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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In this space the first week of January 2004, I predicted it would be the year that would determine whether or not American democracy would survive. In the last month of that same year, I was forced to conclude, with sorrow, that American democracy is doomed. Although I’ve been allowed brief moments of hope since then, I have not seen fit to change the diagnosis. Now I am forced to conclude that human society as we know it is also doomed.
I’m typing this from a place freshly ravaged by Tropical Storm Irene. “Tropical” and “Vermont” don’t belong in the same sentence, but there they are. Helicopters buzz overhead as they leave to drop supplies in stranded communities. This is the second hundred-year flood we’ve had this in the last four months and yet it is not these events so recently past that prompt my dire prediction. It’s what two events of the past week bode for the future.
Friday, the State Department ruled that the 1,700 mile long Keystone XL pipeline – which, if allowed to proceed, will carry tar sands crude to refineries in Texas – will have minor environmental impact. Experts disagree. James Hansen, the NASA scientist and leading expert in global warming says that should the pipeline be built, there will be no way to reverse catastrophic global warming. One would think that’s a significant environmental impact, but the oil companies want it and what the oil companies want….
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By floegel
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Posted in Commentary, Economy, Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear Energy, Oceans, Oil
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Tagged Barack Obama, ExxonMobil, James Hansen, Rex Tillerson, Russia, Tar Sands, Vladimir Putin
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What the Left Hand is Doing
Cognitive dissonance is name given to the discomfort caused by trying to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas. Policy dissonance might be the name applied when two conflicting ideas are the basis for government action.
An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended (at least in terms of the calendar). Wildfires destroyed an area of Texas as large as the state of Connecticut, another all-time worst.
On August 13th, in the midst of this, Texas’s Republican Governor Rick Perry declared himself a candidate for president. He thinks – or at least says he thinks – global warming is a hoax invented by scientists as a way to get research grants. He has not indicated whether he thinks these scientists are setting his state on fire.
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