Of all the chaos of this week, and of this volatile era, what stands out to this writer as the living example of what is driving all acceptable moral standards to disappear, are Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his comic book wife Ginni.
I would like to say they are doing it single handedly, but they are getting a hell of a lot of help from the rabid right as they lead the march to the almost universal lessening of any sense of respect or dignity enjoyed by the Court and by association, by the entire government.
It’s interesting that this is coming down to Thomas because it pretty much started with him and his controversial appointment and clownish presence on the court. Thomas has been a justice for 31 years. For most of that time, actually until the death of Antonin Scalia, he never published an opinion. He never seemed to have one, always voting the farthest available conservative position as indicated by Scalia.
Along the way his crazed wife, a true believer in the Marjorie Taylor Greene cult of fanatics, joined him in his conservative fetish. She has proved unwilling to mitigate her insane beliefs even when they have proved detrimental to her husband’s position on the Court.
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The recent poll that listed 71% of American’s feeing Biden is doing a bad job with Putin’s war has been discussed ad-nauseum but in this world of too much never being enough, here’s some more.
Why do people feel that Biden isn’t doing a good job? Simple, they are scared. As soon as leaders start talking about nuclear weapons, as Putin has, people panic. Putin understands this. That’s why he said what he said. Biden understands that Putin doesn’t care who or how many he kills and that’s what makes him cautious in his decisions. Biden’s problem is “how do I kill this motherfucker before he blows up half the world?” Putin’s is, “how do I get out of this mess alive?” There is no visible place where they coincide. Everyone can see that and that’s why most sensible people are scared shitless. Their leader isn’t telling them what to.
If Biden were acting more like a politician than a leader right now, he would be shoveling out some pile of crap that was believable but not necessarily doable. He’s not. He’s trying, as much as possible, to give us the straight story, even when it isn’t what we want to hear. It makes people hate him because people want to hear stuff that makes them feel safe and happy regardless of reality. And the reality is that we will never be safe and happy until Putin s either dead or in a Russian prison, as the result of a coup.
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If one takes a look at the last ten presidents, an interesting phenomenon is presented. Six of them have been Republicans and four Democrats. Of the four Democrats all have been acceptable presidents with some redeeming social values. The best was probably Lyndon Johnson who did escalate the Vietnam War, but that was a gift he had already been handed by Nixon.
He passed some of the most important legislation in the history of the nation. After him came Carter who was at best ineffectual but presented the country with a man of high moral values and set an excellent example of how a president should act.
Next came Clinton whose personal life was a definite swamp but who was the only one of the ten who left office with the nation out of debt. Finally there was Barak Obama, a shinning example of how a president should comport himself. He was a powerful force in saving the nation from the ravages of Bush and Cheney while he had congress on his side, but wasn’t a good enough politician to get the work done without a majority.
All in all but not great group, but a pretty good one.
Now let’s take a look at the six Republicans. The first was Dick Nixon who quit the job before he ended up in jail. He was followed by Gerry Ford, a likeable but ineffectual oaf who spent most of his time falling over everything he approached. Next in line was the GOP savior, Ronald Reagan, who knew how to inspire and may have been the least divisive Republican to reach the White House. Unfortunately he lost it long before he left office. Next was George H.W. Bush and all that’s necessary to say about him is “Iran Contra.” But he was an excellent ex-President. Unfortunately he had progeny and one of them was George W. Bush, possibly the laziest and dumbest president of modern times who, nature hating a vacuum, had the evil Dick Cheney at his side goading him into one disaster after another. It looked for a brief while as if Bush was going to be the worst president in US history but then Donald Trump took office and I do mean “took” office, along with the books, the chairs and everything else that wasn’t nailed down. The combination of ignorance, ego, incompetence and intractability has put Trump in a class by himself in the race to the bottom. Whether or not he evades jail time is sill up in the air.
So of the six GOP contenders only Reagan and possibly Bush Sr. because of his post presidential behavior, even come close to being Presidential material. Think about this when you go to the polls again.
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The Covid-19 virus is one of the worst disasters to ever hit this planet. But it is having one very important side effect. It is illustrating with demonstrable clarity that the polluter’s march to destroy this planet can be reversed, and if what has happened since the start of the plague is any example, it can be accomplished quickly and with dramatic results.
In the two years plus of the plague, as countries around the world have shut down to slow the spread of the virus, the results of those shut-downs have dramatically affected our skies, our oceans and just about everything else that seemed to be on the verge of destruction.
No, the Antarctic icebergs haven’t grown back … yet, but water all over the planet and the life that exists in it has shown an almost miraculous resurgence. Fish have appeared in the Venetian canals and all over the globe in places where it has come to be believed they would never appear again. Birds have returned to places from which they have long absented themselves and on every continent, animals and insects have suddenly appeared in areas from which they hadn’t been seen in decades. And all it took was a reduction of human traffic and the elimination of pollution caused by boats, planes, automobiles and anything powered by fossil fuels.
This horrible virus has illustrated inarguably what many of us have long understood, that the use of fossil fuel is destroying this planet, but that this can be quickly corrected by the simple means of substituting an alternate fuel to produce energy.
At the very same time, the greed and stupidity of those nations whose economies are most dependent on their use are allowing fossil fuels to push them to the brink of economic collapse and the planet to the edge of functional disaster. And still, none of these greedy swine are willing to shift their production to one that will help rejuvenate the planet even if it somewhat reduces their profit margin.
It’s time to bury all fossil fuel back in the ground from which we have stolen it and expand our horizons by adopting the use of technologies that do not harm the planet, technologies that are cleaner and cheaper, and which will help to prolong life on earth far into the future. These technologies will create hundreds of thousands of jobs that will be necessary to drag national economies back from the brink of the virus and Trump created depression. The moment is now. Seize it!
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One problem here. Johnson did not inherit Vietnam from Nixon but rather from Kennedy. Tricky Dick actually followed LBJ into the White House, not the other way around. The war in JFK’s time was a skirmish held over from the French disaster with only a handful of American troops and “advisors” on hand to do the heavy lifting. Johnson blew it up into a major conflagration based on a lie, the infamous “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” responding to an attack that never actually happened. While it’s true that Johnson’s domestic policies were phenomenal, Vietnam is a massive black mark on his administration.