Crazy Overload

I haven't posted in quite a few days as of late.  It seems you can't go an hour without some crazy thing happening around us.  The Russia-Trump campaign thing.  The MOAB.  That "Crazy Fat Kid" (gotta love McCain!).  Ben Carson getting stuck in a public housing elevator.  Anti-government ideologues destroying the EPA, the DOE, the USDE, the FCC...  It's just been incessant.  Where does one even begin?

Well, for starters, when the President said he was going to "Make America Great Again," for the people he's put in charge of our federal agencies, it seems like a return to the "Good Old Days" as described in the Weird Al tune, "torturing rats with a hacksaw and pulling the wings off of flies."

Candice Jackson, now acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, is the latest exemplar here.  This is woman who believes she suffered discrimination for being white (though shows no evidence of suffering anything), has neither a civil rights nor education background, and is apparently no fan of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or public, compulsory education, or Title IX (though unlike Betsy DeVos, she actually may know something about it).

Ajit Pai, the Chair of the FCC, is meanwhile trying to destroy Net Neutrality.  Trump voters are not going to like where this goes.  The "Good Old Days" in this case would be like the early 90's, when downloading a single picture was an opportunity to do the dishes and laundry, and maybe trim the hedges.

And then there's Richard Cordray, who now runs the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, who together with the House Financial Services Committee Chair, Jeb Hensarling, (R-His Satanic Majesty's Toilet), are working to...

"...(weaken) the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by stripping the agency of its independence and severely limiting its ability to go after corporations."

"...convert the CFPB into an executive agency with a director who can be removed by the president at will."

"...scale back the agency's enforcement powers and prevent the agency from publishing its consumer complaint database..."

With so much happening all at the same time, it's hard to see the action in the windy forest.  But our education, information, and the safety of your finances are all at high risk right now.  This is not going to "Make America Great Again, " unless by "Great" you mean "Like Putin's Russia, but with Worse Education."  

Please, whatever your political persuasion, whatever your religion, philosophy, ideology, or any other disposition, please, please study up on these issues and let your congress critters know that making America like Russia is NOT what what any of us had in mind!

JMJ

Insecurity and Distraction

A couple days ago, Sean Spicer, our WH Press Secretary, was confronted in an Apple store by an admittedly "impolite" critic of the President, a young woman of Indian descent, born here, no discernible accent, seems like her heart's in the right place, who asked him some annoying and rude questions, saying Trump is a "fascist" and so forth, and at one point Sean Spicer said this:  "It's such a great country that allows you to be here."

Now, I understand how annoying it can be to visit one of those telecom stores.  My wife and I have a scheme for dealing with it.  We play sane shopper/insane shopper.  They can either deal with her quickly and give us the best deal they have, or, I act like a silly lunatic in the store, creating distraction and chaos, and getting the other customers to join in, without actually bothering anyone, just creating General Disarray, but forcing the salesperson to hurry up and get us the hell out of there.  Learned it from my Dad.  I am fun to shop with.

So, I can imagine being confronted in one of these stores, and getting a little flustered with the lady asking the rather crude, lumpy questions about Russia and Treason and Fascism, but Spicer's response was very telling...

Yesterday, Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa long known being a One-Trick-Pony (immigrant-bashing), tweeted, "We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."  And he doubled down... 

And King himself refused to back away from the tweet. On CNN Monday morning, King said, "I meant exactly what I said," and that he'd "like to see an America that's just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective."

There have been large shifts in the demographics of the world over the past couple-thousand years.  We are still in the midst of this shifting.  The US is a very recent product of this shifting.  We are a country made up mostly of immigrants.  During certain periods in our history, we had unprecedentedly high levels of upward mobility, and most always more than the rest of the world.  We absorbed new, usually rather poor, immigrants as the last wave moved up.  Now that upward mobility is down, below that of Europe, irony, the Right blames the immigrants and minorities, irony of ironies, for that lack of upward mobility.  In case you don't know, immigrants and minorities, pretty much by definition, only hold so much power.  They are not politically capable of holding back those above the mobility-ladder from them, and it is not in their interest to hold down themselves.

The Grown-Up Question raised here should be, "How do we increase upward mobility?"

Well, here's how not to do it...

The Congressional Budget Office projects that 14 million people will lose coverage by 2018 under the Republican ObamaCare replacement bill.

“I’ve been telling you why don’t we wait, just let (Obamacare) implode and let’s not take the blame,” Trump said to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price,... “I’ve been telling you that as an option. It’s not an option I like, frankly, but it’s certainly an option.”

..both the new president and some of his closest allies have expressed both a strong opposition to net neutrality and a profound ignorance of what the concept actually means.

 America's infrastructure is close to failing.

And it just goes on...

You can blame immigrants and minorities if you like, but if you don't want to have the babies, and you don't want to build the roads, and you don't care if you can get proper health care, maybe you should just get the fuck out of the way and let someone "else's" BABY take care of things.

JMJ 

While You Were Distracted...

So, while we were all unpleasantly distracted...

From CNET: FCC chips away at net neutrality rules

This under-the-radar issue IS going to affect all of us.   Net Neutrality, basically, treats ISPs (internet service providers like cable and satellite and phone companies) as utilities.  After all, those towers, lines, satellites and such are utilizing our public transportation systems and airspace to provide the signals we use, they get plenty of money from us to maintain that system, and they've already got a dependent market often with very few, if any, choices.  Now, they want to control the flow of particular information.  When you consider just a few huge corporations already control most of the media access, from radio to TV to movies to ISPs, this is a recipe for complete corporate control of information.  Who thinks that's a good idea?

From CommonDreams: Trump's FCC Blocks ISPs from Giving Low-Income Families Web Access

This one is another attack as above.  In the "Information Age," in a time of economic stagnation in the working class, helping the poor get broadband was a wonderful idea, and very inexpensive.  But hey, they don't consume much!  They're poor, after all.  So, fuck them, right?  I say fuck you, Trump's FCC.

From TheIntercept: Republican Lawmakers in Five States Propose Bills to Criminalize Peaceful Protest

This is just ridiculous.  From the article: "In North Dakota, for instance, Republicans introduced a bill last week that would allow motorists to run over and kill any protester obstructing a highway as long as a driver does so accidentally. ...Although the bill ostensibly requires drivers to have acted “negligently” or accidentally in killing a protestor, the bill’s co-sponsor, Republican state Rep. Keith Kempenich, has said that some accidents might occur if motorists “punched the accelerator rather than the brakes,” according to the Bismarck Tribune."  I wonder what would happen if a "Stand Your Ground" defense came up against the "Run Over a Protester by Accident" defense (aside from the bloody mess)?

From The Hill: Leaked ObamaCare bill would defund Planned Parenthood

Ah, good ol' Planned Parenthood, the bane of people who've never used Planned Parenthood or have any substantive reason to even have an opinion about it.  Well, about 1 in 5 women do, and most not for abortion, but for a wide variety of health and personal reasons.  It's a necessary thing, PP, and if we harm it, we're harming the country.  This is placing ideological zealotry ahead of the real world health needs of the people.  It's bad enough we're the only developed nation on the planet without universal healthcare, but here comes worse!

From the NYT: President Trump Takes Aim at the Environment
  

This one is heartbreaking.  The coal industry has been in decline for years, as new technology has made natural gas cheaper and cleaner (well, it was always cleaner, as the whole notion of "Clean Coal" is a myth).  But Trump promised all those poor Appalachian unemployed coal miners a return to the days of King Coal, and this will do nothing to address their situation, but rather just make it easier to ruin even more of their land and water.
  

From Stars and Stripes: Shulkin promises ‘major changes’ at Veterans Affairs

If anyone thinks privatization of the VA is a good idea, and let's not pretend this is not what this is about, here are some thoughts for you: These vets put up their LIVES for this country, US, and WE have to take care of them.  It is OUR responsibility.  If we want to make the VA better, well, just like everything else, WE have to spend the money and do the work to make it so.  ALL of that money should be going to THEIR care, NOT the profits of some corporation.

This goes on, from privatizing PBS and ending the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, because, as we all know, Americans are already so very cultured, to an infrastructure plan that has pretty much nothing to do with our nation's crumbling and outdated infrastructure and everything to do with profiteering your tax dollars.

Are we Making America Great yet?  Anyone even paying attention?  Or was it always just bullshit, disguising the real impetus for the Trump presidency, just plain ol' hatred of one another?

JMJ

Well, here we are.  The day after Trump's inauguration, huge, mass demonstrations, the day after he orders a make-shift ban on immigration from the tiredest, poorest, huddledest, wretchedest places on the planet, more huge, mass demonstrations.  Again, I can not thank our new President enough for what he has done for liberalism in just his first nine days.

A Brooklyn federal judge blocked part of the order.  GOP leaders are squirming.  The order does little to address it's ostensible aim, and seems to be nothing but a political distraction, and a very poorly planned one at that.  But while this goes on, along with the ongoing silly drama of The Wall, Net Neutrality is doomed, and we can expect rightwing assaults on our healthcare, education, pollution, and consumer protections with the aid of his cadre in the cabinet, and a drooling GOP Hill.

Though he may mobilize the Left for the future, the damage that's being done now will take a loooooong time to undo.  Let's hope his distractions are the GOP's undoing come the next couple of election cycles.  The good things Trump says he wants to do would only be doable then anyway.

JMJ