The rail disaster in East Palestine, Ohio is a direct result of the elimination of rail safety regulations during the Trump administration. There is no doubt that a Biden visit would have brought better press, but the responsibility for the lack of safety regulations lies directly with the GOP members of congress who took with both hands from the rail industry to eliminate the regulations that made this accident inevitable.
Meanwhile the residents of the area most affected by this derailment are overwhelmingly Republican and voted for those who got rid of the safety regs, so they have no one but themselves to blame for this mess. Maybe next time they will consider policies when they vote instead of just the bigotry and hatred the candidates bring to the table.
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Just watched Mary Anne Williamson being interviewed about her candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Sure, she’s the longest of shots but she makes a hell of a lot of sense, and that’s really hard to say about many of those running for either side. We need people like her just to keep the rest of the candidates honest. She reminds me of those movie candidates to whom no one gives a chance, but that end up with the nomination.
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Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb was discussing the theory that there has been a ton of conjecture lately about the possibility that the COVID virus escaped a lab in China. Intelligence agencies seem to be split on whether it came from a lab, or from a wet market or neither, but from some other, as yet unrevealed source. Congress is looking into this and has formed a committee that according to its chairman is doing yeoman work to get some kind of definitive answer and also to come up with procedures by which this kind of experimentation and research can be safely controlled. This all sounds great until one finds out that the committee has members like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yup, the psychic sociopath herself. What is someone like that doing on a scientific panel? Yes, if you are putting together a panel on the new Witches of Salem, by all means grab her up. If it’s sex trafficking in the Trump White House, demand her presence. But this isscience and there is no place for the critically insane in this investigation. Putting Marjorie on a scientific panel is on its face, beyond ridiculous. She needs to be left home to practice her new hobby of public speech interruption.
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Chris Sununu, the GOP Governor of New Hampshire, who has always tried to sell himself as a reasonable Republican, ate a snake this Sunday when he tried to protect the GOP Media empire of Rupert Murdoch against the accusation that they deliberately lied about the fake election noise from Trump while actually knowing the truth. This, coming from a guy who has always tried to sell himself as a “good Republican,” is really depressing to those who hoped there actually were good Republicans.
Chris is one of those people who always wants everyone to believe that both sides have good and bad. The problem is the amount of good and bad, and in this case, as in most others, the GOP js overwhelmingly loaded with bad. Murdoch’s minions have given up the concept of reporting and replaced it with the need to keep the base happy and the stock price up. Sure, opinions can differ but when you openly admit that you know what you are saying on camera is false, it’s time to give up TV and look for one of those greeter’s jobs in Vegas.
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Watched a bunch of interviews from CPAC and every time things turned to the war in Ukraine it was the same story. The people were all into backing the Ukrainians but didn’t want to spend any money to do it. How the hell do they think they could fight the war without spending money? Even without Ukraine the biggest item on our budget is always the military, even when we aren’t fighting anybody. But the thing that bothered me most was the fact that none of these ignorant fools seemed to understand that if the Ukrainians stop fighting the Russians now, we will be fighting them in a year or two when they invade Poland or Finland or some other country that borders them. The Ukrainians are watching their sons die now so that our sons don’t have to die in a few years, because if Russia wins this fight they aren’t about to stop at the Ukrainian border. Putin has said more than once that the greatest political catastrophe in history was the fall of the Soviet Union and that he feels it is his mission to get it back to where it was. That means expanding once again across the borders of all the bordering countries and that means World War III and we will be in it up to our eyeballs. So, if you don’t want to spend a couple of bucks now to keep your kid from getting his head blown off in a couple of years you are a pretty bad parent and a dumb as dog shit human being.
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It has been established from military sources that the balloons we shot down after the Chinese balloon were worth about $12 apiece. That’ $36 for the trio. But the missiles we used to shoot them down cost over $400,000 each. That’s over a million two hundred thousand right into the toilet. No wonder our military budget, the one for which we never have an actual budget, is so out of control. I saw a picture of one of these missiles. It’s under twenty feet long and about two feet in diameter. If it really did cost over $400,000, one must assume that around $390,000 was stolen by the manufacturer. It’s this lack of oversight by the Pentagon that keeps our military budget equal to the next ten nations combined. It’s exactly this kind of wasteful behavior that leads to thousands of tanks rotting in the Arizona desert and an F35 that has, after a dozen years, cost over a trillion bucks even though it is still unable to engage in combat.
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Larry Somers revealed in an interview last week that an international banking fund exists from which Russia can be made to pay for all the damage they have done to Ukraine and all the human rights violations they have committed. This fund, the name of which he did not mention, appears to have existed for some decades and has been used in the past to do exactly what Somers has suggested it be used for this time.
From what he said it may be deduced that a number of countries have been made to pay up from monies they have deposited in the fund. It seems that the fund holds trillions of dollars. It is commonly known that Germany and Japan were made to pay huge reparations after WWII, but Somers did not say whether or not the offending nations were able to pay with money they had deposited in this fund or if they had to come up with money from their own, already depleted, treasuries. It is a way to force Putin to pay for, at least, the physical damage he has done in Ukraine.