Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
The Atlanta shooter blamed a specific race of people for his problems, and then murdered them because of it. If that’s not racism, then the word has no meaning. pic.twitter.com/4gIKN5hM28
The backlash began with the sheriff spokesman’s statement to reporters that the mass shooting suspect was having a “bad day.”
“He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” Cherokee County sheriff’s office Capt. Jay Baker said Wednesday. He was describing the 21-year-old man accused of killing eight people, mostly Asian and almost all women, in a rampage across three Atlanta-area spas.
Then — as the violence stirred fears in an Asian-American community that already felt under attack — Internet sleuths and journalists found Baker’s Facebook posts promoting shirts that called the novel coronavirus an “IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.”
One person’s reaction on Twitter: “I think Capt Jay Baker is going to have a really bad day.”
Is Baker a racist or just exercising his White Privilege? Will he have a bad day, or will he be promoted to Chief Baker? Is the mass murderer a racist, or merely distressed about his urge to fornicate? Did the mass murderer really think that by murdering women he was attracted to, it would make this fornication urges go away? Or is he just stupid, a liar, and/or a racist?
Another tragedy. So many questions. Probably not much will change. Here is how one source valiantly described America's mass shooting situation in 2019, the NRA is not to blame, liberals are:
Mass shootings and firearms violence greatly increased as the destruction of morals and family values was followed by violent TV and videogames, social media, attacks on Christianity, excess legal and illegal immigration, multiculturalism, political correctness, excessive legal and illegal drug use, and the creation of “gun-free school zones.” Since 1950, 98% of all school shootings have occurred in these zones. Liberals shoulder the blame for virtually all of these causes. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is not to blame.
Twenty-one Republican state attorneys general on Tuesday threatened to take action against the Biden administration over its new $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law, decrying it for imposing “unprecedented and unconstitutional” limits on their states’ ability to lower taxes.
The letter marks one of the first major political and legal salvos against the relief package since President Biden signed it last week — evincing the sustained Republican opposition that the White House faces as it implements the signature element of the president’s economic policy agenda.
The attorneys general take issue with a $350 billion pot of money set aside under the stimulus, known as the American Rescue Plan, to help cash-strapped cities, counties and states pay for the costs of the pandemic. Congressional lawmakers opted to restrict states from tapping these federal dollars to finance local tax cuts.
Lawmakers included the provision to ensure Washington isn’t footing the bill on behalf of states that later take deliberate steps to reduce their revenue. But the guardrails frustrated many GOP leaders, who said in a letter to the Treasury Department that the law’s vague wording threatens to interfere with states in good financial standing that sought to provide “such tax relief with or without the prospect of COVID-19 relief funds.”
The attorneys general from Arizona, Georgia, West Virginia and 18 other states called on the Biden administration to make it clear that they can proceed with some of their plans to cut taxes, including those that predate the stimulus, in a seven-page missive sent to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday. Otherwise, they said, the relief law “would represent the greatest invasion of state sovereignty by Congress in the history of our Republic” — and they threatened to take “appropriate additional action” in response.
A White House official late Tuesday said Congress had acted appropriately in seeking to stipulate conditions on the federal stimulus funding, emphasizing in a statement the law “does not say that states cannot cut taxes at all.” Rather, the official said, it “simply instructs them not to use that money to offset net revenues lost if the state chooses to cut taxes.”
“So if a state does cut taxes without replacing that revenue in some other way, then the state must pay back to the federal government pandemic relief funds up to the amount of the lost revenue,” the official added.
This is an interesting turn of events. States want to cut taxes, some even before the relief bill became law, but the federal government does not want COVID relief funds to pay for tax cuts. Money is fungible. How does one deal with this paradox, or is it not a paradox at all? Republican tax cuts can be used to negate pro-economic effects of the relief bill, leaving the GOP free to argue the relief bill was a failure and a waste of money. On the other hand, states need to be free to change their tax policy as a matter of state sovereignty. In theory, the constitution's Supremacy Clause would make the federal law controlling and valid.
If the GOP would act in good faith, this could be worked out. But with a party that refuses to compromise or even negotiate in good faith, this disagreement could eventually wind up before the supreme court. There the court will have a chance to kill at least the contested provision of the COVID relief bill.
I checked the text of the relief bill to see if it contains a severance clause that allows a court to nullify a contested part of a law without trashing the entire law. I could not find one. Thus, if the court invalidates this provision of the law, maybe the entire law falls.
Wouldn't that just take the cake? The first major bill out of the democratic congress is fatally flawed. I hope the clause is in there somewhere. Maybe we're going to find out.
MSNBC reported yesterday that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) sent a letter to our new Attorney General Merrick Garland. The letter ended with a short handwritten note to Garland offering him congratulations and best regards on his new job. He's going to need some good will, given what he has to do. A whole lot of republicans are going to hate his guts, to say the least. One can already feel the flames of hate and lies starting to bubble up in the bowels of Fox News, Breitbart and all the other fascist right propaganda and lies sources.
The Whitehouse letter asks Garland to investigate several fishy incidents that occurred under the last administration. The incidents include circumstances surrounding the apparent whitewash of the FBI investigation (fake investigation?) of sexual assaults on women by Brett Kavanaugh. That is a big, important plie of sleaze to look into. Kavanaugh is probably unfit to be a Supreme Court justice, but a thorough FBI investigation would have been necessary to show that.
Whitehouse is also asking for investigations into (i) California fuel emission-agreements for antitrust violations, (ii) possible civil fraud by the fossil fuel industry, and (iii) the old Nixon-era justice department memo that says the DoJ cannot indict a sitting president. That ridiculous memo was the excuse the previously corrupted and subverted DoJ used to not prosecute the ex-president for his crimes.
Godspeed to Whitehouse and Garland. They're going to need all the help they can get. The daggers are already being drawn and the character assassins are creeping out from under the rocks they hide under.
In other encouraging news, the New York Times reported on a declassified US intelligence assessment of the 2020 election. Not surprisingly, Russia did its best to help the ex-president get re-elected and to smear Biden. The NYT writes:
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday.
The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine.
“Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said.
A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.
The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.
The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Some former officials appointed by the ex-president are already disputing some of the content of the intelligence assessment. The lies are already starting to flow. It would be great if felons like Manafort are forced to spill their guts in court[1] about Russian collusion with the 2016 campaign. Let no one forget that the ex-president quietly killed the FBI collusion investigation and that is the basis the ex-president's supporters use to say there is no evidence of collusion. That deflection masks the fact that the evidence is limited because there was no investigation. That is another steaming pile of sleaze that deserves a whole lot of very bright sunshine. Now that the republican swamp creatures are driven out, the clouds are clearing and the light is getting brighter.
Mr. Garland is going to be a very busy boy for the next four years. So let's get on with it, amputations, less rejards, skeletons in the closet and all. Inquiring minds want to know.
Skeletons in the closet, where the ex-president hid them
Footnote:
1. My understanding is that Manafort, and all the other felons, crooks, liars, thugs and traitors the ex-president pardoned, cannot refuse to answer prosecutor's questions under oath. If they lie, they can be prosecuted for perjury. If they refuse to answer questions, they can be jailed for contempt. They have no place to run to (lies) and no rock to hide under (no 5th Amendment for them).
We're in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.
The current mass extinction differs from all others in being driven by a single species rather than a planetary or galactic physical process. When the human race — Homo sapiens sapiens — migrated out of Africa to the Middle East 90,000 years ago, to Europe and Australia 40,000 years ago, to North America 12,500 years ago, and to the Caribbean 8,000 years ago, waves of extinction soon followed. The colonization-followed-by-extinction pattern can be seen as recently as 2,000 years ago, when humans colonized Madagascar and quickly drove elephant birds, hippos, and large lemurs extinct.
The first wave of extinctions targeted large vertebrates hunted by hunter-gatherers. The second, larger wave began 10,000 years ago as the discovery of agriculture caused a population boom and a need to plow wildlife habitats, divert streams, and maintain large herds of domestic cattle. The third and largest wave began in 1800 with the harnessing of fossil fuels. With enormous, cheap energy at its disposal, the human population grew rapidly from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1930, 4 billion in 1975, and over 7.5 billion today. If the current course is not altered, we’ll reach 8 billion by 2020 and 9 to 15 billion (likely the former) by 2050.
Humans’ impact has been so profound that scientists have proposed that the Holocene era be declared over and the current epoch (beginning in about 1900) be called the Anthropocene: the age when the "global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development" dominate planetary physical, chemical, and biological conditions.
Humans annually absorb 42 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30 percent of its marine net primary productivity, and 50 percent of its fresh water.
Forty percent of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7 percent in 1700.
Fifty percent of the planet’s land mass has been transformed for human use.
Large animal extinctions are not mostly due to hunting any more. Instead, those extinctions mostly arise from loss of habitat and human-caused climate change. Assuming there is a will to act, those are things we can actually do something about.
