimulative efforts fail to prevent a deflationary cycle. Most sources I'm familiar with expect that over the coming decade or so, gas prices at best will remain where they are and are more likely to rise somewhat than to fall. If the author of the referenced article actually admits falling gas prices is a major component of his perceived rise in traffic fatalities, the most responsible thing to do would be to raise gasoline taxes. (We could use the money to fund the development of alternative fuels and renewable energy sources, preventing any future wars over oil and diminishing the future proliferation of nuclear technologies.)

If you think about it, it would be every bit as logical and factual, using this author's own postulates, to write an article entitled "People Against Increased Fuel Taxes Have Killed More Americans than Iraq War." Hey, maybe that's why green energy has been so mocked, maligned and under-supported—all the traffic fatalities its adoption would cause because it would be so much cheaper to drive that we'd suddenly spend vastly more time doing it. Abrazame (talk) 08:08, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bigtimepeace, I did explain the positive - I said it was to combat global warming.Corporate_Average_Fuel_Economy#Effect_on_traffic_safety contains sources to back up the claim made in USA Today. Grundle2600 (talk) 09:35, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(ec, replying to Abrazame) Interesting points, though obviously you go into quite a bit more detail on the subject than we could in the article. My basic (incredibly general) takeaway from your comment is that these issues are, unsurprisingly, quite complex, which lends further credence to the idea that some thorough research is needed to put together an NPOV paragraph on CAFE standards, and that the USA Today article is far too simplified of an account for our purposes (at the very least it cannot be our only source). You seem abnormally (in a good way!) conversant with these issues, so if you'd like to help with writing something on this I think that would be great. And just to be clear I certainly don't take the claims in the article as gospel and am glad you have elucidated some of the possible issues with it here. As I said above it's still advisable to go to the source in terms of the studies referenced (or similar ones) in order to see what they say about deaths and small cars (and when they were saying it) while also looking for sources that perhaps disagree with those conclusions. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 09:47, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Abrazame, I agree with you that Tesla Motors won't have any problem meeting those mileage standards while maintaining safety - they have already surpassed those standards by several multiples, when you look at the gasoline equivalent of the Tesla Roadster electric car. And I'm sure that Toyota and Honda will do just fine too. But General Motors and Chrysler are a different story. I think it's ironic Obama is bailing them out while they continue to make gas guzzling SUVs. The environment would be better off if they were allowed to go out of business. It's not like there won't be any jobs available to build cars in the U.S. without them - Honda and Toyota have already been making up for that. According to this, while Michigan lost 83,000 Big Three auto manufacturing jobs between 1993 and 2008, more than 91,000 new auto manufacturing jobs were created in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Texas during that same time period. Why not let General Motors and Chrysler cease to exist, and let the better manufacturers make up for it with better, safer, more fuel efficient cars? Why bail out companies that are destroying the environment? Grundle2600 (talk) 09:58, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

(replying to Grundle's brief comment a couple of comments' above) That's not what I meant re: the "positive." Let me try another tack to show you why your proposed addition is problematic. I'll use the same article you did - drawing only on it for information - and show you a different possible version from what you propose.

"Obama has proposed to address global warming by substantially increasing the CAFE standards for gasoline mileage. This proposed change has been hailed as an excellent solution to a variety of problems related to greenhouse-gas emissions and the consumption of fuel. Carol Browner, the director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, has suggested that car companies will be able to use new technologies to comply with the new standards and thus will not have to significantly alter the composition of their fleets."

Does that sound good to you? Me either. It's horrible, but it is based completely on the article, it's just that I've picked out all of the positive aspects and left out the negative ones. You are doing essentially the opposite, and it's just as much of a problem. Does this make sense?

But we're moving beyond this. We need other and better sources to write well about this issue. Are you interested in working on that? Because really no one seems interested in putting in your suggested change as is, so some additional work is probably required here. At this point, discussion of CAFE standards should not be based on this one USA Today article.

Also let me say that both Abrazame's comment and Grundle's last one are shading off into questions of politics and the automotive industry, rather than focusing solely on the article. We need to deal only with the latter. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 10:07, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I do like that paragraph. You did an excellent job writing it. Grundle2600 (talk) 10:49, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

If that was the only thing that was in the article, it would be horribly unbalanced, given what the USA Today article says. You still seem to be having some problem fully grasping NPOV, and that accounts for a lot of the problems you have faced in editing this and other Obama articles. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 16:00, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The article still says, "Critics have pointed out that CAFE laws may have forced tradeoffs between fuel economy and auto safety."

Am I the only one here who thinks that the words "may have" do not reflect the source?

This is what the source says:

"The National Academy of Sciences, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Congressional Budget Office and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have separately concluded in multiple studies dating back about 20 years that fuel-economy standards force automakers to build more small cars, which has led to thousands more deaths in crashes annually."

It says those four studies show that those deaths definitely happened. There is no "may have." It is definite, according to the source.

Wikipedia requires that articles match the source.

Why am I the only person here who disagrees with the use of "may have," when it is very clear that such wording goes against wikipedia policy?

Grundle2600 (talk) 14:07, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I have already explained my use of the words "may have" to you (more than once), but you have chosen to ignore me. The wording does not "go against Wikipedia policy" at all. You are trying to write something that basically states that there is a direct relationship between an increase in fuel efficiency and an increase in deaths, but the source does not support that, and it is obviously not true. At best, it could be described as a gross oversimplification. The biggest problem, however, is your framing of this event, which is actually about how Obama brought together a disparate group that included auto manufacturers and came up with new fuel efficiency goals that everyone agreed with. You made it sound as if Obama was personally signing the death warrants of people who buy fuel efficient cars. -- Scjessey (talk) 14:51, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a simple temporary solution already suggested above. Rewrite the sentence as "Critics have argued that CAFE laws force tradeoffs between fuel economy and auto safety." That's accurate in terms of what the source says, and avoids the word "may," while also making it clear that this is only a claim made by some, not an iron clad fact. But we need to rewrite the whole thing ultimately using better sources. I've asked Grundle2600 repeatedly if he's interested in doing that, and for now the answer appears to be no since I've received no reply. That's instructive (particularly as all Grundle seems able to do is push, over and over again, for his or her preferred version, despite repeated efforts on my part to draw the editor into actual collaborative work), but I don't think I have anything more to say here at this time. I suggest making the change above as a temporary fix to put this silly discussion over "may" to bed (so long as a couple others agree - don't just make the change without discussion), but then I hope at some point we can actually write a good paragraph on this issue. What we have now is not that, regardless of whether we say "may" or not. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 16:00, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just to give a bit of extra context for my choice of "may", the edit I performed was a quick and dirty change to try to neutralize the version put up by Grundle. I never intended for it to be a permanent solution, and at the time I considered just deleting the entire paragraph per WP:NPOV. Clearly the main story is that Obama succeeded in negotiating a set of new standards that move the country further toward improvements in lowering emissions and decreasing our dependence on foreign oil. The mainstream media has given little attention to the notion that it will lead to an increase in auto-related deaths, presumably because there are no current data to support the notion that fuel efficiency improvements automatically involve making cars lighter and less safe (as evidenced by the gigantic Chevy Tahoe hybrid). -- Scjessey (talk) 16:16, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm leaning towards leaving all that out and just saying that Obama supported the move to tighten CAFE and pollution standards. This article should simply state what Obama and his administration did during the period, and not the arguments on both sides of each policy issue. Thanks to the wonders of hyperlinking, that can all be explained in each article on the subject - organizing things that way is part of the fundamental premise of Wikipedia. Stating pro and con arguments, either from analysts or partisans, is best kept to a minimum, and only where the arguments themselves factor into the presidency. The support, opposition, or effect would have to rise above the normal noise of politics, and I don't see that here. Wikidemon (talk) 16:37, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In response to Wikidemon, I don't see the harm in a sentence (that's probably the extent of it) describing a couple of viewpoints on the CAFE policy proposals—it is the kind of issue that in the past has provoked a lot of reaction, from environmentalists, the auto industry, perhaps even consumers. In this article far more than at Barack Obama, we really need to move beyond just saying "here's what the administration said/did." In my view an article on a presidency needs to discuss reactions and effects throughout. Yes a lot of that can be farmed out to sub-articles, but confining this article to "what Obama and his administration did" is a mistake I think, and turns us into little more than stenographers summarizing White House press relies. I think the end product in that scenario is an uninteresting and uninformative article (and maybe I'm just misreading your comment, but what you're describing sounds more to me like what we should have at Timeline of the Presidency of Barack Obama). Now one can certainly argue that, so far at least, this has not received enough coverage to warrant more than a passing mention if that, but I don't think any of us have investigated that question sufficiently as yet. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 17:48, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Scjessey, you said, "You are trying to write something that basically states that there is a direct relationship between an increase in fuel efficiency and an increase in deaths, but the source does not support that, and it is obviously not true."

If it's not true, then please tell me what this part of the article means, in your own words:

"The National Academy of Sciences, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Congressional Budget Office and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have separately concluded in multiple studies dating back about 20 years that fuel-economy standards force automakers to build more small cars, which has led to thousands more deaths in crashes annually."

Grundle2600 (talk) 19:54, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bigtimepeace The best way to have this article be balanced is to allow different people to add to it. If I get to add what I want, and you get to add what you want, and Scjessey gets to add what he wants, then the article will be balanced. Right now, it seems that everyone except me is allowed to add what they want to the article. That's not balance. An article gets balanced by adding to it, not by erasing from it. If you think my addition is unbalanced, then please add to it what you think needs to be added. But please don't erase what I wrote. Grundle2600 (talk) 19:57, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That wouldn't lead to "balance", that would lead to an incomprehensible mess. The way for you to get something into the article is to write something that a consensus agrees passes at least WP:RS, WP:NPOV, and WP:WEIGHT. Cherry-picking cheap shots from wherever you find them is the wrong approach. PhGustaf (talk) 20:40, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Grundle, you are not being prevented from adding a goddamned thing, it is what you wish to add that is the problem. Stop with the persecution complex, please. Tarc (talk) 20:57, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Grundle your statement above, with my username leading off in bold, is shocking for an experienced Wikipedian. That is absolutely not how we do things, period, end of story, how are we even talking about this. If you continue to edit along the theoretical lines you lay out above, you will not be able to participate at these articles anymore (at least for awhile, in the form of a temporary topic ban). Please go read WP:NPOV and other various content policies backwards and forwards, because my efforts to explain the problem in your approach are obviously falling on deaf ears. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 21:09, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think this deserves mentioning in the article. This speech from Dick Cheney is quite interesting. He points out that although Obama released to the public the information about interrogating terrorist suspects, Obama has not let the public know the information that was obtained through these interrogations. Cheney claims that the interrogations "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people," and criticizes Obama for making the interrogation methods public, while keeping the info about the terrorists' plots that was stopped by the interrogations a secret. Grundle2600 (talk) 19:50, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What an ex-administrative official has to say about the presidency in a speech to a private institution is irrelevant to the Presidency of Barack Obama. Thanks. Tarc (talk) 20:59, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]