CSotD: Things People Say
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Another of those “Where to begin?” days, as we look into things said and unsaid, implied, inferred and wise and idiotic. Mostly, for today, the latter.
Let’s start in Texas, where it remains unclear what part cuts to NOAA and the NWS played in the tragedy, and what part is due to lack of a functional warning system.
That will likely remain unclear, not just because it takes a while to probe and weigh the evidence but because we’re in the grip of an administration that has never acknowledged, and will never acknowledge, any mistakes.
The cruel take would be to agonize over the Homeland Security department being under the sway of a botoxed beauty queen who would rather indulge in cosplay than actively administer her department, and can’t wrap her head around the demands of her job.
However, Noem does admit that it’s all Biden’s fault: “we needed to renew this ancient system that has been left in place with the federal government for many, many years, and that is the reforms that are ongoing.”
Trump also pronounced the water to be mostly Biden’s fault, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is introducing legislation to ban cloud seeding, which goes well with her opposition to chem trails.
Here’s what seems tangible: With or without adequate staffing, the warnings that went out in the middle of the night didn’t get through, and that seems to have been because of dead zones in that part of Texas.
There are substantial gaps in cell phone and Internet coverage throughout rural parts of the country, which is both an economic problem and, as demonstrated here, an issue of safety. Your phone would have awakened you with a piercing din, but not if you lived where there was no signal.
There are reports that an efficient warning system was debated but dismissed as too expensive. It would be tasteless now to ask what it cost to not have such a system in place.
Still, whether you had one person working at regional weather services or 1,000, if their warnings can’t get through, it’s that matter of a tree falling in the desert.
Ironic, or perhaps appropriate, that much of the growth of the Weather Service was sparked by the lack of adequate warning provided in advance of Galveston’s 1900 hurricane, also in Texas.
Adam Zyglis claims the only part of the Constitution the current administration still upholds is the Second Amendment, and critics who haven’t read the Federalist Papers argue that the Founders were thinking of flintlocks when they wrote that.
Which is naive, but not appallingly toxic like claiming that the birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment only applies to the children of slaves. Perhaps when Dear Leader brings his preposterous white-supremacist theory to the Supreme Court, they’ll apply the same foolish originalism to the Second Amendment as well.
If blatant stupidity is going to be the law of the land, it should at least be applied consistently.
Granted, the Second Amendment had a head start.
Meanwhile, firearms are the leading cause of death for children, but we’re hoping measles and polio will catch up, if we give them a chance.
The matter of the disappearing client list is also difficult to resolve, in large part because the Department of Justice is, like other Trump cabinet departments, staffed by pals and media stars rather than competent professionals.
Having Pam Bondi backed up by Kash Patel and Dan Bongino sounds more like a proposed sequel to Idiocracy than a model for serious governance.
The issue here is that it’s not entirely clear that Bondi actually admitted to having a client list. Asked if there was a client list, she responded that “it” was on her desk, but may have been referencing the entire Epstein file rather than the particular piece she was asked about.
If this were an episode of Law & Order, Ghislaine Maxwell would have been offered a two-year sentence in exchange for testimony that would have tied everything up with a bow, but, even in an administration led by media figures, real life tends to offer less perfect resolutions.
And, even in Law & Order, Jack McCoy doesn’t win every case.
It would certainly help if we didn’t have mooncalves in the newsrooms of major newspapers, but the NYTimes’ coverage of Dear Leader’s new tariffs repeats the misleading, utterly asinine misinformation that exporting nations pay the tariffs.
I’m flummoxed that a major media outlet can have reporters who write such foolish things and editors who fail to catch their errors.
In any case, new tariffs on Bangladesh and Malaysia should play Holy Ned with the prices of formerly-cheap clothing.
Just as working-class people will pay more for T-shirts, those in rural areas will also see their hospitals close and their commute to health care increase. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear laid out the impact of the BBB’s slashing of Medicaid funding in his state:
In my state alone, 200,000 people are going to lose their coverage. Those are 200,000 Kentuckians that deserve to see a doctor when they’re sick; 20,000 health care workers are going to lose their jobs, and we’ve got up to 35 rural hospitals that are typically the second-biggest employer in their communities that may close their doors, and what that means is our economy takes a huge hit. And then, whether you have private insurance or Medicaid, if you live in rural America, you have to drive hours just to see the doctor that used to be in your community. It is awful, and that is before we even talk about the cuts to SNAP, which means that seniors and children will go hungry at night and wake up hungry in the morning.
But it doesn’t really matter, because Beshear is a Democrat, and, while Donald Trump got nearly two-thirds of the vote in Kentucky, he is only president for Republicans and he hates Democrats. Seriously. He said so.
I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.
We’ve come a long way from “Come, let us reason together.”
Lyndon Johnson said that.
So did Isaiah, but then some folks read the Bible and some folks just sell overpriced copies of it.
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