Policy and process

    The liberal standard bearers, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were front and center last night telling us how we will get "Medicare for All", how they will repair infrastructure and fix the immigration system.   Both sounded well prepared and ready.  Unfortunately, CNN aggressively cut off debate in most cases just as it was getting started and interrupted most debaters before they could fully answer questions and comments from others on the stage.  The Divine Mrs. M gave up in disgust after an hour of rudeness.
    Beyond the stupidity of the format, the CNN moderators seemed to be acting as stand ins for Faux News.  They repeatedly echoed GOP talking points and tried to force candidate to defend against bad faith republican arguments.
    Finally, despite their basic agreement that health care is a basic human right, none of the candidates were able to articulate a plan to combat opposition to government managed health care.  That the Senate will probably be controlled by republicans in 2021 and will continue to kill democratic big picture plans is a given, but no one seemed to have any idea on how to deal with that obstruction.

Turning up the racist rhetoric

     I doubt the president's* advisors are really happy about his race-baiting tirades against "the squad" and now Elijah Cummings.   At this point anyone a shade darker than Melania who votes for tRump will be someone with an identity problem.
      The Donald is not a student of history or of much of anything, but he does know how to connect with the fears and hatred many whites have for people of color, whether Mexican immigrants or the descendents of slaves.   There is a strain of fear and loathing for the "other" which goes back to our founding fathers.  The elites who guided the nascent American republic through the Revolution and its formative years had very little respect for most of their countrymen, be they black or white.  However, they used the prejudices of the majority white population to secure their own power.
      Fast forward to the Civil War and reconstruction.  The white planter class used the fear of working class whites of newly freed slaves to counter the efforts of northern republicans to lift the black population of the south.
      tRump's present day rhetoric is an echo of that sorry era of American history.   Yet working and middle class whites in America seem endlessly willing to swallow the demonization of their fellow Americans, even if it means voting for a mean spirited narcissist who cares not a fig for the problems which plague the white population.   For those who say "we are not that kind of people", I beg to differ.  

Another Day...

    There was another mass shooting yesterday at of all places, the Gilroy garlic festival.   I guess as long as large numbers of people gather in one place, depraved lunatics will take advantage to create mayhem.   I doubt many of these killers would be able or willing to add to the statistics if firearms were easier to obtain.  However, thanks to gun manufacturers and the NRA, easy access to the means of mass murder will continue.
     In gardening news, we are approaching peak production.  I have cut back somewhat on my later plantings and my CSA customers are almost in "No mas" territory as their shares begin to take up more and more space in their refrigerators.  Peppers will be available this week and tomatoes are not far behind, but as usual at this time of the year, rainfall is at a premium and yields depend on how much precipitation we receive during the August doldrums.

Cruel and Stupid

     I know I'm not the only one to point this out, but the tRump administration and its GOP enablers in Congress and red state legislatures will go down in history as perhaps the cruelest and most stupid US governments ever.
     In a recent post, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones points to a chart from the Bureau of Economic Research showing states which refused the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare have presided over more than 15,000 preventable deaths each year compared to states which accepted the federal funds.  As Drum points out, it would have cost them virtually nothing to do the expansion since it was paid for with funds they were already contributing to the system.   This is ideologically motivated cruelty.  All the states who refused the federal aid voted for tRump.
     Paul Krugman in the NYT today shows the stupid side of the administration.  Cheetolini likes to brag his tariffs have resulted in an increase in revenue, paid for by foreign governments.  But as Krugman points out, every item covered by tariffs has risen in price to reflect the fact that we, the consumer are actually paying for the tariffs.  In addition, the tax cut tRump likes to take credit for is actually a $40 billion bonanza for foreign investors who hold stock or equities in US corporations which have received the lion's share of the benefits of the cuts.  Meanwhile, revenues to the government are down about $140 billion this year.  That is the case for stupidity.
     Anyone without a vested financial interest in The Donald's government who continues to support it and its leader is participating in a monstrously stupid and cruel criminal enterprise.

The future is now

     Ted Lieu, a California congressman scored perhaps the biggest coup of the Mueller hearings yesterday when he walked the former Special Counsel into a blind alley where Mueller admitted the only thing standing in the way of indicting the president* for felony obstruction of justice was a ruling by the Office of Legal counsel stating a sitting president cannot be indicted during his term.  Mueller tried to walk back his answer, saying it was not the "correct" way to say it, but for those of us looking for a smoking gun, this is as close as it gets.
     Overall, the hearings were not must watch TV, as the witness looked every bit of his 75 years, asking for questions to be repeated either because his hearing aids were not working very well or he was confused by some of the compound questions being asked by his questioners.  Sadly, this decorated combat veteran and lifelong public servant (as well as a registered republican) was savaged by GOP members of both the judiciary and intelligence committees.   Blind loyalty to tRump will come back to haunt many of these weasels.
     The MSM has already weighed in and for the most part agree that Mueller's testimony did not "move the needle" on impeachment.  However, I think Lieu's question and Mueller's answer may be the key to further investigation and the opening of an impeachment inquiry.

One more time

     Mueller time, that is.  The famously "by the book" lawman will reluctantly testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees today in what is starting to look like a last ditch effort to build public support for the impeachment of Cheetolini.
     I think Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the democrats congressional leadership are looking for a poll showing a majority of Americans are in favor of tRump's removal from office before they begin the process.  Mueller's testimony will supposedly jump start the process.  However, I also believe the most interested viewers of these hearings have already made up their minds and the majority of my fellow countrymen are tired of the whole hand wringing process and will tune out.  I may be and hopefully will be proven wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it.

rearranging the deck chairs

     I rarely read the columns generated by Ross Douthat at the NYT.  He generally spouts theological nonsense informed by his Catholic upbringing and as a fellow traveler in the world of suburban catholicism I long ago diverged from his opinions.  However, today, Douthat speculated that the coming robot apocalypse predicted by many, including presidential hopeful Andrew Yang, is not going to happen as soon as many forecast.
     I read the entire screed, but beyond disagreeing with Douthat's conclusions,  I think he is missing the existential threat which makes the robot overlord scenario a moot point.  If/when climate change overtakes and destroys much of our productive capacity, especially in agriculture, who will care if a robot truck driver puts a human driver out of work.   I hope with all my heart we can solve the coming crisis and Artificial Intelligence will probably be a key player in the fight, but let's focus on what is the most dangerous challenge we face instead of using precious space to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Hot town...

    The northeast US finally got a taste of what 90% of the rest of the world has been dealing with.  In other words, it was ungodly hot and humid this past weekend.   My garden, which has struggled with wet and cool conditions through much of the season, looked prostrate by Sunday afternoon with even established plants wilting in the intense heat.  Fortunately, the mini heat wave broke last night and today's high will reach the low 70s.
     Of course the climate change deniers will continue to dispute the inevitability of the problems induced by anthropomorphic meddling.   A disputed paper published in a scientific journal posits a variation in our distance from the sun as the cause of the current climate gyrations.   Although the central thesis has already been debunked, the deniers will use the imprimatur of respectability granted by the publication to insist that dumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere has no effect on climate.   Somewhere, Carl Sagan weeps.

The Knee Jerks

    The "Send her home" chant hatefully sounded by the trumpanzees at Cheetolini's latest campaign rally is just the latest symptom of the white supremacist disease overtaking the party of Lincoln.  In a hate filled rant against Ilan Omar and the other members of "the squad", tRump continued to tear at the fabric of our democracy and lead his followers down the path to authoritarianism.
     How anyone whose ancestors made the perilous voyage to this country in search of a better life can applaud the racist tirades of the president* is way beyond my understanding.  My heritage is Italian and Irish and I hope only a minority of my fellow Irish/Italian Americans are in favor of branding those with a different lineage of somehow being less human than themselves and their families.   Both the Irish and the Italians were pictured as subhuman by the press and many in the public during the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries.
     Eventually we assimilated into the mainstream of American life.  Perhaps those who cheer on tRump's diatribes against the latest immigrants should consider going back to their ancestral homelands.   The knee jerk racism of tRump's fans is a disgrace and a repudiation of everything this country is supposed to stand for.

Dog days

        The expression the dog days comes from the fact Sirius, more commonly known as the dog star rises with the sun from July 3 to August 11.  This period coincides with the maximum warmth we get in many areas of the Northern Hemisphere.  It also is the most productive period in the garden.   Everything from lettuce to zucchini is making maximum growth now.  Unfortunately for growers, many people stop cooking during this time and sales of vegetables tend to plummet.  Vacations, heat and humidity are good excuses used by growers to explain lagging sales and abundant supplies.  It happens every year and yet we are always surprised by the phenomenon.

50 years ago

    Some days it seems like yesterday, others it feels like a geological age.  50 years ago I had just graduated from high school and was taking a few tentative steps toward independence during a summer which featured two of the most talked about events in our history; Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's landing on the moon and its counter culture equivalent, Woodstock.
    Unfortunately for me, I was keeping my head down and working all summer at a local nursery for money for college tuition while assiduously courting a certain local lady who would eventually become the Divine Mrs. M. .  The moon landing registered with me, but only peripherally.   I grew up during the space race and followed Alan Shepherd and John Glenn's exploits in the early 60s.   By the time of Apollo 11, many of us took the achievement for granted, assuming mission control would make sure the astronauts would make it there and back again.  No big deal.  The detail that made me proud was the Lunar Excursion Module or LEM which actually landed on the moon was built by a local company, Grumman Aerospace.
     My relationship to Woodstock was even more tenuous.  I heard about the massive traffic jams in the tiny community in upstate NY where the festival was held, but having never been north of NYC, the Catskills were Terra Incognita to me.  I was about as likely to guest on Apollo 11 as attend 3 days of Peace and Love.  As a clean cut teen who spent 8 years in Catholic school, I was suspicious and a little put off by marijuana puffing hippies and psychedelic rock bands.
     50 years on, I wish I had paid a little more attention to the historic trends rocking America, but in the small town world I grew up in, it took more self awareness than I possessed to do that.   All I can say is I was there at the time.

Racism and education

    Racism was the theme many columnists and pundits are exploring in the wake of Cheetolini's attacks on 4 women of color in Congress.   All of them approach the topic differently depending on their own racial identity and experience.  However, all of them start from the presumption that education can mitigate racism to a certain extent.
    Paul Krugman in the NYT takes the GOP to task for tolerating tRump's racism with virtually no pushback from prominent republicans.  He posits this is the endgame of the party's continuing efforts to make itself the party of white identity and supremacy.   Starting in the Nixon era the GOP realized that with the passage of Civil Rights bills by the democrats, racists, especially in the south suddenly without a party.  The republicans filled the gap and gradually expanded their share of the white vote while democrats became the defacto party of minorities and unionists.  Under the latest iteration of the GOP republicans have gone all in on the race issue.
     Jamelle Bouie in the same paper has a different take, reflecting his own heritage.   He sees tRump's call out of  AOC, Ilan Omar, Rashida Talib and Ayana Pressley as the naked racism it is.  He worries the GOP will become even more heavy handed as its numbers continue to shrink and the US becomes a truly multi-racial democracy.
     Finally, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones can hardly believe republicans have staked their existence on drumming up racial division.   He, Krugman and Bouie all assume most of the white working class  is racist and in thrall to republicans while college educated whites are more tolerant.  I hope in this case they are all wrong, but unfortunately, my own experience with many people in the North Country tends to verify their thesis.   Drum comes to the conclusion that people of good will must come together and crush the party of racism and expunge a dark moment in our history.

The Fire next time

     It looks as though New Orleans dodged the water bullet over the weekend.  By missing the largest part of Tropical storm Barry's precipitation, the beleaguered levee system was able to keep the city dry for the most part.  However, we are at the very beginning of the hurricane season and NOLA can't continue to count on missing storms as a strategy.
     Meanwhile, in India, a city of over 8 million people is about to run out of water.  The implications of that are terrifying.   There is no way even fleets of water tankers can alleviate that problem.  With most of the sub continent dependent on the increasingly problematic monsoon season to recharge aquifers and reservoirs and haphazard development destroying the land's carrying capacity, people on that side of the world are encountering another side to the climate crisis.
     We need to mobilize now to deal with both of the above problems.

Good News/Bad News

      Sometimes, politics is a lot like farming.  No matter how much good weather and timely rainfall you get, a 2 minute thunderstorm can undo weeks of crop growth.  Similarly, an issue which triumphs several times can be brought down by an untimely judicial opinion.
      My garden received a timely 3/4 inch of rain last night which will keep things growing through the weekend.  Meanwhile, in the Canadian growing region where I do a lot of summertime business, a heavy rain and hail event pretty much destroyed at least one growers harvestable lettuce.
    To carry on the analogy, despite the success of Obamacare in reducing the number of uninsured people in the US and majority support for it in the public at large, a couple of republican judges will presumably rule in favor of a ridiculous argument against the law.  It will likely appear in the Supreme Court again where John Roberts will hold the law's fate in his hands alone.  Such are the vagaries of weather and politics.

Hello, Ms. American Pie

    With  apologies to Don Maclean, I rearranged the first line of his iconic song with its reference to levees (why did he drive to it and why was it dry?).   Louisiana and the American Midwest are about to find out what will happen if the levees get too wet.  The Mississippi has been flooding Louisiana and the areas around New Orleans since the spring.  Should proto hurricane Barry dump up to 30 inches of rain on the state, there is a pretty good chance the levees protecting NOLA will breach and cause a Katrina like flood, possibly even worse.
      More troubling for the country as a whole is the very real possibility the Mississippi could change course and join the Atchafalaya river on a different path to the Gulf of Mexico.  If this happens, the damage to trade, both domestically and internationally, would be incalculable.   Much of the industrial and agrarian trade from the US to the world flows down the mighty Mississippi and closing it to navigation for years would probably cause an immediate global panic.   I have scant confidence the tRump administration could deal with such a situation.
      Meanwhile, on a more personal level, a childhood idol of mine, Jim Bouton died yesterday.   Bouton was revered and reviled for his tell all book on major league baseball.  Ball Four detailed the tawdry side of the game, revealing many players as huge man children whose sole talent was playing the American pastime better than 99% of their fellows.   Descriptions of  marital infidelity, casual drug consumption and petty vendettas put off many players and sportswriters, but the very people who criticized the book ensured its success.   As an 11 year old besotted with the Yankees at the end of one dynasty, Bouton, who won 20 games in 1963 was one of my heroes.  RIP Jim.

What really matters

    I was going to write about the citizenship question on the census and the continuing assault on Obamacare and what these two issues say about our democracy.   Then, I checked the weather.
     Although the local forecast seems like a pretty tame summer prediction; hot and humid with a chance of thunderstorms tomorrow, there was an add on story which caught my eye.  It seems we have broken the record for most rainfall in the US during a 12 month period with a nationwide average over 37 inches. The kicker is the previous record was set last month and chances are we will break the record again this month.
   A warming world is one in which we can expect huge precipitation events due to warming oceans evaporating into the atmosphere.   The huge load of moisture will then be steered over land where it will fall as rain.  This is the same process we have always observed, but now on steroids due to human induced climate change.   Although attempts to game our electoral system by republicans are despicable, if we don't do something to mitigate our free form science experiment with climate, in the long run their shenanigans won't matter.

The fog of scandal

      Another day in the tRump administration.   At least four new scandals, any one of which would have derailed any previous president, are being covered.   The Epstein arrest which implicates our fearless leader who vouched for the sex-trafficker's  character, his boastful claims of his nonexistent environmental stewardship, the mess around the citizenship question on the census and the continuing horror of the detention centers aka concentration camps on our southern border.
      Any tRump supporter at this point is like a cult member.  They have drunk the Kool-Aid and nothing the president* says or does will shake their worship of him and their condemnation of anyone with the effrontery to offer facts which disprove their beliefs.   At this point, I think most of his supporters are all about "owning the libs".   The only revelation that might shake some of them would be his tax returns.   Much, if not all of the Donald's mystique is based on the belief by many, again in the face of much evidence it is not true, that he is a self made man who built a small family real estate business into a global empire worth millions.    Many media outlets have published stories showing that much of tRump's vaunted wealth derives from his father and much of his recent success in business is based on his reality TV show and possibly money laundering for Russian oligarchs.
     As the fog of scandal continues to swirl around this White House, a legitimate question is when is enough, enough.   When will we finally wake from this nightmare.
   

Gardening in July

     The front part of the July 4th weekend was what most of us think of as summer.  It was hot, humid and altogether miserable for gardeners.  Saturday was perhaps worse with the same dose of humidity but with off and on thundershowers spoiling any attempts at outdoors activities.  Sunday was the cure.   Low humidity and bright sunshine made for a perfect summer day.
      The garden is producing possibly too bountifully for my CSA members.   By next week there will be dark mutterings as they carry a bounty of greens and lettuce home where they will either have to cook and enjoy quickly, or share with friends and neighbors.  
      Weeds and succession plantings were the order of the day and will continue for a few more weeks.   The weather has settled into a more dry regime, but the damage from heavy rains earlier in the season, including hard soil with major clods will continue to hamper plantings for the remainder of the season.  

Post Indepence blues

     Now that the high flying patriotic rhetoric is packed away for another year and America's supposed pre-eminent place among modern democracies is proclaimed secure, most of the media will redouble its concentration on the political horserace among democrats for their party's presidential nomination.  What will suffer will be coverage of the continuing outrages on our southern border, tRump's disastrous foreign policy and the worsening economic disparity between the rich and poor in our nation.   I think the media giants who control much of what we see and hear like it this way, since they are beneficiaries of many of the policies being pursued by the present administration.
     Alexandra Occasio Cortez, known more by her initials, AOC has pointed out  the detention facilities in Texas, where up to 11,000 children are being held are "concentration camps".  Cue the right wing outrage, led by torture advocate Liz Cheyney who pretends to believe these references cheapen the Holocaust history.  Instead of educating Americans about our own history in this regard, the media resorts to both siderism once again.
     The fact is, going as far back as the Civil War, we have abused prisoners in search of political victory.   Andersonville, Georgia is the site of an infamous Confederate prison camp where up to 45,000 Union soldiers were held with no shelter through a Southern summer.  Nearly 11,000 died and the commander of the camp was charged with war crimes.   In the Phillipines at the turn of the century we did the same thing to freedom fighters in that country.  Of course the Japanese internment camps of WW2 are another lasting stain on our country.
      If all we are going to get for the remainder of the year is non-stop political coverage, I hope the candidates will use their bully pulpit to advocate for the refugees being abused by this administration and that they continue to shame the media into covering this outrage.

Happy 4th?

      As most Americans celebrate Independence Day as an unalloyed milestone in governance, we might take a few minutes to think about the what ifs.  Dylan Matthews over at the Vox media site speculates about what might have happened if the Revolution had not.
      If a few feisty white men chafing under British rule had not organized the American Revolution, we might never have had a Civil War.   Had we remained a part of the Empire, slavery would have been abolished in 1834, and presumably the lives of former slaves in the south would have been better.
     Native Americans probably would have been treated better if Independence had been put off until the 19th century if Canada's experience is any guide.   The Canadians were not exemplary in their handling of indigenous people, but they did not carry out the wholesale ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders did.
    Finally, without our Constitution which allowed the dysfunctional system of strong presidential powers we would have inherited a parliamentary system which seems to work better in our modern world.  
     Of course many people would dispute these conclusions, but it is an interesting thought experiment for those who have always, uncritically hailed America as the exceptional democratic system.   It certainly works for white, middle and upper class males.   For the rest of the population, maybe not so much.   Happy 4th!

OPK

     The title of this post is "other people's kids".   As we roll into the celebration of American Independence tomorrow, it is unconscionable that we stand by as thousands of children are jammed into concentration camps on our southern border.   A gaggle of local protestors were on the main drag in Plattsburgh yesterday to weigh in on our government's treatment of refugees, but it was a small affair covered in a desultory way by our local paper.
     It seems if our own children or those of other Americans are in jeopardy, no amount of money or action is too great for us to spend, at least if the children in question are blastocysts or zygotes.  Once born, the fact 20% of them are consigned to a childhood immured in poverty doesn't seem to sway public opinion.   If we can't or won't care for our own in "Christian" fashion, I seriously doubt the images of brown children jammed into substandard accommodations and held indefinitely in cruel conditions will tug enough heartstrings to ameliorate the situation.   In fact, for many of the president's* supporters, the cruelty is the point.

So little time

      This blog has for the most part concentrated on current events as seen through the lens of a liberal baby boomer gardener.  If I had more time, I would probably churn out more postings on popular culture to the dismay of the few people who actually see them.   Unfortunately, current events require me to dedicate an inordinate amount of space to the antics of our current president*.
      How any self respecting American can look at or hear the rapist in chief and not come away with a queasy sensation is beyond me.  His latest adventures in diplomacy with Kim jong Un is a case in point.   He provided the arguably most brutal dictator in the world a chance to upstage the G-20 summit with a photo op in the DMZ and came away with nothing but a promise there would be more negotiations.  He then blatantly lied to the press, claiming the previous administration had "begged" for a meeting with Kim and had been turned down.  
     Meanwhile, the tragic farce on our southern border continues as thousands of refugees are herded into camps meant to hold a fraction of their numbers for short periods of time.  Horrendous stories of 4 showers available for up to 700 detainees and people held in such crowded cells there is no room to lay down and sleep are being reported.   One woman even reported being told if she was thirsty she should drink out of a toilet.   A private facebook site open to present and former CBP officers was gleefully running gimmicked videos purporting to show liberals such as AOC performing oral sex with refugees.   This is tRump's America in 2019.
    Finally, Paul Krugman in today's NYT tells us that in the latest fiscal year, the state of Kentucky received 40 billion dollars more from the federal government than its residents paid in taxes.   If that state was a nation, the 40 billion would represent 20% of its GCP.  The same is true of most states which voted for Cheetolini.  Socialism indeed!

Weed control

     Most of my communing with nature these days is from the business end of a wheel hoe or the old fashioned blade on a stick.   I enjoy the bird chatter and even an occasional mosquito bite, but midsummer in the North Country is weeding time and if you don't pay attention, these interlopers can quickly swallow a garden.