Archives for September 2023

Friday, September 22, 2023

I read in Time Magazine the story of the 12 year old child that was impregnated by a stranger. She didn’t know what to call it. She was playing in her front yard and a man came down the street forced her around the side of the house and raped her. He went on his way. She didn’t go out to play again. She didn’t tell anyone because she didn’t know what to say. She knew it hurt. She thought it was bad. A cloud descended on her, but that was it. She was getting sick. She threw up. She didn’t know why. Finally, her mother took her to the ER and they learned she was pregnant. This was Mississippi. She was way past any chance of getting an abortion in that state. The closest palce was Chicago, 600 miles away. Her mother didn’t have the means so they did nothing. The girl turned 13. She had the baby. 

In this part of Mississippi there is one person who can take care of preganant mothers. She’d like to leave, but she feels she can’t. Northern Mississippi has become an ob/gyn desert. Interns don’t want to come here. They don’t want to become pregnant here either. Who wants to go to a place where you are threatened with prision for doing what you know is best for a patient?  The area is bracing for 4,000 more babies being born than before the abortion ban was put in place.

In 18 years look for crime to go up in that area and I’m sure the Republican politicians in that state will wonder why.

Combine this with what Dr. Hotez said about Covid and the anti-vax movement. Areas of the deep south were especially hard hit because people there did not get vaccinated at the same rate as other parts of the country. It is estimated that 200,000 people died needlessly.

And let’s look at “No Child Left Behind,” W’s plan to improve education. The idea was to give schools mandatory tests for students and if the schools flunked they’d defund the school and if would have to shut down. How does this help a school district that is struggling? It doesn’t. Say there are seven schools in a district and they are all struggling. Then one fails the test and is shut down. Where do those students go? To the remaining six schools, which are all ready overburdened. The possibility then exists that those six schools will all fail. Great. Maybe, a better solution would be to go into the seven schools and help them? Just a thought.

Immigration. Why do people keep coming here by the thousands? Because their homes are not safe and there is little opportunity for them. Hey. I got an idea, why not help them in their homeland? Why wait for them to show up at our borders? Just another thought.

Ron DeSantis keeps sinking in the polls. The more people get to know him the more distasteful they find him. Huh. Eat pudding with your fingers, kick the dog, tell a kid eating a popsicle it’s bad for them and he wonders how to revive his campaign? Go to ettiquette school and learn some manners. That’s a start, then go away.

Rudy tried to grope Kassidy Hutchinson on Jan 6th. So she says. I’ll bet Rudy will deny it. Who ya gonna believe?

Fox has got a new chairman, just as bad or worse that the last one.

Just as Fox was never about news so Prager was never a university, but it didn’t stop them from getting over $200M and pretending to be one.

The problem is The Simpsons. Not the show itself, but the fact that so many have taken their cues as to how to act from that show – not realizing it is supposed to be satire, not reality. Fox and Prager are both posers, fore flushers, cons and like Trump are dangerous in that people believe them to be truth and reality.

We are watching what happens MAGA world runs into reality. It’s called prison.

Monday, September 18, 2023

Lauren Boebert – oh my. Well, she got kicked out of a theater for vaping, taking selfies in the middle of the performance, and disturbing people around her by singing. At least, that’s what the theater initially said. Boebert was outraged, of course. She said she got kicked out for laughing and dancing. She said the vaping was from a smoke machine – not her. Then they showed the tape – the security footage. There was Lauren blowing smoke from a vaping device. 

She also played the, “Do you know who I am?” card. I have done that too. It always gets the same result, except once. “No.” The exception being when I gave my card to someone who studied it for some thirty seconds and said, “I’ve heard of you.” My instantaneous reactive thought was, “No, you haven’t!” But I kept my mouth shut.

Apparently, the reasons above weren’t the real reason she was booted. Maybe, it contributed, but the real reason was Boebert and her “date” were groping each other. There was nothing subtle about it. So aside from the vaping, the loud singing, the flashing camera light, they were trying to have hand sex – I guess that’s what you’d call it. Groping? Egads, get a room you two. Oh yes the theater released some more security footage showing their “acitivity”. So the theater tried to give her an excuse. She wasn’t bright enough to understand so they said, “Okay. Take a look at this.”

Then Lauren made a “I’m really sorry” boo-hoo, that’s not the person I am and the voters deserve better statement. 

In other news Kristen Welker had her first weekend at the desk of Meet the Press. She had an interview with Donald Trump. She tried to keep him focused on her question. She tried. He wandered around verbally. Same old stuff. Several times he said Democrats want to kill babies after they are born. Welker had enough and replied, “No Democrat says that.” For a few instances Trump actually stopped. Temporarily rocked back on his heels. He kind of shrugged. Then it was right back to one complaint or another, or an outlandish lie. Things like how great his presidency was. How he could solve the Ukraine war in a day. 

His solution to everything was to get all the pricipals in a room and “negotiate.”

Vague ovrblown promises and pronouncements, nothing concrete. I wouldn’t call it trying to nail jello to the wall, but rather having the jello solution thrown in liquid form and running down the wall.

Update from Tuesday Sept 20 (I didn’t finish Monday’s screed until Tuesday)

Janet Yellin was on a morning show. She was asked what about this? And what about that? All dealing with the economy. She is brief, specific and to the point. While the Wall Street folks and the Repubicans are going on and on about recession she clamly points to the data. Could it be better? Yeah, of course, but it’s pretty good right now. Especially, when you compare it to other times it’s really damn good.

Last night, Peter Hotez was on talking about his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.” He pointed to the rise of anti-vaccine rhetoric. This was not random he points out. It was planned and orchestrated. It started at CPAC 2021. They had a number of anti-vac folks speak. The theme being that the government was going to force you to get the vaccine, and then they’d come for your bibles and your guns. This idea was picked up by Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Ron Johnson, and Rand Paul in Congress and it was amplied every night on Fox by Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and others.

The result said Hotez was that 200,000 people died that didn’t have to. They were mainly in conservative states and many in the south.

Other than drug dealers pushing fentanyl, who else kills willfully their own people? The Republican party and anti-vaccers.

Not only are people being told lies about the vaccines, but the politicians like Greene are targeting the very scientists trying to save us, calling them names and saying they are employing brown-shirt fascist tactics. WTF?

People like Trump, Greene, Boebert, Hannity, and Ingraham are dangerous, because they not only willing lie, they have no soul.

Joe the Plumber died, pancreatic cancer. He wasn’t really a plumber. He didn’t have his own license, He kind of worked under someone else who had a license, and that wasn’t really legal. But hey so what? Right? Freedom. Hopefully, your toilet won’t leak but maybe he wtched a good YouTube videio and kinda knows what to do?

No rules. Except abortion, then we gotta get in there and F with people. Time has an article about the 13 year old girl in Mississippi who had a baby. The girl starts 7th grade. She was raped. Way to go Mississippi. What an opportunity.

OMG. I didn’t think it could get any stupider, but I was wrong. Boebert has broken off with her date at the theater. She checked his party affiliation and he’s a democrat. That’s the problem. Democrats are known fondler – is that it? OMG.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

The idea behind our democracy and those of the states is that people elected to office are good people who will do the right thing. This is often not true. In general, they will do whatever they have to to save their own political career regardless of what is right.

In Texas the Attorney General, Ken Paxton, was brought up on 16 charges of abusing his office. This came about because people who worked in that office were so concerned they blew the whistle on him. He fired those people. They sued and won a 3.5 million dollar case. He wanted the State if Texas to pay the fine. That’s what finally got his republican colleagues to bring impeachment charges. There are 30 state senators: 18 Republican and 12 Democrat. To impeach you need a 2/3 vote. That means the vote would have to be twenty to impeach and therefore 8 Republicans would have to “do the right thing.”

Two were willing to do so on a few of the 16 counts. They weren’t up for re-election. A rich right wing conservative political pac had promised to primary any senator who voted to impeach. Why that isn’t illegal I don’t know.

I wonder if Paxton felt like the guys who killed Emmett Till – guilty as sin but who cares?

While watching Virginia Tech’s football team lose to Rutgers I was shown three different Republican ads for candidates for President. The worst, and by worst I mean most poorly done was Donald Trump’s. It appeared to be done by a 7th grader as their first attempt at creating an ad for media class. But okay, what were the messages?

Donald Trump is going to stand up to the drug cartels. He’s going to build (or has built) the wall. He’s going to convict drug sellers and the cartels. Wait? Didn’t he promise to do that last time? Other than saying he was going to do it did he? Well,Steve Bannon started a build the wall fund after Don couldn’t get Mexico to pay. But he never used the money to build a wall. He got arrested on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht in Long Island Sound. The only reason he isn’t in jail is Don pardoned him. The worst part of the ad was Donald’s personal statement. He seemed to be reading queue cards and had never practiced reading what they said. Or maybe he just can’t read very well. Sounded like a second grader who was hauled up in front of the class to read out loud.

Then there was Nikki Haley. She’s going to stop China from making fentanyl and shipping it into this country. Okay, so Nikki is going after the makers and Donnie’s going after the distributors. Great. Question: why is the U.S. the only country with this problem? Ya know Europe has regulated this drug successfully, why can they do it and we can’t seem to do it? Oh wait. There’s a super rich family that got away with pushing this drug for years and stopping it from being more tightly regulated. Oh no. How did that happen?

Then there’s the Tim Scott ad. I forget what he’s going to do. Oh yes – values. Blah blah blah. That’s a hard case to make against Joe Biden, but he’s trying.

Meanwhile, the autoworkers are starting to strike. Their case is simple. The car manufacturers are back – big time. The bosses got 40% raises. The workers gave up a lot to save the industry and they want to have the life that their parents or grandparents had when they worked for the auto-industry.

It’s a slightly different case than what the writers in Hollywood are making. But essentially the big game being played here is “If we can just make the workers desperate enough they’ll have to work for whatever scraps we give them.” Some have even said as much.

I think it was Eugene Debs when he was negotiating with the bosses that would draw a circle – a pie. He’d show slices of the pie: some for labor some for manufacturers. He say the pie had gotten larger and all he wanted was his fair slice for the workers. Not a hard concept.

There’s a Facebook meme going around: GM made $22 billion last year, if they gave each of their 50,000 workers $80,000 they have only made $18 billion. Hum. Good point.

Saturday, September 16, 2023

Frequently, I have heard commentators refer to the real world as Earth 1 and the world of climate, election, and vacine deniers as Earth 2. But I posit that there is another world – Earth 3, and possibly a forth – Hyper Earth.

Let’s deal with Hyper Earth first because it is easier to do. Hyper Earth is when Earth 2 comes into contact with Earth 1. Take for instance Ron DeSantis appointing a witch doctor (what else would you call him – a doctor? Come on.) as head of Florida’s health services. That guy (the head of Florida’s health services) has railed against Covid vaccines and is doing so again with the new version of it. How many people are going to die or get really sick because they listened to him?

Okay, that’s Hyper Earth. And we could argue that when the Jan 6th folks get sentenced to jail time that is Hyper Earth – maybe???

But I suggest there is yet another Earth – Earth 3. It is the strangest world of all.

Sorry, I interupt this screed to bitch about something else. I just read this:

John Hughes is a marketing director at Merck in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is best known for being the husband of Kristen Welker. He reportedly obtained the position in 2015 but had been working for the firm since 2006.

What? Wait? He obtained the position as Kristen Welker’s husband in 2015? Bad relative pronouning…

BTW He’s been Kristen Welker’s husband since 2017.

Where was I? Oh yes. Earth 3. Let’s examine the evidence and related phenomena. I have seen a few clips of Kristen Welker’s interview with Donald Trump. Also, clips from the Megyn Kelly interview with him. You’ll be surprised to hear that I heard somethings come out of is mouth that I found well – worth noting. Let’s put it that way.

Trump said that the charges against him were all fake, and that he had a right to all the documents he took because of The Presidential Records Act. (Is he really unaware that that act was written to prevent, or should I say make clear, that a President on leaving office is not entitled to every paper he held and that some belong to the people (ie the government)?) This is akin to the former governor of Virginia’s wife swiping the silverware from the mansion upon leaving.

Let’s stop right there. It wasn’t only that he said those statements, but the way he said them. It seemed to me that he has said this stuff so many times that he now believes it.

We may have talked about people “living in an echo chamber.” That is saying stuff and listening to others of the same mindset reapeat whatever it is that they all collectively come to believe it. But here I present a new case – seemingly unique, but upon further inspection not. That is the case of Donald Trump talking to himself and convincing himself of his own lies – that is Earth 3.

We’ve seen it before, but never so publicly. I think we will see what happens to this world if and when Donald is sentenced to prison. I remember when the Duke lacrosse rape case DA got sentenced. He stood there listening to the sentence and seemed to not be there; to not understand what was happening to him in that moment. We saw it too when the assistant coach for Penn State got sentenced. He seemed out of it, not understanding. And so I predict it will be with Donald Trump when Earth 1 collides and crashes into his own little earth that he has created for himself – Earth 3. He will stand there unknowingly and oblivious.

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

I just watched an interview with Matt Gaetz. He’s a weird guy. He wants to bring impeachment charges against the President. That or he wants an investigation into Hunter Biden and ties with his dad concerning Burisma. Gaetz claims that Joe sat down with Burisma on multiple occasions. He kept referring to these meetings as Joe meeting with Hunter’s bribe masters.

Okay, let’s break this down. When Joe was VP he spent a lot of time trying to stop Burisma being used by Putin as a cash register. Essentially, before the Russian propped up Ukrainian head was deposed Putin put a guy in a job at Burisma to skim money off the top of any and all gas being sold by Burisma. Burisma tried to clean up their image and hired Hunter to help with that. Now, were they trying to get close to Joe? Yeah, probably. This by the way is something that companies try all the time, and Washington is littered with relatives being hired by companies trying to shine up their image. Republicans do this all the time.

There is no evidence that Joe and Hunter ever discussed Burisma. 

Additionally, Gaetz referred to Kevin McCarthy and a deal he had with him. He said McCarthy isn’t living up to the deal. The deal is written down – he says. However, he doesn’t have his copy. Someone else has it, and if you want to see his copy of the deal you’d have to ask that person for it. But, Gaetz says, he can tell you what’s in the deal, and McCarthy is lying about something – I forget what.

Now I can see someone going to the other person and asking to see the deal and that person saying, “Oh I can’t show you that because it’s Matt’s paper.”

As to Joe, well Burisma was corrupt for years when Putin’s guy was head of Ukraine. Biden met with folks in Ukraine during that time. Hunter was hired by Burisma. Whether it was during that time or after I don’t remember. But Gaetz’s claim is like saying someone is a commie if they met with a Communist, or that you had to have been bribed because you met with a person who bribed someone else.

Then there’s this “Kevin broke his promise, but I can’t show you the promise” is just weird.

So Gaetz is threatening the Speaker of the House over a deal he won’t show us, and he’s threatening the President by association, but has no proof. Not even a smidgen of a problem.

The dual things both stink and Gaetz is just weird.