A fine pack of morons are we

The networks reported breathlessly that the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers linked arms during the playing of the national anthem last night in a show of solidarity in the face of criticism of players by Cheeto Jesus.   Meanwhile, the republicans in congress unveiled their "tax reform" bill.  It is a shameless giveaway to the very rich donor class, but as usual, everyone from the GOP is telling us it is a middle class tax cut.  They will trot out a few provisions which will provide some crumbs to the average taxpayer while obfuscating provisions which shower wealth on the 1% and set the stage for calls to further shred the social safety net which the 99% depend on.  I wish someone would stand up and tell people if they want nice things they need to pay taxes.  Instead, as Steve Bannon characterized the voters of Alabama, we act like a pack of morons when tax cuts are dangled in front of us.   Infrastructure, social services, education and all the other trappings of modern government depend on the willingness of people to support these functions.  The momentary thrill of a few extra dollars in our paychecks should not obscure the long lasting harm we are doing to the foundation of government and its ability to meet our needs.  The unfolding disaster in Puerto Rico is a reminder of how fragile the social compact can become in the absence of a robust government response fueled by the tax payments of ordinary and wealthy citizens alike. 

Suffering in the Commonwealth

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I am thinking Puerto Rico may fast becoming tRump's Katrina.  As it becomes clearer by the day that FEMA is overwhelmed by the confluences of Harvey, Irma and Maria, residents of the Commonwealth are starting to die due to shortages of fuel, medicine and medical care.   Had the full resources of the Department of Defense been deployed immediately after Maria cleared PR, the first response would have been robust and the hardest hit areas would be receiving aid by now.  Instead, news organizations are the first into remote regions of the island and residents are asking where is the relief.   Meanwhile, with the bill for rebuilding large parts of Texas, Florida and PR said to reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars, Cheeto Jesus is pitching a tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.  I really thought G.W.Bush was the worst president in my lifetime, but he looks like the father of our country compared to the malevolent clown now ensconced in the Oval Office. 

Living down to expectations

Just when you think it can't get any worse, the citizens living in the state of Alabama nominated a sweaty, bible thumping ignoramus who is virtually assured of election to "The world's greatest deliberative body" in November.  This is a man who has been held in contempt by the US Supreme Court for instructing state employees to refuse to recognize same sex marriage.  The rule of law is something Moore recognizes only when it aligns with his prejudices.  He will replace the ethically compromised Luther Strange, who was an interim appointment by a corrupt governor who needed to stop Strange's investigation of his sexual peccadillos.  Admittedly the electorate in Alabama was presented with 2 seriously flawed candidates.  But they didn't disappoint.  Now we will be treated to the spectacle of another racist, misogynist, homophobic theocrat holding forth in the Senate on these and other retrograde policies. 

Sandy, Katrina, Harvey, Maria responses. Rinse and repeat

As millions of US citizens in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands huddle in the heat and darkness, waiting for relief, it's starting to look like a familiar story.   The GOP politicians no one seems to want in charge are still there, ignoring the calls for help.  The "president" is too busy inciting nuclear war or NFL destruction to worry about the humanitarian crisis about to unfold in the Caribbean.  Where is "Heckuva job Brownie" when you need him?  It's too bad there isn't a Trump property in or near San Juan.   Seriously, it is time for someone to step up and demand relief for the victims of Maria, before the death toll spirals into a third world nightmare.

We are so screwed

It was very warm and sunny weekend at Casa Monzeglio.  Normally at this point in the gardening season we are flirting with frost.   However, as I was bunching basil and cilantro on Friday evening for the Farmers' market on Saturday it felt like midsummer.  The only jarring note was the sunset at 7 p.m. instead of 9.   At this point in the season I am in harvest mode, but if we had any moisture, there would be an explosion of weed seedlings.  It hasn't rained in 20 days and only brief showers are predicted for later this week, heralding a cold front which may finally usher in fall weather.  Meanwhile, very little has been heard from climate change deniers.  After Harvey, Irma and Maria, most Americans are shell shocked by the constant drumbeat of superlatives used to describe these storms.  Coupled with the unusually warm fall weather across much of the country, the flacks for the fossil fuel industry are lying low.   This is cold comfort to the millions of Americans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands who will shortly be running out of food and potable water and will have no electricity for months.  The GOP is still trying to demonstrate it is capable of governing the country by passing a healthcare bill.  The problem is virtually any organization related to health care is overwhelmingly against the bill, decrying it as cruel and unusual punishment for millions of Americans.  As Paul Krugman points out this morning in the NYT, the republican party has lied its way to control of Congress and the presidency, and now it must deliver legislation based on those lies.  I can hardly wait to see what the party of "fiscal responsibility" does for tax reform, aside from blowing up the deficit to provide tax cuts for wealthy donors who have threatened to turn of the cash spigot if their concerns are not addressed.  Faced with the need to deliver on their lies, the GOP has turned into a pretzel in an attempt to reconcile the fantasy they fed the base with the reality of governance.  We are sooo screwed...

Health Care by Dummies

As the bad publicity and opposition to the egregious Graham-Cassidy "health care"  bill mounts, it is becoming increasingly unlikely to pass.  Put together in a back room with even less care than Frankenstein's monster, the legislation is by turns, cruel, incompetent and stupid.  Personally, I think Lindsay Graham was made a co-sponsor solely because of his friendship with John McCain.  When asked about specifics of the bill it was obvious he has no idea of what he was putting his name on.  Block grants to the states is about as far as he is conversant with the bill.  The Louisiana senator who also put his name on the bill is really getting raked over the coals by Jimmy Kimmel after his sanctimonious blather about protecting low income families with sick children.  The effect of the bill would be the exact opposite, and he is being relentlessly criticized  for it.   As Paul Krugman put it in his column today, regardless of whether this piece of crap is passed, it shows the real disease that is affecting the GOP and that sickness is not going away anytime soon.   This travesty of a political party has distilled the essence of everything wrong in America and made it the action agenda.  What is wrong with these  people?

Pre Apocolypse Now

Magnitude 7 and 8 earthquakes in Mexico.  Category 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.  Trump threatening North Korea with "total destruction".  I wonder if somehow Gaia or Mother Earth is reacting to the aftermath of the election of Cheeto Jesus.  It would certainly seem like the natural world is preparing us for disaster.

Saving the world

Cheeto Jesus will take the bully pulpit of the U.N. today and may the flying spaghetti monster save us all.   It seems that all the rogue regimes in the world will be in his crosshairs.  Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and anyone else who has crossed his orangeness since November.  Despite the gravity of the situation and the venue, the US will probably be a laughingstock at the end of the day as the so-called leader of the free world vents in one and two syllables.

Continuing perfection

The run of nearly perfect weather has continued through the weekend and promises to run through the entire week.  Lows in the 50s and highs in the upper 70s and low 80s has energized the late plantings in the garden.   Some late seedings of basil, cilantro and dill will be large enough to harvest before the end of the farmers' market.   It looks like even the spinach planted on the 2nd of Sept. will be big enough for a cutting before really cold weather arrives.  This season has been a lesson in patience.   Keep planting even in the face of horrific weather and at least this year you will have been rewarded.  Even the swede midge pest must have taken an early vacation.  I was spraying organic pesticide and fungicide on the late cauliflower last night and noticed that a large percentage of plants were actually making heads!    Here's hoping October is as clement as this month.  I may actually run out of things to harvest.

What if

What if James Comey hadn't issued his infamous letter on Oct. 28,2016 insinuating he was about to re-open the investigation into Hillary's e-mail server?  What if the Russians had been called out by Facebook for using social media to target undecided voters?  What if the media treated each Trump scandal on a par with the only Clinton scandal they could find?  Obviously if any of the above had or had not happened we would be talking about President Clinton right now.  That is the gist of Clinton's take on "What Happened" in 2016.  But in a wide ranging interview with Rachel Maddow last night, she also offered her take on the tRump presidency so far and it was devastating in its comprehensive condemnation of both domestic and foreign policy.  Unfortunately, based on the likely audience, she was preaching to the choir.   Maybe she could book a segment on "Fox and Friends" next week!

The whiff of totalitarianism

That the White House press secretary would suggest an ESPN commentator should be fired for tweeting that tRump is a white supremacist should probably not shock anyone.  Sarah Huckabee Sanders, aka the spawn of Huck is as clueless as her predecessor and even less shamed in the performance of her job than the unlamented Sean Spicer.  The erosion of democracy this represents is shocking and harks back to the Nixon presidency and its infamous "enemies list".  Nixon's imperial presidency was an obvious threat to democracy and even republicans were willing to stand against it when evidence of obstruction of justice became overwhelming.  Today's GOP is unable and unwilling to process the damage being done to the republic by this administration.  Russia intervened in our elections to help The Donald get elected.  This is now incontrovertible.  where is the outrage among republicans.  If the shoe was on the other foot, Hillary would already be impeached and we would be wondering if there was a Senate republican who would vote to acquit.  Thanks to the hapless nature of the administration we have not stumbled too far down the road to dictatorship, but more capable men than Trump are now taking notes on how to manipulate public opinion and consolidate power.  We are closer to Putin's Russia than most people think.

Gardening update

We are finally getting the weather we should have had for the last month or so.   Clear, warm days and cool nights.  After last week's cold and rain, it is taking most crops a few days to get back to growing again.  The brassicas should be shining right now, but the insidious swede midge has attacked virtually all the cole crops and it looks like I wasted a lot of time on the broccoli and cauliflower.   The only way to beat this pest organically is to not grow the crop for at least 2 years and hope there are no wild host crops like mustard to sustain the midge population.  It would be interesting to find out how the pest came to inhabit Almena Gardens.  Meanwhile, the winter squash crop is maturing.  The early wet weather this summer greatly reduced the number of vines and a weed infestation hampered what survived, but there is a crop to be harvested.  Lettuce, kale, collards, cukes, zukes and herbs are still abundant and likely to last until frost.  Overall it has been a frustrating season with a few bright spots.  Maybe it is time to start a local chapter of Gardener's Anonymous.

Irmageddon

While the impact on the US will be devastating in the short term;  millions without power for possibly weeks on end and some horrific damage in the Florida Keys, it pales compared to the damage Irma inflicted on many small islands in the Caribbean as well as Cuba.  In some cases it will be decades before normality returns, especially for the poor and uninsured.  Reporters have described many islands as resembling pictures of bombed out cities.  Having seen some pictures this morning, I would agree with that assessment.  Many of these islands depend on the tourist industry for survival.  It is hard to imagine they will have the resources to rebuild in time for any business this year and even next.  What happens when the next monster storm batters them again.  The infrastructure that is built should be hardened as for a war.  In the meantime, the people who have to deal with the aftermath of Irma will need support.  They will be forgotten as soon as the next big thing happens.

Disaster Porn and the denials of climate change

Although Hurricane Irma left a path of apocalyptic disaster through the Caribbean on its way to Florida, the media paid only middling attention to the travails of those hit with the full fury of the storm.  From Wednesday on, the obsessive focus was on Florida and the devastation about to be visited on its residents.  While there was some justification; after all, Florida contains the hopes and fears of over 20 million people, after a couple of days of non-stop coverage, anything less than an end of the world scenario would seem to be an anticlimax.  You could almost see the reporters salivating at the prospect of a Category 5 storm hitting Miami Beach.  Reputations are made or lost covering gigantic disasters and this appeared to be one of them.  By Sunday, as the storm lost strength and hit the sparsely populated Keys you sensed the news anchors losing interest and almost hoping the whole thing would go away and let them go back to worrying about who is in or out of tRump's inner circle.  I guess that the coverage was no better or worse than that of previous storms, but with the internet and social media piling on, it appears to me we are in for a proctologist's view of natural disasters, at least in these United States.  Other places not so much.

The newly normal

As Irma barrels towards South Florida for a Sunday rendezvous many people are wondering if this is just an anomalous hurricane season or is it the new normal.  In 2005 we had several killer hurricanes in quick succession and everyone was wondering the same thing.  I think the hurricane seasons will come and go, but the increasing temperatures of the oceans will magnify the storms that do occur until the Harveys and Irmas will become accepted as inevitable.  Despite Rush Limbaugh's complaint that the Librul media is inventing these storms, the 50 inch rainfalls and 185 MPH winds are not some left wing plot.  If anything they are proof of what Al Gore and 97% of climate scientists have been telling us for over 20 years.  Humans have been altering the planet for millennia, but in the last 200 years with the advent of the carbon based economy our potential to cause a global catastrophe has become a real possibility.  I hope the correct lessons are being learned in the wake of the latest storms, but I wouldn't bet on it.

See no evil

One of the nice polite republicans on NPR this morning was interviewing Ta Nehisi Coates regarding his recent article in The Atlantic.   Coates theory of the 2016 presidential election is racism played a large part in the eventual election of Cheeto Jesus.   Of course, I have held that theory since before the election occurred.  That a manifestly unqualified mountebank, racist and misogynist could prevail over a qualified albeit flawed woman candidate is a triumph of prejudice over sober judgment.  The interviewer on NPR kept insisting that the common sense wisdom that tRump is the result of white working class resentment at being left behind in a globalized society.  Coates agreed that was part of the answer, but pointed out the GOP nominee was supported overwhelmingly by whites of all socio economic classes.  That they knew he was a disaster of a candidate and likely to remain one as president or in the words of one supporter, "he's an asshole, but he's our asshole", pretty much clinches Coates' argument.  The inability or more likely the plain refusal of many whites to admit they wanted a white man as president to cleanse the republic of 8 years of blackness is a stain that will mark our democracy for decades.

Racism and the modern republican party

The mainstream media and quite a few liberal bloggers continue to make excuses for the obvious racism of the republican party and this reticence needs to be called out.  Much as the democratic party of the late 19th through the mid 20th century was the home to a large contingent of racists, the republicans from the 1970s and forward have become the preferred refuge of racists seeking political power.  Membership in the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood will not help you gain a national following, but it will make you a punching bag for those who are less extreme, but more dangerous to the body politic.  While the overt racism of dixiecrats largely excused the politics of South Boston and other democratic enclaves in the north, the modern republican party does not differentiate southern racists from their northern cousins.  Support for Trump and his followers may have been less in Pennsylvania than in Alabama, but it was sufficient to elect him.  the hunt for the semi-mythical white voter who backed Obama, but voted for Trump because of his economic message is a fool's errand.  The GOP successfully painted Obama and Hillary as out of touch elitists and Trump as the people's herald in one of the most blatantly racist and misogynistic campaigns of all time.  White resentment won the election, pure and simple.  Never underestimate the darker side of human nature.

The beatings will continue until morale improves

As Irma bears down on Florida and may well eclipse the damage Harvey did to Texas, the republicans in Congress are already squabbling about how relief for the regions in question will be handled.   Attach aid funding to a debt ceiling or not; deal with democrats or go it alone; express faux outrage at the entire process.   Continue fiddling while Rome burns seems to be their go to option.  Two storms in two weeks that are probably going to be called "thousand year events" and the leaders of the GOP and the doofus in chief will still deny the warming oceans as the cause of both Harvey and Irma.   What to do about the implications of these weather events should have rocketed to the top of the legislative agenda.  Instead we will be treated to an episode of "Keep moving along, nothing to see here" as the planet starts down the path of destruction.  The collective we voted for these incompetents.  How many more storms will it take to realize the course we are on and start making drastic corrections.  For my grandchildren's sake I hope it is sooner rather than later.

Post labor day blues

Back from the Labor Day weekend.  It looks like a tough week ahead in domestic politics.  The situation in Southeast Texas is still horrendous, a new monster hurricane is barreling towards Florida, Trump will announce the cancellation of the DACA program and on it goes. 

Climate Change anyone

According to one columnist for the NYT, in the 1980s there were 9 storms which caused over a billion dollars of damage in the US.   Since 2010 there have been 20, including Hurricane Harvey which is estimated to have caused at least 75 billion in property loss.  I think many in the media are focusing on the short term story of the flooding and displacement caused by Harvey, but are neglecting or underestimating the suffering and pain the Houston area will endure in the medium and long term.    Tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands will be homeless for months, if not years.  Economic activity will grind to a  halt until reconstruction starts and who is going to pay for it all.   The  haphazard development which set the stage for the disaster is not likely to change, so this could all be replayed in the near future.  The Gulf remains extremely warm and another storm could conceivably hit the area again this year.   Meanwhile, Cheeto Jesus promises help on the one hand while the House plans to gut FEMA to help pay for the wall with Mexico.  Texas voted overwhelmingly for tRump, so I guess a little schadenfruede is in order.  But in the long term, we are all in this together and we better start dealing with the implications Harvey has exposed.