Rep Byron Donalds of Florida was interviewed on Meet the Press last Sunday and he came across as a thoughtful, intelligent guy. So why does he back Tr ump all the way? Because along with those qualities, he is plagued with a desire for power, which overcomes all his better qualities. Donalds sees the Vice Presidency in his reach, so just like many of his GOP contemporaries, he stays busy kissing Trumps ass in hopes of getting that nod. He’s even gone so far, while addressing a group of black voters to say that Jim Crow was good because black families stayed together, and that Lyndon Johnson ruined it all. It’s a shame, because this is a guy who might turn out to be a pretty good politician if he can ever get out from under, the influence of the criminal Trump.
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Record temperatures sweep across the nation as if to prove to the deniers that climate change is real. The last ten years have been the hottest in recorded history and it looks like this year will continue to set records.
You can babble all you want about how climate change is a liberal fantasy but when the sun burns a hole in your bald spot it’s past time to pay attention. It isn’t as if the climate deniers were just a bunch of well-meaning protestors basing their points of view on misinterpreted science. That might be excusable. No, these deniers are doing it for one reason and one reason only. Profit! There would be no climate denier movement if it were not for big oil and big coal battling logic and the survival of the planet to retain their profits and build their empires.
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It had to happen… and it finally has. Masking during the COVID crisis, intended to protect us from the dangers of infection, has evolved into a very different danger.
I can clearly remember hating my mask and finding it very difficult to breathe through but wearing it because it created a small safe zone that was available outside in that dangerous, germ filled world.
Now the crisis has mitigated, but the world through which we walk is still filled with things that can kill you, mostly represented by young men wearing masks to protect their identity when they commit crimes.
The mask legislation has already begun, and it will quickly be followed by the appeals to courts all over the country whining about the unconstitutionality of the legislation.
Thugs and muggers will demand their constitutional right to wear a mask to protect them from disease, while the citizenry will know that all they actually want is for the masks to protect them from identification.
It is a battle that will go all the way to our fractured Supreme Court, where instead of deciding an issue of constitutionality it will be made into a political football.
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Noise! New York was never a quiet city, but the noise level encountered on the streets during a typical day seems to have risen far past any level of endurance. Yes, I know I’m just a cranky old man, that’s why I named this thing what I did, but that doesn’t make the noise level on the average street any more endurable. There is the unavoidable cacophony of the trucks, the motorcycles, and the subways adding to the planes taking off from LaGuardia, and the helicopters cruising from God knows where to who the hell cares where? There’s not much we can do about that or for that matter, the noise of construction if you are unlucky enough to be stuck in a location where something has gone awry and needs to be fixed. But there is so much noise production that it seems unfair to also have to put up with noise, that is unnecessarily mandated, supposedly for our own good.
Yes, I have something in mind and I’m sure you can’t wait for me to get to it. It’s the beepers on all construction equipment that beep when a vehicle backs up. I know, it beeps to warn people who are in a location that may not be in the driver’s sight lines, or to look out for the moving vehicle. The huge backhoe that has been operating on my block since three o’clock in the morning, three weeks ago, has no fear of knocking off a pedestrian. The street is closed, and the digging and backfilling is just about the only activity extant. But still the beeper goes on, and on, and on.
Given the circumstances, the immediate question is, why not turn the damn thing off? There’s plenty of noise being created by the backhoe without it. The answer, of course, is you can’t turn it off. There is no shut off switch, a crime perpetrated by the designer that should be seen as a capital offense.
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Our government was established in three separate sections, independent of each other, but with oversite over each other, to allow each section, Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme court to act independently but not without controls.
Suddenly we are finding out that what we thought was a nice, neat package is quickly falling apart.
Congress is a cacophonous mess that can’t get out of its own way and can get nothing done. The Presidency, as Trump has already shown us, is simply a role that can offer dictatorial powers to a man with little personal morality. And now we see that a Supreme Court, which until now has been allowed to discipline itself, has finally stocked itself with a significant number of ungoverned personalities that function with no regard for any moral restrictions. It has shown itself to actually be worse than the other two/thirds of the governing trio.
Previous Courts have been fortunate in gaining Justices who possessed a sense of propriety. And while perhaps leaning in one political direction or another, they understood the responsibilities of the office. They repressed those political leanings with enough vigor to do honor to their decision making.
The current Court, already disgraced by the, all but criminal actions of Clarence Thomas and the undisguised conservative leanings of Samuel Alito, has been further sullied by the addition of three justices, appointed by Donald Trump, whose only reason for being seems to have been an allegiance to certain Trumpian principals, thus leaving the Court with a 5-3 Trumpian advantage that can no longer be swayed by Chief Justice Roberts when he seeks balance.
This leaves the nation at the mercy of political hacks like Trump who openly influence the Court or seek the approbation of the Court in order to achieve their personal or political ends.
I am of course, referring to the Court’s treatment of the stolen classified files case, in which the Court first agreed to take the case, which, by consensus of most neutral lawyers, they should never have done, and then slowed the process so that it could never be adjudicated before the election.
So, what do we do? Very simple. We must vote for congressmen who will create and pass laws that will hold members of the Supreme Court to credible moral standards and for a President who stands behind the need to appoint justices who will understand their duty to the nation and its citizens in all their decision making.
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