Tag Archives: GOP

Political Rants

Hot air.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is just the latest Republican politician with presidential ambitions to cast doubt on the validity of climate change, a necessary prerequisite for claiming the G.O.P. nomination in 2016. Indeed, anyone who is going to have a ghost of a chance with the tea-party fueled right-wing electorate in that party needs to be a climate change denialist to the core (though Rubio has since backpedaled slightly, perhaps in embarrassment). Sadly, then, the senator is not alone.

Found floating in denial.Now, I don’t usually comment on opinion columns, but I will make an exception on this occasion, only because columnist Tom Morgan is spectacularly deserving of the “tin ear” award for his column “Remember that report? Well, forget it.” I know Morgan is trying to be, well … sort of funny, I guess, but when he spouts something like this, the humor escapes me:

That is part of the problem the president and the Greens face. They want us to be alarmed by climate whatever. But the reason they changed the term from global warming is that the globe did not warm — not the way they predicted. And so many more of their predictions have not come about.

Morgan goes on to say that many of the predicted “calamities” related to climate change have failed to occur. All of this, mind you, on the week when it was reported that the West Antarctic glacier is, well, melting away … in fact, it’s in the midst of what’s described by researchers as an unstoppable retreat which will result in a precipitous rise in sea level over the long term. That’s long term.

Short term, the evidence of climate change is simply undeniable. Glaciers are retreating in Greenland, the arctic is melting, California and Texas are experiencing unprecedented drought, and extreme weather is becoming more and more extreme. Maybe Morgan doesn’t live in Tornado alley, but frankly, if he doesn’t now he may soon. Here in upstate New York, we’ve had more tornadoes in the last couple of years than in the previous 30. The next big storm may be headed your way.

Perhaps when Super Storm Sandys start happening twice or three times a month, people like Morgan and Rubio may start admitting the obvious. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

luv u,

jp

 

Political Rants

White hats.

Ladies and gentlemen, Cliven Bundy has spoken, and mainstream conservatives are now running for the exits.

Well, his hat's in the right place.I use that term “conservative” in the very expansive sense that is in common usage now, descriptive of the type of “conservative” who appears to favor facing off against federal law enforcement officers with firearms. That’s the kind of conservative we saw praising Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his militia-inspired neighbors as he took his somewhat bizarre and incoherent stand against the Bureau of Land Management. It was the classic reactionary fairy tale, and our friends at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, and Limbaugh central sucked it up with great relish and spewed it out over the airwaves so that everyone in America knew the name of this rambling, aged, white-hatted patriot.

I’m no fan of extreme police tactics (like, for example, the violent dispersion of Occupy Wall Street), but pulling guns on federal agents is a serious matter, and I was flabbergasted over the past couple of weeks that I would need to explain that fact to people who term themselves conservatives. Of course, it seems that they didn’t make a very close study of the man they were raising to the level of Paul Revere, as it seemed to come to them as quite a surprise when he piped up with this little gem about African Americans:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

Okay, I may as well just say it. Not only is this guy a racist, he appears to be suffering some form of dementia; perhaps early stage Alzheimer’s. I think the latter condition may play a role in his lack of the ability to conceal the former. I would almost feel sorry for him, frankly, were it not for the fact that he’s bilking the federal government for a million dollars in back grazing fees and fines (note: the fees are very, very reasonable) and apparently content to start the equivalent of a modern range war to keep from parting with his cash. (It’s not hard to imagine what would happen to black people in, say, Philly if they were to try something similar.)

My advice to the Feds is this: the man has bank accounts, doesn’t he? Do to him what you are doing to the Russians and the Iranians. Freeze his assets until he complies. No guns needed for that.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Unopposed.

Do we live in a democracy? Formally speaking, yes, if by democracy you mean representative democracy and, for most races, one person, one vote. But an election truly democratic if an incumbent runs unopposed? What choice is there but to assent or remain at home? That is the reality for a significant number of communities across the country, including my own. Our Congressman, Richard Hanna, will not face a Democratic opponent this fall. The county Democratic party has said they could not find anyone willing to run. What that tells me is, they likely could not find a millionaire, because after losing to the G.O.P. twice, the national Democratic party is probably not willing to drop another thin dime on this district.

Permanent fixture?That has been the situation here over very long stretches of time, including every election throughout my youth, but there have been exceptions. One was the election of 2006, when our longtime Republican Congressman Sherry Boehlert retired. The national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee saw an opportunity in what seemed like (and turned out to be) a Democratic-leaning year. They poured some significant resources into this district in support of the local D.A. at the time, Michael Arcuri. I worked on the campaign, manning the phone bank, and it was unlike anything I had seen short of a presidential campaign. They leased a building (an old restaurant) and set up a VOIP phone system with about 20 workstations. They sent a very sharp team of consultants to manage the ground game. It was a pretty impressive effort, and it succeeded, electing the first Democrat to that seat since well before my arrival on this planet.

Needless to say, the largess did not survive that election year. During Arcuri’s re-election campaign in 2008, the phone bank was in a cramped union headquarters in downtown Utica.  I used my cell phone for calls some nights. He got over the line just barely that year, apparently without significant investment on the part of the national party, only to be knocked off in the deluge of 2010, the consequences of which vex us still. Token opposition from a sadly underfunded  Democratic candidate ended in predictable failure to unseat Hanna last year, and now the DCCC has likely written this district off. So we’re stuck with a supposed moderate who sends me flyers on his efforts to protect the “2nd Amendment” against background checks, on his battle against “Obamacare”, and other clap-trap collateral handed to him by his much more generous national party.

So, hey … nothing to see here. Welcome to the one-party state that is Central New York … or as Schumer has dubbed it, “Silicon Valley of the Drones.”

luv u,

jp