Big discussion on reopening of schools this weekend. Everyone blames the teachers and that may indeed be the case but there are always other considerations, like making the actual buildings safe and the protection procedures that are used, even safer.
Steve Scalise who is with us only because of an incompetent would be assassin’s lack of skill, appeared on This Week, trying to make it seem like the delay in school openings is a political problem caused by Biden instead of Trump’s year long failure with the coronavirus. He seemed as ridiculous as ever and maybe that’s why he had to take one for the party.
Scalise’s logic just doesn’t make sense because he fails to stick to the point. Instead of trying to establish why the schools are slow in reopening, he wanders off in an attack on Biden’s COVID bill. This kind of false premise, matched by malfunction is why nothing ever got done in the Trump administration.
But next he goes off on a tangent about the science involved in the school program. This is a Republican talking about science, the same Republican who during the last four years, denied science in the environment, the pandemic and everything else including the field of science. Then he caped it off by refusing to acknowledge that Biden kicked the crap out of Trump in the election. Maybe if the GOP wants to ever be relevant again, they might attempt to just tell a straight story and be able to back it up with facts. Trump’s big lie led to sedition and the GOP even failed at that. Maybe if guys like Scalise learned to tell the truth, they and their party would have a shot in the future.
*****
Teacher’s unions have continually voted not to go back to teaching. Sure there is a certain amount of danger but if cops, firemen, postal workers, store clerks, garbage men and a whole selection of workers who serve the public can go back to work so can the teachers. Educating our children is one of the most important jobs extant. I have always supported teachers in their attempt to be paid according to their input into the nation’s social structure but now I also think they should teach.
*****
The discussion about bi-partisanship will just not go away. Not that we want it to but it appears that it really needs a new definition. The GOP thinks that it is encouraging bi-partisanship when it refuses to be agreeable or when it does not consider the needs of the American people. The GOP thinks the Democrats are refusing to be bi-partisan when they disagree with what the GOP wants.
The basis of bi-partisanship is reasonable people acting reasonably, but the GOP has not acted reasonably in so many years that they have forgotten how. They actually think that Trump’s tax bill was helpful to the great mass of Americans and not just them and their rich friends. They are still against Medicare for all. They still believe high tariffs against China help the American worker rather than costing him extra money on what he buys. Many think Trump actually did something about the Coronavirus and there are even some who still think the fat degenerate won the election.
If you think like that there is no way you will ever be able to work your way through the logic it takes to act in a bi-partisan manner. So let’s just forget it for the time being and concentrate on who won all three legislative branches of government.
*****
Republican Adam Kinsinger said something really cool this week. He actually admitted that Republicans have been running on fear for years when he quoted a fellow Republican. “Send me a donation, or Nancy Pelosi will kill your children.”
So where does that leave us? How can we expect the GOP to vote with intelligence or a conscience when we have elected the least intelligent, immoral and intellectually vacant assholes we could find in the swamp?
*****
Texas is in big trouble with the weather this winter. Most of the trouble comes from ignorance, idiocy and incompetence. It’s history of government officials not being intelligent or functional enough to deal with issues necessary to mitigate the effects of weather or anything else is an obvious problem. As if to prove that, this GOP controlled state has elected far too many idiots to run it. Both the present governor, Greg Abbott and the former Governor, Rick Perry have come out with statements about the situation that not even a moron like Marjorie Taylor Greene would buy. Perry from a nice safe space has proclaimed that Texans will put up with even more hardship rather than let the Federal Government into their affairs. Has he asked any Texans living in homes without heat, water, food or electricity if they are still as staunchly anti-Fed as they used to be?
Governor Abbott has proclaimed that the breakdown stems from renewable energy. Really Greg? How much have the fossil fuel boys been shoveling into your bank account to get you to make that statement? Renewables account for only 7% of Texas energy; that leaves 93% of the population not getting any help from the fossil fuel people. I wonder how those Texans that are freezing their asses off with no electricity or water, feel about their gas & oil suppliers now? The problem is pretty simple. As the use of fossil fuel has became less and less profitable the billionaires who own the fuel and generating companies like Ercot, have colluded to avoid regulations that were put in place a decade ago to force them to upgrade their already disintegrating facilities in order to be able to deal with weather being caused by the carbon released into the atmosphere by the operations of these same companies.
The legislation passed in 2011 demanded that the energy suppliers upgrade all facilities to a point where they could withstand the ravages of ultra cold temperatures and general winter weather. But since the companies were no longer making big enough profits to satisfy their greedy billionaire owners, they just ignored the legislation and allowed their facilities to rot away. Result; they crashed when the weather got too cold. This crash was abetted by the fact that Texas has it’s own power grid. It is the only state in the country that is not hooked up the two power grids that supply the rest of the United States. Is this, as the idiot Rick Perry stated because they don’t want to be in business with the United States government? They’d love us to think that but the real reasons are first because the big oil and gas interests will do anything to avoid any kind of federal regulation and second because Texans have always had dreams of being their own country. Now they have gotten an object lesson on what that means and they have failed miserably.
The reality: fossil fuel is dead and the sooner Texas and its dumb legislators realize it and stop taking money from the fossil fuel interests to repair plant that is no longer functional, the state will be a hell of a lot better off.
*****
This week The Republican Party published a newsletter laying out a potential platform for the coming two years leading up to the 2022 elections. If any of you out there were expecting anything different than the deranged nonsense that the GOP has been spitting out under Trump, you will be sorely disappointed. Continuing their policies of lies and deceit, the GOP begins by calling the Democrats, “Big Government Socialists.” Sure there are some socialist leaning progressives among the Democrats, but this is a middle of the road dominated party and anything but socialistic. But that’s just the beginning.
Next the Republicans promise to preserve everything they have accomplished in the last four years. I assume that includes ripping babies from their mother’s arms, insulting the families of war hero’s, ignoring the most deadly pandemic in a century and destroying the economy, because that is precisely what they have accomplished.
They next state they are dedicated to putting America first, which is amusing when one considers that their record under Trump has resulted from America stepping down from its world leadership and assuming the mantle of a banana Republic.
This nonsense is accompanied by a survey, which asks questions like; are you a Republican or a socialist?
The multiple-choice question that asks what the reader thinks is the most important issue facing the country does not include among its possible answers anything about: the pandemic, the crashing economy, education, anything about healthcare except the cost, unemployment, poverty or the environment. They want you to consider only stuff like the Second Amendment and draining the swamp, where they all live.
As for the rest of the questions, the form suggests you should agree that: the Democrats “socialist” agenda would be bad for America, that the Green New Deal would be terrible for America, that media companies like Twitter and Facebook be prohibited from removing liars from their sites because in doing so they are violating First Amendment Rights, that we finish The Wall and that tax breaks should be reserved for hard working (read rich) citizens.
If you haven’t yet grasped it, the point is the GOP hasn’t changed one iota with the departure of Donald Trump. It is still, despite having a significant number of responsible members, being led by a coterie of scum sucking swine whose only interest is the preservation of power and their personal bottom line.
The current attempts to steal voting rights all across states that currently have GOP legislatures is only one example of the ways they are trying desperately to steal Americans right to vote. They couldn’t legitimately win the last election, they couldn’t lie their way to victory after it was over, so they are trying to steal the right to vote from those who legitimately own it just as much as they do.
These crooks and power brokers have to be stopped and the best way to do it is criminal prosecution of individual cases plus flooding the polling places at the next election and voting them out of office. Send them back to their former jobs as dentists, postal clerks, garbage collectors and petty criminals. We don’t want them in Washington; they are killing America.
*****
Some fat little slug named David Ball, the chairman of the Washington County GOP in Pennsylvania, came on TV this week and in a blundering attempt to censure Pat Toomey, actually stated that his party “did not send Toomey to congress to vote his conscience and did not send him to Washington to do the right thing, or whatever…”
Why did they send him? Did they want him to lie like the ex-president or the scumbags who follow him? Following your conscience and doing the right thing are exactly what we want from our elected officials. Ball is definitely what we do not want.
,