I’ve been watching the demonstrations around the country filled with people demanding that we open up the various states to business again. This is not surprising, mainly because it seems that most of the protestors just don’t understand what’s at stake and that no one, as they love to claim, is actually taking away any of their rights. It’s always been fascinating to me that any time you have a bunch of people protesting that someone is taking away their rights, it often turns out that what they want to do will almost always involve taking away someone else’s rights.
Let’s take a very simple example. You’re walking along the track that runs along the Hudson River in Riverside Park. Three people are jogging toward you, not wearing masks. If you question them as to why they aren’t wearing masks they will almost certainly tell you that it’s their right to choose not to wear masks. But is it? We wear masks not to protect ourselves but to protect others from us. I wear a mask to protect you. You wear a mask to protect me. So in not wearing a mask these joggers are endangering my life. Do they have a right to do that? I think not.
So when you see these clowns at the demonstrations shouting that by protecting the general population we are violating their rights, the reality is that by forcing the stores open before it is safe, they are violating the rights of everyone around them by endangering those lives. I won’t even deal with the morons carrying automatic weapons into a situation that could turn violent, except to point out that a penis extender would probably go further in solving their problem than an M16.
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Then of course there are those who are so self involved that nothing ever enters the area between themselves and reality. I was watching video footage today of groups of people in the LA area who were out demonstrating because they wanted the Governor of California to open Laguna and other beaches. These are not businessmen trying to get their stores and restaurants open so they and their employees can earn a living. These are spoiled brats who are being petulant because they can’t play on the beach. They haven’t the intelligence to understand, or the discipline to deal with the necessities demanded by a deadly disease that is killing people all around them. They simply have to get out and run or swim or surf lest their little pointed heads explode. A nation filled with this type of worm is in serious decline and all but begging for a pandemic.
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Watched Andrew Cuomo in his daily press conference on Tuesday. This guy should be required watching for everyone that plans to vote. He is a politician who has learned to speak the truth without coating it in bullshit. He, more than almost anyone involved in today’s problems understands and elucidates them clearly and without as much bias as is humanly possible.
He doesn’t whine and moan because everyone doesn’t love him. He doesn’t lie to make a point or to curry favor. He just tells it like it is, logically and clearly. He accepts his responsibilities even while he is telling people that they have to accept theirs because if they don’t do the right thing, it will hurt everyone and that even if they do, it may not work out for them. That takes a lot of guts politically. Very few politicians in my long life have had the balls to do that.
Today he was speaking about a very important subject. Money! Specifically how much we, as a state, lay out and how much we get back. It seems that New York State sends the Federal Government more money each year than any other state in the union. In some ways that’s normal. We are a very rich state. But in order to get rich we have what is probably the highest state tax in the nation and that tends to work against our interests by driving businesses and rich people who pay high taxes to states that don’t have such high tax rates.
Even so, the situation might not be so egregious if the Federal Government reciprocated by giving us back a fair share of what we give them. Unfortunately they don’t. They don’t even come close. Last year New York State paid the Federal Government $26.6 billion more than it got back. On average NY gets back $.90 on every dollar it sends to Washington whereas other states get back an average of $1.21. That’s only fair if you live in Florida. The top five states currently giving to the Feds are NY, NJ, MA, CT & CA. The top five states taking from the Feds are VA, MD, KY, AL & FL. Interesting isn’t it, how 4 of the top 5 givers are in the Northeast and all five of the top takers are in the south? Why do you suppose that it? Maybe because states like Kentucky, with a population of 4.6 million have the same number of Senators, as does California with a population of 39.5 million. Or how about both the Dakota’s, with a total population of 1.6 million having twice the number of Senators as California. 1.6 million! We probably have that many people living on Broadway.
You getting a picture of the inequity here? So what can be done? Well, certainly nothing with this administration in office, just like nothing can be done about gerrymandering, tax inequality, Pentagon waste, automatic weapons, the environment, our healthcare system, infrastructure or the minimum wage. As long as Trump and his coterie of pathetic, bumbling, non-functional baboons are in office nothing will ever get done.
Come November when a tortured nation, realizing the egregious mistake it made in 2016, throws these bums out of the House, the Senate and the Oval Office, maybe we will have a shot at making America what we always thought it could be.
Of course any new administration will have to face what every Democratic administration that follows a Republican one has to face. Before anything constructive can be done, it has to undo the disastrous mess that the GOP has left behind.
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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 pretty good presidents. The best was probably Johnson who did escalate the Vietnam War but who 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 for the nation and the world. Next came Clinton whose personal life was a definite mess 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, a damn good group as a whole.
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. Gerry Ford, an ineffectual oaf who spent most of his time falling over everything he approached, followed Nixon. 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 he could steal. The combination of ignorance, ego, incompetence and intractability has put Trump in a class by himself in the race to the bottom.
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 in November.
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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 first of this year is any example, it can be accomplished quickly and with dramatic results.
In the last three months as countries around the world have shut down in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus, the results of that shut-downs have dramatically effected our skies, our oceans and just about everything else that seemed to be on its way to destruction.
No the Antartic 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 and planes and automobiles, pollution created not by those mechanisms but by their use of fossil fuels.
This horrible germ has illustrated clearly 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 the use of those fossil fuels is pushing them to the brink of collapse. They have long controlled the price of oil but that control has now led to a disaster in which their oil is worth almost nothing and it is destroying the economies of Russia, Saudi Arabia and any number of other nations around the world. And still none of these greedy swine are willing to shift their product to one that will help rejuvenate the planet.
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 the planet far into the future; technologies that will create the hundreds of thousands of jobs that will be necessary to drag our economy back from the brink of a virus and Trump created depression. The moment is now. Seize it!