Aug 8^th

According to Cal Thomas the President’s goal is bankrupting the coal industry. He assumes this is true because the President once said, “… that if somebody wants to build a coal fired power plant they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them…”  Cal Thomas seems totally unaware of the tremendous increase in natural gas finds in this country and that natural gas competes with coal. He also has no idea of the insidious history of the coal industry’s willingness to risk the lives of miners to make a few extra bucks. The Sago mine disaster in 2001 killed twelve West Virginia miners and the cause has been batted back and forth for years. The mine’s safety record had been appalling prior to the accident… but, of course, spending money on safety might cost jobs.

I know something about coal mining and what happens when you burn coal. I lived in Pittsburgh and close to Pittsburgh for eleven years. When I went to high school I lived across the road from abandoned strip mines, hundreds of acres of abandoned strip mines. The mining companies bought the mineral rights from farmers if there was enough coal underground to make removing the overburden to get at the coal profitable. If it was, the excavated overburden, devoid of topsoil was left where it was and the coal company moved on.

Eventually the state decided that the coal companies had to deposit a considerable sum per acre for each acre they planned to strip. They could recoup that money when they leveled off the areas, covered them with topsoil and did some planting. There was an eruption exactly as there is now with cap and trade: coal company owners said that coal prices would skyrocket, miners would lose their jobs and the industry would disappear. It didn’t happen.

Pittsburgh was the center of the soft coal industry; I lived there too. That was in the late 1940s and early 1950s; it’s different now because of environmental regulations. In 1949 you could not sit down outside, either on the grass in a park, or on a bench at a bus stop. If you did your pants with be streaked with black soot when you got up. A white shirt worn in the morning had to be changed if you were going out to dinner because the top of the collar would be black. Thanks to those despicable EPA regulations, you know the regulations the Cal Thomas types are always claiming will be the downfall of the country, Pittsburgh is now considered one of America’s most livable cities.

Cal Thomas really has done little to enlighten us about the effects of burning coal. I believe he knows that because about two-thirds of the way though his piece he shifts, segueing, albeit clumsily, to criticizing the President for not commenting on Planned Parenthood. Then, apparently not satisfied that he has yet been sufficiently critical of the President, he slips in the failure to destroy ISIS. It does seem to me that Cal Thomas would do well to understand the importance of regulating the coal industry before advancing to other topics he also knows little, or nothing, about.

Aug 7^th

Carly Fiorina is said to have won the “undercard” debate last night. Her opposition consisted of six “lightweights” who, with Carly, hadn’t enough poll support to compete in the 9 o’clock main event. Of the now (don’t blink!) seventeen competitors for the Republican nomination Carly Fiorina is the only female. One of her claims to fame is that she is not a politician; she is just an ordinary temporarily out of work business woman…who happens to be worth well over 120 million dollars.

That she is not a politician is not for want of trying; naturally someone of her importance should not be expected to begin their political career competing for anything less than a United States Senate seat, so that’s what Carly did… and she lost that election big time. Barbara Boxer, who had been in Washington over 25 years, beat her 52 percent to 42 percent. She got a whippin’. So she’s right, at this point in her career, through no fault of her own, Carly is not a politician.

Unfortunately there is some blow-back from Carly’s campaign. A number of the people employed by her were not paid. The campaign was in 2010 and these folks, none of them multi-millionaires like Carly, did not get paid until 2014. Some were owed as much as 10 thousand dollars. Many of them said that they would never work for her again and only part of that was her fiscal irresponsibility. Carly wants to control the purse strings of the federal government. If she can’t responsibly handle the finances of a Senate campaign, let’s give her a really big pot of money, the federal budget! Who’s for that?

She has explained her situation at Hewlett-Packard (HP) many times; that explanation now pours out like a well-rehearsed talking point. She did an exemplary job of running HP (Even though the stock dropped 53 percent.) It was a difficult time for all tech stocks. (Even though she fired 30 thousand workers.) It was just a boardroom brawl. (Even though the stock jumped 3 percent once the word of her firing got out.) It is obvious that Carly Fiorina has learned nothing at all from her debacle at HP. Perhaps if she had just a smidgen of political savvy she might not have had the HP debacle and she might have won her election against Barbara boxer.

If you have political skills it means that you are able to compromise, to find some common ground with your opponent. I’m thinking of politicians like LBJ; he was able to accomplish enormous amounts because he knew how to trade when trading was necessary. Of the candidates on the stage last night I didn’t see any whom I thought might compromise with someone of another party to advance their agenda. If they did appear willing to compromise what chance at the nomination would they have?

Aug 6^th

Kathleen Parker has taken to task Planned Parenthood; this is now required of all right wing pundits. The “Center for Medical Progress” sent con artists to discuss buying fetal tissue from some Planned Parenthood (PP) officials. The recording of this encounter was carefully edited to make it appear that fetal tissue was offered for sale. Nothing illegal was done although the Center for Medical Progress has sucked a number of right wingers into believing that some awful sins were committed by PP.

Ronald Reagan in 1988 convened a twenty person panel to discuss the ethics of using harvested fetal tissue for research; seventeen of twenty panel members approved. Then in 1990 the issue of using federal funds for harvesting fetal tissue arose. That stalwart conservative Senator McConnell voted to approve their use for that purpose. The upshot is that there is nothing illegal about using fetal tissue for research. It is not illegal to recover a portion of the cost of harvesting this tissue either; it is illegal for the harvesting entity to harvest tissue and make a profit from its sale. Try as they might the con artists haven’t even, with extensive editing, managed to make a case that PP was pricing out fetal parts. Never mind, the lack of evidence, the prepared conservative mind was ready to believe just what the hucksters suggested to them.

Now there is great hue and cry to defund PP. This is curious because the government funds given to PP have never been available for abortions, so the right wing effort to defund PP is just another effort to reduce available health care for women and punish PP. Keep in mind that only 3 percent of PPs funds go to provide abortions and none of those are government funds. The removal of federal funds will then drastically reduce, not abortions, but contraceptive services and STD diagnosis and treatment, two of the primary PP efforts. Of course it is probable that the fundamentalist movements in Congress will be delighted to see funds removed from any group helping women to achieve birth control. You may remember the wiseacre billionaire Santorum supporter Foster Friess who oh so cleverly touted holding an aspirin between the knees as an effective birth control method for women. You can see how seriously the right wing takes women’s issues.

 Finally Parker tells us that there are over 9 thousand community health centers compared with just 669 PP outlets. Therefore, says Parker, women can get all the health care they need from community health centers. Do these community health centers provide IUDs? Do they treat the complications of STDs? It is odd to hear a Republican suggest that government run organizations are more suited to help citizens than privately run charitable entities. Center for Medical Progress has been successful, at least with Kathleen Parker.

Aug 5^th

Mona Charen is hoping, rather desperately, for a few Jewish Democrats to sink the Iran nuclear deal.  She does have some difficulty digesting the fact that American Jews are disproportionately in the Democratic camp and, of course, she isn’t. Clearly, all those other Jews are mistaken.

She says, “No, the short explanation of Jewish liberalism is straightforward. Jewish Americans tend to be disproportionately urban, secular and educated. Each of these categories is highly correlated with liberalism and membership in the Democratic Party…” No Mona, that’s not an explanation; that just describes the fact that there is a relationship between intelligence, education and liberalism and that this relationship extends to Jews. It does not explain why that relationship exists in the first place.

Mona goes on to tell us that, based on percentages attending services, Jews are more secular than Christians and much more secular than Muslims. But not all Jews fit this liberal secular mold. The Orthodox Jews are quite different, according to Mona; they are more religious and more likely to be Republican. She claims that 57 percent of Orthodox Jews are Republicans in contrast with just 22 percent of the non-Orthodox Jews. This jump in the number of Orthodox Jews, their allegiance to Israel and their concern about the Iran is supposed to give Democratic Jewish Senators pause if they vote for the Iran agreement. Not likely!

There are some difficulties here: there are only about 6 million Jews in this country of whom only about 6 percent are Orthodox; that comes to a grand total of about 360 thousand votes if all orthodox Jews voted as a block; they won’t. It is true that many Orthodox Jews take voting instruction from their religious leaders just as the take other instruction; even so those numbers will not put fear into the heart of any Senator who has not already decided how to vote on the merits of the issue.

There are two additional considerations, both unfortunate: Yeshivas, the religious schools of the Orthodox Jews often, but not always, concentrate so exclusively on religious instruction as to eliminate much science, mathematics and foreign language classes once the student has reached high school. (Note the unfortunate similarity to the instruction provided by some Madrassas where many Muslim children find little is taught beyond memorizing the Koran.)

In Israel we have a new and interesting political cancer; we have ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorists. Recently at a gay rights parade a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox gang member. The previous day a Palestinian home was torched by this same gang and an 18 month old child was burned to death, his parents injured as was his four year old brother. There have also been arson attacks on Catholic churches. These attacks are engineered by Meir Ettinger, the grandson of Meir Kahane. Kahane was behind the extreme ultra-Orthodox movement a few years back designed to eliminate any non-Jewish settlers in Israel. This would be done by buying out any non-Jews and forcibly removing any who would not sell. Christian churches were considered idolatrous. As this movement grows in Israel, sympathy for Israel will probably diminish; Mona Charen never mentions these people so we don’t know about her attitude toward them.

Aug 4^th

You will notice that there was no blog for Aug 3^rd; that was because we had no power and no internet connection from Sunday Aug 2^nd until late afternoon Aug 4^th. We will resume the good fight tomorrow, Aug 5^th. Stay tuned.

 

Aug 2^nd

George Will has taken up the cudgel lately swung against Planned Parenthood (PP) by Cal Thomas. This must be a contest among right wing columnists to see which one can be most hyperbolic in their criticism of PP.

George gets a spectacular start on his hyperbolic journey by titling his piece “The barbarity of a nation, Planned Parenthood.” “The barbarity of a nation” Wow! That’ll get your attention. Note that the “Barbarity of a nation” is not the killing of about 500 thousand Iraqis from 2003 to 2011 on the false premise that they were a threat to this country because they had, or were developing, weapons of mass destruction. Or the mass killing of our own citizens, 150 thousand over the last five years, by gunfire. Yes sir, Planned Parenthood is far more barbaric than any of that.

I know that George Will is a busy guy; what with public appearances and columns to do and all, but given what he’s paid one does expect originality.  On July 26^th Cal Thomas, writing on the very same topic and excoriating PP to a fare-the-well wrote, “…if we are of no greater moral value than a hamburger…” Then George Will, on August 2^nd speaking of PP’s attitude toward a fetus, “Never does it have a moral standing superior to a tumor or a hamburger in its mother’s stomach.” This is surely an accidental borrowing of an image; but that’s points off for George and he was doing so well. Oh and George, the fetus is not in its mother’s stomach; it’s in the mother’s uterus, or womb if you like, but please not her stomach; impressionable children may be reading this.

George Will tells us that life begins when a sperm fertilizes an egg. Actually, life begins before that; egg cells are alive and so are sperm cells. George wants us to accept a fertilized egg cell travelling down a fallopian tube is a human being. This is rather like insisting that acorns are oak trees.

George has a field day with his adjectives: Consider his observation that SCOTUS “discovered constitutional significance in the number nine.” Well no George, the significance was that prior to the second trimester the fetus cannot survive as a separate being. George finds this a “preposterous assertion.” Then he claims the court follows this with “faux humility” then swerves back to “breathtaking vanity.”

Finally George gets to his trump card “partial birth abortion” (A term which has no medical significance.) where he can talk of “tiny limbs and hands.”  Now he can provide colorful descriptions of the procedures required to reduce the size of a hydrocephalic infant’s head so that it can move through the birth canal without killing the mother. Of course the mother is never mentioned; it’s only the “pre-born” that concerns George, the post-born of whatever age is irrelevant.

Aug 1^st

We now begin the week that was! This is the week of the first debate among the Republican hopefuls, and the week we bid farewell to Jon Stewart. We can be really thankful for the ability to tape A while watching B.

The Republican Party is bifurcating before our eyes.  The majority are as nasty as ever; see Ted Cruz who completely agrees with Donald Trump about the awful Latino immigrants, Mike Huckabee who compares President Obama to Adolf Hitler. Then there are the columnists and other hangers on who routinely find any kindness to anyone just despicably liberal. Here we have Queen Bee, Ann Coulter, and various elderly white princes: Cal Thomas; Charles Krauthammer; Bouncy Bouncy Limbaugh and others. In contrast to the ultra-nasties there are the semi-nasties, Jeb Bush whose Latina wife and fluent Spanish humanize him, albeit barely. And there is Ohio Governor Kasich whose policies seem ultra-modern by comparison with, say, the union smasher Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is the Koch Brothers’  very favorite person.

This weekend The Koch Kids are having a do called “Freedom Partners.” Only certain selected Koch favorites have been invited. These are: Bush, Fiorina, Walker, Cruz and Rubio. Rand Paul was invited but had made other plans (?). The Koch’s’ rationale was to gather together serious people interested in discussing the issues of the election. This certainly did not include Donald Trump. Let’s face it Trump is a billionaire who had the effrontery to actually run for office himself instead of doing the gentlemanly thing and buying several professional office holders. Trump’s other problem from the Koch Bros.’ position is that Trump may be the only right winger who can’t be bought.

Freedom Partners party didn’t include Governor Kasich either. Kasich is on the Koch Bros.’ “bad boys” list because he crossed them up by getting Ohio involved with expanded Medicaid. At one Koch sponsored function Kasich was asked about that by a potential donor and said that when he met his maker he wanted to declare he had done something that benefitted the poor people in his state. His defense of Medicaid led 20 people to walk out of the Koch sponsored event and ruined Kasich’s shot at any future Koch support. The folks attending such events expect much more compliant politicians. Hey, if you want to get paid learn the required dance or go home. Keep in mind that Kasich for the most part hues to the conservative party line. Among other things he is quoted as believing that the separation of church and state is “goofy.” On most other issues he follows the orthodox party line.