Throughout U.S. history, the Republican party has worn many faces.
Until the early 20th Century, it was the party of Lincoln and true loyalty to the American people.
That flip-flopped about 100 years ago, but I don’t think anyone could have foreseen what it would become today: a collection of sadists who provide tax cuts to billionaires and invent new, creative ways to punish the common person.
I hate to say it, but this is what we do all day long in the United States.
We didn’t just jump from the sanity and intellectual distinction of the Obama presidency into where we are now:
• On the verge of re-electing a president who is a pathological liar, was impeached twice, committed fraud, extortion, witness intimidation, election tampering, seditious conspiracy, and stole top secret documents.
• Banning hundreds of books that well-educated American schoolchildren have been reading for generations.
• Overturning Roe v. Wade and banning abortion in many states.
• Destroying our education system, installing an Education Secretary whose overt mission was to crush public schools into impoverishment to forward her dreams of parochial and charter schools, as well as, home schooling.
• Trying to resuscitate the coal industry and extending the reign of fossil fuels in general, as scientists’ predictions for our climate future become even more grim.
Again, none of this just fell out of the sky; it’s been slowly building. Every time Trump got away with a crime, he became that much more emboldened to commit an even greater one.
Where this is going to go from here is anybody’s guess. It doesn’t look good, because there doesn’t appear to be a lower limit. Each atrocity ushers in the next in order. Wish I had better news to report.
It’s good to know that we live in a country in which certain people have moral principles that inform their behavior, and Alexander Vindman is certainly among them.
CNN wanted viewers, because viewers = money. They got what they wanted, but, once again, proved that things like honor and love of country mean absolutely nothing to them.
Now, if you think for one minute that the garden-variety Trump supporter will accept the findings of this Republican-led investigation, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Here’s an idea for processing storm water runoff, i.e., precipitation from rain and snowmelt that flows over land without percolating into the ground.
There is no doubt that climate change is exacerbating the problems that our civilization faces with storm water. Not only are flooding events from violent storms more frequent, but sea-level rise is pushing water that was formerly contained in our oceans and aquifers up onto land; this latter effect is called “sunny-day flooding.”
Through the millennia, civil engineers have found ways to collect this runoff and send it downstream into large waterways like rivers, lakes, and oceans.
This particular concept calls for boring enormous tunnels, 12 feet in diameter, far beneath the Earth’s surface, below all current infrastructure. Current technologies enable tunnels to be built at a rate of one mile per month. Given that the United States has 317 cites whose population is greater than 100K, does that seem like a workable approach?
Note the one-size-fits-all approach. It doesn’t come in 2-foot, 4-foot, or 6-foot diameters, only 12 feet. Does that make sense, given the incredible range of needs associated with different urban layouts and storm volumes?
Also, the concept isn’t designed to move the storm water towards larger waterways, but to store it in the tunnels, letting it slowly infiltrate into the underground surroundings.
From what I can see in the website linked above, I can’t estimate the cost per mile, but it must be astronomical.
Climate change is already necessitating that we adapt to flood waters, but it seems extremely unlikely that the concept here will play a meaningful role in these adaptation strategies.
Here’s an article by Robert Reich entitled: “Trump committed treason and will try again. He must be barred from running.”
There are two other parts of our Constitution that renders what Reich says here unworkable. One lies elsewhere in the 14th Amendment and the other is the 5th Amendment, both of which say no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
Of course, if you want to try him and convict him of treason, then you have a deal. Let’s move forward with this, post-haste.
People say there is no right or wrong between the two main U.S. political parties, or that they are essentially identical to one another.
The meme here suggests otherwise.
Keep in mind that about 35% of American voters don’t see it this way at all. And there is nothing that Trump can do–no lie he can tell, no crime he can commit–that will cause his supporters to lose faith in him.
The meme here speaks an important issue in U.S. politics.
My take, FWIW, is that because Republicans are the party of greed and selfishness, its members are more likely to commit crimes than those whose political philosophies are based on the well-being of others.
The meme here came from a reader, to which I respond:
Good for you!
It seems that human beings are wired to think about the world in one or the other of these two modalities. No one knows precisely where this “wiring” come from, but it’s obviously some combination of our DNA and our lived experience.
Spiritualists, i.e., those who believe in the immortality of the soul, will add into this mix the basic personality that we all come into this life with.
In any case, regardless of how you got here, congratulations to you for caring about the people around you. Now that “wokeness” is a pejorative, it comes at a cost.
After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against Mr. Biden and his family, the first report of the premier House G.O.P. inquiry showed no proof of such misconduct
