Good news, everyone: the Biden Administration adds back most of the teeth to the Endangered Species Act that the Trump Administration knocked out, by extending the same protections endangered species get to “threatened” species, and by ignoring the “economic impacts” of endangered species protections, “economic impacts” really only meaning “whether some rich CEO gets even richer” to Donald Trump and his kind. The Biden Administration did not reverse a Trump-era rule allowing agencies to essentially disregard any predicted impact that wasn’t “reasonably certain,” but get the right people in agencies – i.e., not industry people – and you can mitigate that error, as well. Joe Biden hit the big targets, and good for him – and good for you if you left one of the 450,000 public comments telling President Biden to roll those Trump-era rules back.
Oregon government ends its experiment with drug decriminalization, by making possession of hard drugs in small amounts illegal again, though they also increase funding for drug treatment programs. I’ve always been wary of legalizing, for example, heroin and fentanyl, but Oregon used the legislative process to overturn the will of the people as expressed in a ballot question, and that’s more than a bit unnerving. South Dakota did it much worse by overturning a campaign finance ban mere months after good South Dakotans approved it, whereas Oregon waited three years, but I’m sure they could have better respected the people’s wishes. Yes, I know, the people elect representatives – but the people speak more clearly and directly through ballot questions.
Ho hum, Elon Musk passes around yet more “extremely concerning” information about voter “fraud” that doesn’t actually qualify as “information,” let alone “extremely concerning,” because it’s utter bunkum. No, anyone getting a Social Security number is not automatically an “illegal” registering to vote illegally, and a state could submit information about a citizen to a voting database more than once; Jesus Mary and Joseph what is wrong with just shutting the fuck up until you know what you’re talking about? Or is that something only “little people” like us, and not the richest man on Earth, have to worry about? Undocumented immigrant voting in elections is extremely rare, and that finding meshes well with actual common sense – folks here without papers tend not to give out very much personal information about themselves for reasons you can easily imagine. Apparently that finding does not mesh as well with some folks’ desire to be constantly enraged about anything and everything – or with certain rich individuals’ strange desire to show off for such people.
Just Security reminds us that most of the D.C.-held January 6-related inmates Donald Trump wants to release assaulted a police officer. (No, really – 10 of the 29 have been convicted of it, while another 10 have already pleaded guilty to it, which makes 20 of 29.) Well, so much for I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!! And so much for law and order, too. Of course, nobody thinks of themselves as law-breakers, and most folks who break the law tell themselves (and us) that their circumstances were “unique” and they had “no choice.” That is all, of course, very convenient reasoning. Please allow me to keep believing that I’m doing some good by pointing this out.
Newsweek asks if DEI – a term describing efforts to increase diversity, equality, and inclusion in corporations and academia – has become a “racial slur,” now that right-wingers blame literally every bad thing that happens on it, but remember that some people are so evil they’ll turn everything into a bad word. Remember when Barack Obama said he wanted his Supreme Court nominee to possess “empathy”? Oh, how the right-wing media pissed and moaned about that! And if they’d kept it up for longer than a day, they might have succeeded into making “empathy” into a cuss word, too. I wish I'd had as much success trying to turn “bold” into a cuss word during the George W. Bush era.
Donald Trump won’t tell Hugh Hewitt – about as sympathetic a media audience as he could hope to get – that he’s “100% with Israel” even after being asked twice, and while I know a lot of people in America are saying Israel might be wrong to themselves for the very first time (and Donald Trump knows that just as well as I do), just imagine what our “liberal” media would say if a Democrat refused to say directly he was “100% with Israel.” They’d call them weak, or a flip-flopper, or whatever – all things they refuse to say about Mr. Trump, because then they’d have to explain why he’s not actually a “strong leader” like all the polls they conduct say he is.
Finally, the incomparable Rebecca Solnit argues that Republicans – with their opposition to abortion and birth control and their embrace of fascism – have become an “anti-sex movement.” They’re saying it out loud! The Heritage Foundation wants to “restor(e) sex to its true purpose,” i.e., procreation, which means they want women to be breeders and nothing more (plus they want women to have no say over their breeding). Has the sexual revolution has been an unqualified good? No. But it doesn’t have to be for us to protect what women have won over the last half-century-plus, and calling Republicans the anti-sex party would be weapons-grade PR – most people still like sex, after all. I’ll whisper it into as many ears as I can.
Comments