Sonali Kolhatkar explains how Alex Jones, in purporting to fight government, actually helped make our government significantly worse. And not by spewing bad ideas to enrage the inattentive, but by turning over his primed-to-believe-whatever audience to Donald Trump, who helped put our government even more in big corporations’ pockets while ranting about the “deep state” (which is a thing, as you know, but not necessarily the thing the Trump/Jones axis yells about). So, to sum: not only is Alex Jones a jerk, he’s a jerk who serves Our Glorious Elites while pretending to oppose them. St. Peter’s really going to dig that at the Pearly Gates.
Naomi Oreskes at Scientific American laments that today’s scientists too often peddle solutions that “depend() on technologies that do not yet exist.” It gets worse: depending on unproven (and likely unviable) technologies like carbon capture is just another way of avoiding scaling up the renewable technologies that do work. And we all know why that’s happening! (I was also displeased to learn that the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill passed last year allocated 20 times as much money to carbon capture as it did to renewables. Getting to yes!)
ProPublica tells us all about “A Uranium Ghost Town in the Making” in New Mexico. Since 1958, a uranium processing corporation has polluted air and water, and federal and state regulators didn’t tell good New Mexicans for over a decade; this all started during the nuclear arms race, so I guess sacrifices had to be made. The mill closed in 1990, but folks still suffer from ill effects, so the corporation’s bright idea now is to buy out all the local homeowners (as cheaply as possible, of course) and force them to absolve the corporation of any liability as a condition of sale! In what’s still a seller’s market, no less!
When I hear that Republican Senate Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Rick Scott (E-FL) “br(oke) down like a glitching Furby” when an NBC reporter asked him about the Republicans running for Senate in 2022, I’m tempted to say, “well, in fairness, he is a robot,” but I’ve rarely seen someone have such trouble enunciating. How does one get so unnerved by the question so why do all your candidates suck? And saying the word “Biden” like it’s a cuss word ain’t gonna work no matter how low his approvals go. It doesn’t bode well for any of the Republicans running this year, not just Blake Masters, who really does have a face even a mother could punch.
Mere days after Democrats dared Republicans to remove a $35/month insulin cap from their massive reconciliation bill, both North Carolina Republican Senators face a “vehement backlash” from their own constituents for voting against both the cap and the bill. And that’s how it should be, even when both Senators think they’re immune from accountability – Sen. Burr is retiring, of course, and Sen. Tillis just got re-elected, even though the next time he gets even 49% in a Senate election will be the first. Democratic Senate nominee Cheri Beasley promptly jumped on them for it; maybe she can win her race, if the Democrat consultant class doesn’t make her forget what matters to voters.
Finally, our FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, ostensibly for classified documents wrongfully and/or illegally removed from the White House, but right-wingers still leap to his defense. Here’s the money quotation: “if law-enforcement officials want to murder an unarmed Black man in the street, brutalize protesters against police misconduct, or investigate a Democratic presidential candidate, conservatives will insist that such officers are infallible and that any criticism of their conduct is outrageous. But when the law is used to investigate or restrict the conduct of people deemed by conservatives to be above its prohibitions, that is axiomatically an abuse of power.” Rush Limbaugh being a conservative was harder than being a liberal, but not when being a conservative means you just make up the rules as they fit you. Holding values that don’t always tell you what you want to hear? Now that’s hard.
Comments