A week ago, I asked how bad political discourse can get in this country. Discouraged as I was, I hadn’t seen this coming. Perhaps – despite everything my family and friends tell me – I’m too optimistic.
Last week, Republicans who hope to be president stood silently by as their constituents cheered for the notion of letting uninsured people die needless deaths. None of them had the courage to tell the morons in the audience to STFU.
At last night’s Republican debate, similar morons – or perhaps the same morons (the two debates were held 85 miles apart) – booed an American solider serving in Iraq because he asked if the candidates would try to circumvent his ability to serve his country because he is gay.
Whether or not you agree with our country’s wars, this man and thousands like him puts his life on the line every day on our behalf and when he says he wants to keep serving, he is booed by the very people he’s serving and not one – NOT ONE – of these so-called “leaders” will say a word in his defense.
Afterward, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman called the boos “unfortunate,” providing yet another definition for “too little, too late.”
I am more ashamed of my country today than ever before and that’s going some.
© Mark Floegel, 2011
Along toward the end of August, I received an email from my state’s junior senator, Bernie Sanders (I). I look forward to these because a) Senator Sanders is even more PO’ed about the state of the nation than most of his constituents (although right-winger politicians can say the same) and b) he’s not beholden to corporate interests (which NONE of those right-wingers can say).
The outrage addressed in the August missive was Wall Street banks driving up the price of gas by reckless oil speculation.
“There is no more debate. Excessive speculation is a major reason oil prices have risen so sharply,” he wrote, referring to U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data he recently released. “The data reveals Wall Street speculators played a major role in driving up the price of a barrel of oil to $147 in 2008. During the rampant oil speculation, regular unleaded gas in Vermont hit a record $4.09 a gallon, causing financial hardship for many Vermonters.”
“This report clearly shows that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,” he wrote
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Zero to Seven Billion
When I heard the seven billionth person is due to be born Monday, I thought I must have made a mistake a few years back. “Didn’t I just write a commentary on the six billionth person? Was my math wrong?”
My math was not wrong. I wrote that commentary the first week of October 1999. What was faulty was my memory or my credulity. Have I really been writing these damned things since there were fewer than six billion people? Guess so. (Hello, new readers!)
I did a bit of surfing on the subject and found this BBC site that lets one evaluate world population in personal terms. It claims I was the 3,086,987,341st person on Earth when I was born (extrapolate yourself to find out when) and the 76,783,189,538th person alive on Earth since history began (I’m guessing the BBC starts history with the emergence of writing, around 5,000 years ago).
(Note this: when I wrote in 1999, projections were that we would have 12 billion people on Earth by 2050. The BBC piece predicts 10 billion by 2083, so the growth curve seems to be flattening out. Or we just can’t agree on our predictions.)
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