One thing I find impressive about congressional Republicans is that they don’t mind taking positions that are completely outrageous. Their determination to remove Social Security and Medicare stands out here.
I’ve paid into Social Security since I was 16, and the same can be said about almost all Americans my age (late 60s). How on Earth do you think all these voters are going to feel about their money being taken from them?
What next? Once you let government take action in healthcare that prevents poor people from dying from treatable diseases, you’re well on your way to having a government that actually helps the common American.
At that point, according to Republicans, you’ve become China, or perhaps worse, Denmark.
… remains flat, hovering under 43%, almost 10% under his disapproval rating.
What does this reveal, given the job numbers at left?
Well, at a minimum, it shows that, whatever people may say about the importance of job growth, it doesn’t translate into their approval of a certain president.
This may have been different in the past, but today, in the age of Trumpism, all many people want from their leader is white nationalism, pain inflicted on the poor, an all-out assault on the environment, and any other conceivable means to “own the libs.”
The money I made in my marketing services company had nothing to do with my father’s money, nor his connections. So, does that mean luck was not a factor?
Hardly. I was adopted shortly after my five-month birthday by two of the finest people on the planet, who sacrificed greatly to put me through a terrific private school in Philadelphia, and a fabulous private college in Connecticut.
At this point, I ask the reader to consider, as I do frequently, how terribly wrong this could have gone, even setting aside the fact that my biologic mother could have aborted an unwanted pregnancy.
Not all adopting parents are intelligent, prosperous, dedicated to their kids’ education, generous, and sober.
IMO, successful businesspeople who discount their luck are kidding themselves.
This quote from early psychologist Wilhelm Reich is the reason that the material here on the 2GreenEnergy blog has transitioned over the years from science/technology to politics. At this point, the impediment to accepting renewable energy and climate change mitigation strategies more generally has very little to do with facts and everything to do with, as he puts it, “feelings and beliefs.”
Of course, I doubt that these posts, which I hope to be emotionally evocative, change too many people’s ways of thinking. Recent studies in neurology show that people’s minds are “wired” in ways that are deeply resistant to change.
If you are, for example, a Trump supporter, there is nothing I can possibly write that will make you wake up tomorrow wanting to save people you don’t know from droughts, wildfires, floods, and loss of land mass.
To be fair, there are no news headlines that are going to make me think that Mexicans are coming for our jobs and that a wall on the southern border is a good idea.
I seldom watch political speeches, regardless of who’s talking, but I did catch a few minutes of Biden’s State of the Union.
And I noticed exactly what Rob Reiner is saying here. The U.S. President says he’ll defend the nation against foreign aggression, that there are 12 million new jobs, etc., and the Speaker of the House doesn’t applaud?
I just can’t understand how any decent American, regardless of party affiliation, finds that acceptable.
…Listen very closely: no one cares.
From this: According to reporting from Bloomberg, George Santos told potential donors that he had been a producer for the Broadway musical, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” However, he was not involved with the production at all, according to the show’s lead producer.
Seriously, we simply don’t care. Not when we have a former president who did everything he could to overthrow our government in a attempted coup, and somewhere near half of us have essentially no appetite for bringing him to justice.
This is particularly egregious given that:
Our Department of Justice has more than enough evidence to sentence you or me to hundreds of years in prison if either of us had committed that crime, and hasn’t taken any action against him at all, and
He’s very likely to be re-elected in 2024, and take our country to a place where dozens of fascist countries are today, with autocratic regimes led by cruel dictators who have dissenters arrested and tortured.
Again, about half the nation views Trump as a national hero.
I have a great deal of respect for Maher’s talent, and usually for his ideas as well, but I simply don’t get his presentation in the video below. No one, woke or otherwise, is trying to “re-invent the very nature of human beings.”
The “woke revolution,” if there is such a thing, is simply an extension of the “kindness revolution,” whose spokespeople are folks like the Dalai Lama. It simply means: You have a choice to make about the way you behave around other people: you can be kind and respectful, striving to be enlightened members of the human civilization, and accepting of the world’s people, or you can choose to be an asshole. (more…)
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is as good a pick as any to deliver the Republicans’ rebuttal following Biden’s speech this evening. As Trump’s press secretary, she garnered vast experience spinning baldfaced lies into statements that tens of millions of people apparently found credible. Following that, she became the governor of one of the least educated, most backwards states in the union, addressing voters who can’t get enough of her anti-science and racist rhetoric.
So what if the economy is strong, unemployment is at a record low, and landmark bills have been signed into law in healthcare and infrastructure.
There will be lots of people watching, wanting to know: What’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Don’t expect “manufactured grievances” to cease being a feature of U.S. politics as long as there are voters stupid enough to believe in their merits.
Tens of millions of idiots still believe that Trump is the rightful president.
We live among them.
