President Trump slaps 30% tariff on imported solar panels, because of course he did. Yeah, I'd prefer to make solar panels here too, but I don't see him moving this quickly on the Chinese steel he uses in his own buildings, and it sure looks like he got up in the morning and asked around the office for the best way to piss off liberals -- which is an understandable political strategy, I suppose, if the only "liberals" you know are the Democrats in Congress. As policy, we'd best interpret his move not as a "pro-worker" move (what, he thinks robots install solar panels?) or even as an "end to corporate welfare" for solar corporations; we'd best interpret is as actual corporate welfare for oil, gas, and coal, three industries that are losing ground to solar.
I approve of data showing the income gap between rich and poor across the planet, but comparing the "1%" to everyone else, even when the 1% makes more than 80% of the world's income, just isn't the most effective comparison, even if it rolls off the tongue more easily. Try the 0.1%, since you're just not in the same club as Rupert Murdoch if you make $450,000 a year -- nor do you do the same amount of damage to civilization. It is, after all, all about restraining the most powerful from running roughshod over everyone else's rights, even if right-wingers call the most powerful "job creators"! (In fairness, the "just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet" is the better comparison.)
Execrable "evangelical" right-winger Tony Perkins announces that evangelicals have given President Trump a "mulligan" and a "do-over" when contemplating the President's extramarital affairs and general vulgarity, as long as he "delivers" on evangelical policy preferences. That may be taking the Parable of the Prodigal Son too far. I presume, also, that Mr. Perkins means evangelical elites, not your evangelical friends and neighbors, have been handing out these "mulligans," since a lot of them already know that if you keep handing out mulligans to folks like Mr. Trump, you'll just have to keep handing them out. (Read the whole article, though -- the work of defending Mr. Trump makes Mr. Perkins, and others, sound utterly unhinged.)
Florida voters will get to vote on a constitutional amendment guaranteeing most felons the right to vote this November. I sure hope those voters do the right thing, which is give back what their government took away, and deal another death-blow to the notion that folks who commit crimes should just keep on paying even after they've completed their sentences and reintegrated into society, all so some politician or other can make everyone watch his balls swing. (But I still think murderers and sex offenders still deserve the right to vote -- rights are either for everyone or they're not really rights.)
Finally, one of the male Trump offspring says the recent government shutdown "is a good thing" for the Trump Administration politically. I don't presume to disagree with his assessment so much as I presume to excoriate a society that tolerates such cynicism openly expressed, a society that encourages folks to think of life and death matters as sporting events where one side is up and the other down, a society that too rarely evaluates events in terms of the harm they do to people. In other words, we live in a sick, immoral, and decadent society.
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