Deficit Reality Therapy

 

                 Deficit Reality Therapy

 

We are constantly bombarded with massively misleading rhetoric and outright lies by those of the far right. On the one hand we are treated to bitching and moaning related to the “debt ceiling.” If it were just that simple, I would tend to agree on the principle that spending more than you bring in is unsound fiscal policy. It doesn’t work on the microscopic scale (personal family finance), and it is a dangerous concept in the macroscopic (national policy) as well. 

        One of the recent key differences, with which Adam Smith was non-conversant, is what has become known as “Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which holds that, as long as an entity can just make (print) more money, they can never run out. The problem with that is that the concept of “full faith and credit” on which MMT relies, is intangible, based on consumer and borrower expectation, not tangible assets, of which we hold some (gold) but nowhere near enough to cover our debt obligation.

 Fort Knox currently holds roughly 147 million troy ounces (4,580 metric tons) of gold bullion, while the Federal Reserve vault in New York houses an additional 6,190 tons. At today’s gold price that means the value of the US gold reserve is about $700 billion. The projected federal deficit or 2023 alone is $1.2 trillion. For the math challenged, that means that we will borrow more than the value of all that gold in storage, and that would still mean an increase in the federal debt, which currently stands at about $31.4 trillion.  Just the annual interest obligation on this monstrous debt as of December 2022, was $210 billion, or 15% of the total federal spending!   

The odd part is that typically, the national debt resulting from deficits usually surges in times of national recession, or war time spending. As an example, in 2008, when the housing bubble collapsed due to grossly underregulated and financially disastrous financial sector operations, Gross National Product decreased as foreclosures spiked unemployment and the outgoing Bush administration enacted a $700 billion “bailout” bill. (remember “too big to fail?”) This coupled with greatly increased unemployment compensation and social service demands led to three years of significant deficits. By the end of the second Obama term, the deficit was back down to a lower level than 2008.

        Enter Donald Trump. While touting the “greatest economy ever” the deficit and, accordingly the debt, soared. In consecutive years the deficit rose, spiked by decreased federal revenues due to Trump’s tax cut, which was a valentine to the wealthy, just to peak at a deficit of $984 billion in 2019, just in time for Covid.  Tax Foundation analysts stated that the tax cuts would cost $1.47 trillion in decreased revenue while adding only $600 billion in growth. In other words, reduce taxes, increase deficit and debt. Which brings me to my second big lie.

The second mammoth falsehood being purveyed by the Right is that the Biden administration request for funding for more IRS agents is aimed at the average taxpayer (read that as “voter”) instead of its actual intent, which is to improve the function of the IRS as specified by law. Understand this:  thwarting the legitimate efforts of the IRS is of essentially no positive consequence to the “average” taxpayer and of none to any honest one. So, what’s the point?

While none of us enjoy paying taxes, as responsible citizens we do so because a free lunch is chimerical. Roads, social services, national defense, etc. all cost money and all are necessary. Oddly enough and overlooked by the “laissez faire” unregulated economy crowd, is the fact that even Adam Smith, himself, opined that those who make more from the economy should pay more for the privilege. While he didn’t use the term “graduated tax,” he implied it, way back in 1776, in “The Wealth of Nations”.

The real focus of current GOP anti-IRS fiction is that maybe, just maybe, those one-percenters who avoid anything close to their fair share (such as paying zero income tax [Trump] for several years while claiming to be wealthy) might actually be held accountable for honestly honoring the tax code. Think I’m kidding?

 Congress has systematically underfunded the IRS. Today, the IRS has as many employees as they had in 1970, and the technological system that they're using to drive tax processing was built in the 1960s before we went to the moon. As a result, wealthy individuals have all of the capacity to be able to try and avoid their taxes, and the IRS has few resources to be able to go after them. They also have armies of lawyers who can help them avoid taxes.

        This also affects the honest taxpayer, but in much the opposite sense.  Last tax year (2021), the IRS received 230 million phone calls and only had 15,000 people to answer those calls, which meant that each person had to answer 16,000 calls. Trust me, the “one-percenters” aren’t those calling the IRS for help. While many Americans, who don’t have tax lawyers, feel that every day, what Congress has actually done is to starve the IRS of the resources it needs to enforce legitimate tax collection from many of the wealthiest Americans, who are the least likely to pay their taxes.

The United States currently collects less tax revenue as a percentage of GDP than at most points in recent history, in part because owed but uncollected taxes are so significant. The so-called tax gap has surged in the last decade. The last official estimate from the I.R.S. was that an average of $441 billion per year went unpaid from 2011 to 2013. Current estimates are more than double that. Most of the unpaid taxes are the result of evasion by the wealthy and large corporations. In short, we don’t need more tax legislation, we simply need all of us to pay their fair share under present laws. This has essentially no negative impact on the average honest citizen, but then we don’t have paid lobbyists greasing the palms of sleazy GOP legislators.

The tax gap also has meaningful implications for fiscal policy. These unpaid taxes mean policymakers must choose between rising deficits, lower spending on important priorities, or further tax increase to compensate for lost revenue—which will only be borne by compliant taxpayers. According to Charles Rettig, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, The United States is now losing at least $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year, Mr. Rettig further states that the agency lacks sufficient resources to catch tax cheats. Referring back to the beginning of this essay, that uncollected $1 trillion would essentially erase the annual deficit. Add to that allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which could save about $300 billion annually and the deficit is a memory.   

        Of course, the GOP doesn’t want to do the first, (rigorously enforce tax codes) because fat cat donors would have to pay their fair shares, or the second, because Pharma companies spend much more on advertising and lobbying than on research and development, thus their extortionate pricing. Want to reduce the pain on US consumers as well??  Void the Trump China tariffs, which in addition to supply chain issues are costing the average US household about $800 annually for a total of around $93 billion.

 Note: no social service or “people programs” were injured during the proposal of these measures.

Women

 

                                            Women

 

Several years ago, I chanced upon an essay written and posted to Facebook by an individual who styled herself as “Lila.” Her thesis was that the status of women as secondary to men was ordained by Heavenly guidance and any women who pursue careers outside the home or take issue with male dominance are somehow heretical and/or violating what she views as the “natural order” of things. At the time, I was focused predominately on national political issues or related subjects such as COVID and economics. I made some notes, but the issue languished until I recently  found the notes in my “documents” folder while searching for something else. After a review, I decided I was remiss in letting this one slide, so I’ll begin with my original opening sentence, which I wrote as the beginning of a brief response to the individual, whose actual, identity I do not know, and enlarge considerably on the subject continuing in that vein. If this sounds a bit like a history lesson that’s because it is. It’s what I do.        

 

Lila, this may well be the most well phrased and yet almost nonsensical defense of the deprecation of women I've ever read.

I must assume from your post that you are a Christian, which means that nothing related to how we treat others (some of which you include in your apologia) which derives from the Old Testament is valid anyway, since your boss described a “New Covenant”, consistent with his teachings and personal behavior as described in such of the synoptic gospels as we have traditionally been “allowed “ to read.

        The secondary status of women which evolved in early Christianity, and continues to a great extent in Evangelical settings, doesn’t stem from Jesus in any sense, but rather generally reflects the personal opinion of Paul; and even more so, the early Bishops who were, by the third century, creating a hierarchy (translates as "positions of authority and power") for themselves. As non-royalty, the only other option for a power-driven person in the Roman Empire was religion. This continued even into medieval Europe and later, where, typically, the eldest son inherited land and title and the second son entered the priesthood. If the family was "connected," he could become a bishop in no time at all.  As recently as 2022, twenty-five Church of England Bishops are still automatically granted seats in the House of Lords in the UK. There is only just very recently a proviso that one of the minor Bishops seats may be filled by a woman. Even a Methodist and a Chief Rabbi, (men only!) have been so seated. All this was cemented by the early systematic reduction of women to relatively inconsequential positions in the Church. Even those women who were sainted and were reverenced, had essentially no temporal authority over males.

Note: She ("Lila") then alleged that anyone who read the Bible with a different interpretation was “reading someone else’s mail.” As a cynic who is, nonetheless, more than passing familiar with the document in question, I decided to engage her on her own turf. 

Your claim that someone who sees the matter differently than you do is "reading someone else's mail" would seem to indicate that you believe that the Bible was written not for the world, but for select individuals (like you), not for anyone who can think critically. That’s just sad. It also implies than no one who is not already a believer could read the Bible and become one.  And finally, remember that the Bible you read isn't all the writings from the period which relate to Jesus.

The OT, of course, was not written contemporaneously, but as much as a thousand years after many of the described "events," so it is much less "history " than fable. Heck, even Homer was writing of events (The Trojan War) at a time much closer (within about 400 years) to the alleged events.

Likewise, the synoptic gospels were not written by the apostles who accompanied Jesus, since almost all of them (like Peter) were semi-literate. It is a sure bet that Peter never wrote in Greek, if at all. Additionally, some of the most powerful scenes in them (the synoptics) cannot possibly be even first-hand accounts such as Jesus' conversation in the wilderness with Satan, for which there is no witness, (yet there is verbatim dialogue!), or the scene in the garden where even with all the Apostles asleep, we again have verbatim dialogue between Jesus and God? Really? and who wrote that down? Paul, however, raised in a well to do family in a formerly Greek, later Roman city (Tarsus)  was schooled in Tarsus and later, Jerusalem, was well educated, and literate in Greek and used that skill to create the image of Jesus as he wanted the world to see it, yet he never met the man either (don’t give me that “Road to Damascus” bunk).

So, in summary, claiming to "know" what Jesus said, or even meant, was wishful thinking. Even if we assume that what is attributed to Jesus is what he actually taught, it was soon distorted into a different focus, from a personal religion to a “corporate” one. Every nation state (all of Europe) which made Christianity the state religion also derogated and relegated women to secondary status, while (exclusively male) Church primates quickly became advisors to kings.

The first step was to make the scriptures unavailable to the common person, who, being almost universally illiterate, were reliant upon the newly empowered, literate, clergy to read it and interpret it for them. (This would result in the Catholic Church continuing the Mass in Latin, understood by essentially no one not of the elite, from, at the latest, the 6^th century, into the late 20^th century (1965), when the first vernacular Mass was celebrated in Ireland.

By the late 200’s AD, most of the “traditional” Gospels which supported the new theme of a male dominated clergy and a secondary status for women, were accepted as such. Reasons for this are several. First off, converting Jews and Greeks, both of whose cultures subordinated women by religious credo, custom and tradition, was much easier if Christianity followed suit. Secondly and just as important was the opportunity for men, in societies already male dominated, to gain power without being born to it. This became even more obvious after Constantine's commission in 331 of fifty copies of the Bible for the Church at Constantinople. Now, endorsed by the Emperor, Christianity’s early power brokers had the highest authority to form the Bible as they desired, regardless of those “other books, which tell a slightly different story. At the Council of Hippo, held in north Africa in AD 393, a group of church leaders recognized a list of books that they believed to be scripture. They cherry picked those which fit their desired narrative.  

The "gospels” (Mary Magdalene, Timothy, Peter, Levi and around thirty other scriptural writings which didn't "make it" were rejected by that early Church council. What do they have in common? All differ from the “accepted” version as early church power brokers wanted it. More significant for the purposes of this discussion, several show the importance and equal status of Mary Magdalene as an apostle. Here is a snippet of the “Gospel of Mary” in the Nag Hammadi library (discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.) :” “Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered.  Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well.”  Why might Peter have acted as he did? Perhaps the “also non-included” Gospel of Philip is instructional. Here’s a verse or two: “And the companion of the [savior] was Mary Magdalene. He loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples… [damaged text]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness." Apparently, in Jesus case, he liked what he saw! Apparently author Dan Brown did also, since this forms one of the principal premises of “The DaVinci Code,” condemned, naturally,  by The Roman  Catholic Church.

So, Lila, whomever or wherever you are, feel free to rationalize why you accept or condone the Far Right’s relegation of women and their right to control of their own bodies to the trash heap of religious dogma, but don’t claim it’s because the Jesus you claim to worship wanted it that way. It’s far more likely Josh Hawley, Mike Pence, or Matt Gaetz you’re thinking of.

Keystone XL One Last Time

 

                     XL One Last Time

                                                               

           I have previously written at some length about the reality of the Keystone XL pipeline vs the Fox News version. I have simply had it with those who, desperate to criticize the Biden re-cancellation of Keystone XL, blame it for current high gas prices. The project, which most Americans seem to think would initiate the piping of Alberta (Canada) tar sand oil across the United States, would, in fact, only be an addition to an already existing Keystone pipeline system which has been in operation across parts of the Midwest for years. The pipeline is owned by a Canadian company, TC Energy, and the Provincial Government of Alberta, Canada, yet, in its early construction stages several states allowed this Canadian entity to exert Eminent domain claims over US citizens to acquire right of way!

        The existing pipeline, three phases of it, runs east from Hardisty, Alberta, across Saskatchewan, across half of Manitoba, then drops almost straight down to Houston, Tx with a branch pipeline from Steele City Nebraska to southern Illinois. This system has been in operation since 2012, with the Neb.-Ill. branch coming online in 2016. It carries Tar sand oil (also known as bitumen), the dirtiest, costliest to refine,  crude petroleum product existing. The green line is the proposed XL, all the rest is in operation.

           

Unlike conventional crude oil, which occurs as a “pumpable” liquid within spaces in solid rock, oil sands are a mixture of semi-solid oil, sand, clay, and water. The viscous crude, called bitumen, can’t be pumped as it exists. Extraction methods use more energy and more water and are much more costly than conventional oil drilling. For deposits near the surface, the sand and oil mixture, also called “tar sands” must be   strip-mined, then processed with hot water and solvents to release the bitumen. For deeper deposits, steam is injected underground to allow the bitumen to flow into extraction wells. National Geographic has called exploiting oil sands the “world’s most destructive oil operation.”

The mining of bitumen laden tar sands strips away forest cover and topsoil, leaving acres of barren, black ground. The post-processing waste (“tailings”) are piped into large ponds, which then contain an acutely toxic mixture of water, sand, hydrocarbons, ammonia, acids, and heavy metals. Numerous scientific studies have detected toxins in the aquatic environment downstream from oil sands production, and a 2017 analysis estimated that cleanup costs will eventually exceed the value of oil sands royalties collected by the province of Alberta.

 The proposed XL would be larger and would greatly reduce the amount of pipeline in Canada (and the risk of spillage) by following the existing route south to the point where it currently turns due east, instead dropping south by southwest across Montana, South Dakota, and mid-Nebraska where it would join the current route. The real reason? Tar sand oil is heavy and sinks into the ground, can pollute the aquifer and is almost impossible to completely clean up. The existing Keystone lines already have the capacity to deliver 590,000 barrels per day to the Midwest refineries and 700,000 to the Texas coast. But the oil is expensive to extract and process, and it has a lower market value compared to U.S. crude oil. As of December of 2021, 300,000 of those barrels were simply “passing through” to be transferred daily to tankers at the port of Houston for export.

So why the XL? Simple, really. Canada would rather ship this dangerous pollutant through the US than through their own pristine middle provinces. In Canada, Keystone XL would barely graze southwestern Saskatchewan before dropping down into Montana, cutting off any new pipeline in either Manitoba or Saskatchewan.

So, what could go wrong? Well… TransCanada arbitrarily and improperly adjusted estimated spill factors to produce an estimate of one major spill on the 1,673 mi of pipeline about every five years, but federal data on the actual incidence of spills on comparable pipelines indicate a more likely average of almost two major spills per year. (The existing Keystone I pipeline had one major spill and eleven smaller spills in just its first year of operation.)" There were major concerns that a pipeline spill could threaten the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world's largest freshwater reserves; the Ogallala Aquifer spans eight states, provides drinking water for two million people, and supports $20 billion in agriculture.

A University of Nebraska professor, John Stansbury, conducted an independent analysis which provides more detail on the potential risks for the Ogallala Aquifer. His conclusions? Stansbury concludes that the original safety assessments provided by TransCanada were intentionally misleading. His opinion?  "We can expect no fewer than two major spills per state during the 50-year projected lifetime of the pipeline. These spills could release as much as 180,000 barrels of oil each." Trans Canada also failed to factor in the fact that Portions of the XL pipeline would also cross an active seismic zone that had a 4.3-magnitude earthquake as recently as 2002. Oops!

So, what has actually happened so far on the existing Keystone system?

In 2016, about four hundred barrels (18,000 gallons) were released from the original Keystone pipe network via leaks, due to what was referred to as a "weld anomaly". Since all such welds should be radiographed, this casts TransCanada’s quality assurance processes in doubt. 

On November 17, 2017, the pipeline leaked around 9,600 barrels onto farmland near Amherst, South Dakota. The oil leak is the largest seen from the Keystone pipeline in the state. Investigators found that a metal tracked vehicle had run over the area, damaging the pipeline. An additional federal investigation found that 408,000 US gallons of crude had spilled at the site, which was about twice what TransCanada had reported. It was the seventh-largest onshore oil spill since 2002.

In April 2018, Reuters reviewed documents that showed that Keystone had "leaked substantially more oil, and more often, in the United States than the company indicated to regulators in risk assessments before operations began in 2010."

On October 31, 2019, a rupture occurred near Edinburg, North Dakota, spilling an estimated 9,120 barrels. Where the 45,000 US gallons that were not recovered from the 0.5-acre containment had spread, five acres were rendered essentially useless. This leak occurred while the South Dakota Water Management Board was in the middle of hearings on whether or not to allow TC Energy to use millions of gallons of water to build camps to house temporary construction workers for Keystone XL construction. Bad timing, huh?

On December 7, 2022, 4 days ago as I write this, TC Energy initiated a shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline System in response to an alarm signaling a loss in pressure. TC Energy later confirmed that there had been a release of oil into a creek located in Washington County, Kansas, twenty miles to the south of Steele City, Nebraska. About 588,000 gallons of tar sands crude was released. This leak was the largest in the United States in nearly a decade. Cleanup is ongoing but, being heavy, unrefined tar sand oil, it will likely never really be restored to former conditions.

                 Cleanup efforts in Kansas

So why not just continue the existing pipeline east to the Canadian east coast or build a new one across Canadian soil to the west coast, avoiding dealing with the US at all? TransCanada’s Energy East project had proposed to do exactly that, promising to carry 1.1 million barrels per day from Alberta to Canada’s east coast. But the plan was scrapped in 2017 amid strong opposition from indigenous communities, environmental advocates, and communities through which the pipeline would have passed (in other words, Canadians who didn’t want the possible environmental damage.) Going west, the Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed in 2008, would have taken the westward route, ending up in Kitimat, British Columbia. It would have cut almost 1400 miles off the current Keystone route. It was also killed for the same reason. “Why take a chance of polluting here when we can ship it south across the USA?”

So why not refine tar sand oil in Canada? Canada hasn’t built a new refinery in over 40 years, even though the Canadian   Communications, Energy and Paperworker’s Union estimates that 18,000 Canadian jobs are lost for every 400,000 barrels of bitumen that are exported. Why? It is expensive to build a refinery and only a specialized refinery can process bitumen and turn it into refined products such as fuels. Few refineries in Canada can do it. None of the refineries in eastern Canada can refine large quantities of bitumen. Not only does refining of tar sands significantly increase air pollution, but it also produces an especially dirty, carbon-intensive byproduct known as petroleum coke. Extracting bitumen from tar sands—and the refining of it into gasoline—is significantly costlier and more difficult than extracting and refining liquid oil. The Canadian position would seem to be, “Let someone else take the environmental risk, do the dirty work, and make the investment!”

The conclusion? As a risk/reward exercise Keystone XL is a loser for the US. Canada has more oil (175 billion barrels estimated) than anyone but the Saudis, but it is far dirtier. They currently produce more refined oil in their eastern refineries from what they import than they use, making them a net energy exporter. It is simply easier and cheaper for them to ship high risk, high sulfur, hard to refine, tar sand oil elsewhere, since the refining process is costly and a serious polluter.

 XL would have been a good deal for Canada and a bad one for the US, regardless of the misinformation to the contrary promulgated by those on the Far Right, whose primary objective is to attempt to discredit any decision which is even remotely environmentally based and Democratic in origin. The worst of these canards, as I said earlier, is the allegation that there is a gasoline shortage related to the cancellation of the Keystone XL. Its output, had it been built (and it would still be years from completion), would largely be sold overseas, profiting Canada, since we, the US, are still exporting oil, even now and US Energy company profits are at all-time highs.

Amen!

Hot Topics

 

                                    Hot Topics

Today’s op-ed by Democrat turned Republican, turned idiot, Betsy McCaughey, leads with a headline which, as so many from the Right seem to do, implies that the Biden administration is specifically targeting and endangering employee 401K plans.

The headline, specifically written to strike fear into the hearts of anybody with any investments, says “President Joe Biden is going after 401K retirement accounts, risking millions of workers comfortable retirement funds; if you put money in a 401K, beware.” Reading just that, one might well believe that something disastrous and devious is happening in Washington when, in fact, the reverse is true. The Trump administration, catering to the anti-environment tenor of the Republican Party, enacted regulations which not only were aimed at discouraging 401K providers from including entities which invested in environmentally aimed products but actually stipulated that they could not unless they could guarantee that there would be a profit involved. In fact, no fund manager, no matter how brilliant, can guarantee that any investment will always make a profit. Market pressures don't care what fund managers think. No financial adviser can truthfully guarantee profit.

Employers have a legal duty to thoroughly assess funds’ risk and return when picking 401(k) plan investments; for example, they can’t subordinate the fiscal interests of workers in favor of a cause like climate change. The new rules don’t change these duties. What the Biden administration has done is to recommend removal of that Trump era restriction at the request of many financial product providers, employers, employees and at the recommendation of the Secretary of Labor. In essence, every 401K allows employees to choose how their contributions are invested in options provided. Under the Trump restriction some options were simply not available because they were environmentally and sustainability oriented and employees had no option to invest in that sector.

The way Ms. McCaughey puts it implies that The Biden administration is directing that fund providers must invest in companies that “follow left wing policies.” That verbiage, alone, tells you what her real agenda is. She then says, “It is legalized theft; the future return on your investment nest egg is being sacrificed to advance a woke agenda.” First off, the use of the word “woke” here is entirely inappropriate since the dictionary definition of woke mentions racial equality and has nothing to do with environmental activism. Giving Ms. McCaughey her due; she does understand “trigger words.”

Simply put, the Biden removal of the Trump directive is the very opposite of the veritable flood of Trump reversals of Obama policy for no reason other than personal spite. It mandates nothing, but simply allows more leeway for employees and employers to put their money in places the Trump gang didn’t like because it failed to fit their “ignore environmental issues” attitude.

Where, one wonders, was all this heartfelt Republican concern for American workers' financial security  in 2004 to 2008 when investment bankers were bundling incredibly high-risk mortgages and selling them to 401K providers and retirement fund managers as investment grade instruments? That massive failure of appropriate financial market regulation and the recession it precipitated is an indictment of everyone involved. What the Biden administration is seeking to do is simply to increase the options that employers and employees have for where they put their money. Period.

On an even more ridiculous note:

In case you missed it like I did, in late October, the national poster child for dumbass of the year, AKA Fox’s Tucker Carlson, proclaimed that, “The United States is "about to run out of diesel fuel ... by the Monday of Thanksgiving week." "Thanks to the Biden administration’s religious war (religious war??) in Ukraine, this country is about to run out of diesel fuel”, he said, continuing, "There will be no deliveries because there’ll be no trucks, there’ll be no diesel generators and then, invariably, our economy will crash because everything runs on diesel fuel, not on solar panels, not on wind farms — on diesel fuel."

Where to start with this lunatic? First off, not “everything” runs on diesel fuel. Electric power generation stations don't run on diesel fuel. Many trucks don't run on diesel fuel and even fewer cars run on diesel fuel. Having said that, it still would be a serious matter if we were going to run out of diesel fuel. The problem is that Carlson, like most of his Fox News cohort, makes a statement that he knows will scare the hell out of his gullible viewers, omitting the part that proves the statement is simply false. Carlson made his statement based on the amount of diesel fuel that was currently available which, if there wasn't any more diesel fuel made would only get us to about Thanksgiving Day. What he omitted is the fact that there were, at the same time, American refineries continuing to produce more diesel fuel and we continued importing fuel, ergo there was no shortage of diesel fuel, there was not going to be a shortage of diesel fuel and Tucker Carlson is simply a liar. Why would he say that? It was an obvious attempt to influence voters to vote “red.” Didn’t work all that well, huh?

And: 

I'm sure Star Parker means well. I'm sure she's a nice enough young woman. I'm also sure that she doesn't recognize that using religious grounds to define marriage means that she is guilty of the same the theocratically blind approach to government that she maligns in Afghanistan and other places in the world because their religion is different than hers. This is not the first time she has railed about the topic but the almost certain signing of a new federal law certifying that a marriage legally entered into anywhere, regardless of gender of the participants, is legal everywhere, seems to really offend her.

 Ms. Parker rejects the Respect for Marriage Act simply because it doesn't fit her religiously driven idea about what marriage is. Accordingly, she is absolutely free to marry as she sees fit. And now in America everybody else will be accorded the same privilege. When I look at the many ways in which dogmatic religious fervor has damaged humanity over the years it reaffirms the Jeffersonian belief that any established religion is a mistake in a national sense.

 I’m quite sure that MS Parker, a woman of color, is aware that only since 1924, and the USSC decision in Loving v Virginia, can she marry across racial lines, should she so choose. I am not so sure that she is aware that the hundreds of years of prohibition of such a union was largely derived from Christian religious dogma as well. Ms. Parker, as far too many do, seems to suffer from a common ailment, 1) the belief that freedom of religion is a good thing only if it is her religion and 2) Choosing who one loves is only allowed if she agrees with the choice.     

A knowledge of history, while it does tend to show marriage has traditionally been between men and women, also shows that the purpose of a formal marriage is, and has been, even in intensely religious societies such as the Puritans in Massachusetts, a legal procedure to ensure inheritance and property. Our founding fathers in Massachusetts had a civil ceremony which cemented those legal procedures and if they desired, as most of them did, they had a religious ceremony as well. Ms. Parker, in essence says, “What I believe is right and only what I believe can be right. How arrogant and short sighted that is.

And:

I subscribe to the online version of the Washington Post. Contrary to what those of the Right tend to feel, the Post carries op-ed commentary from both sides of the aisle. However, even when I differ with the writer, the columns are generally rancor free and use data to support arguments.

 Today, however there is an exception. The op-ed is headlined: “It’s time the Pentagon ended its Covid vaccine mandate for the military.”  I reflected a bit and couldn’t come up with a single idea that justified this position, so I read the column. The writer, a physician, takes the position that, since the Omicron variant is less affected by the current vaccines, there is no reason to give the shot. She then however acknowledges the development of a more potent one. She then also states that current Covid vaccines, especially the newer ones, both greatly reduce the severity if infected (as in greatly reduce the possibility of hospitalization) and also decrease transmissibility. In a military setting such as, oh I don’t know, maybe a submarine(?), any thing that reduces the likelihood of a crew becoming disabled and requiring hospitalization is a good thing, since hospitals are in short supply underwater, where I spent five years of my life, 90 days at a time.

Some facts: While civilians have the right to refuse vaccination and demonstrate their total lack of good judgement (and die if that is the result) military personnel don’t. Period. How odd is it that some, anti-vaxxers and Trumpists alike have chosen to be critics of mandatory vaccination even though the current Covid vaccines have been shown to be as safe or actually safer than most common vaccines? Could it be political? Of course it is, playing to the “You can’t tell me what to do” mindset of the Red Hat brigades. Well, Jethro, we can tell you what to do. We can make you have a driver’s license or walk. We can require you to have auto insurance. As of now, most civilians are not mandated to be vaccinated, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

Choosing to single out the military is far more nonsensical. Every new recruit already gets a slew of shots in basic training. These include measles, mumps, diphtheria, flubicillin, rubella and smallpox. It isn’t voluntary; it is a condition of employment, and the enlistee has signed a contract. If deployed, even in the Submarine Force where we were unlikely to ever contact most diseases, we also got periodic Pertussis, tetanus, Smallpox. (Every 10 years), Typhoid, Yellow fever, and Plague immunizations. They weren’t optional. We got these even if our likelihood of infection was exceptionally low, since any communicable disease can rapidly render a unit ineffective (think USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2020 - 1257 Covid cases, one death). Unfortunately, we still live in a world affected by a global pandemic. Covid is communicable and it is everywhere. Congressmen bitching about mandatory shots for the military are ones who have never served, or they’d know better. For a doctor to do so is even harder to grasp.

And finally, on a lighter note: Why do soccer players scream, writhe, and roll in agony on the ground when they fall, yet are able to hop back up and resume play when the ref fails to call a foul? An NFL wide receiver takes a bone shattering hit, gets up, looks at the guy who hit him and says, “That’s all you got?” I’m just sayin.’   

On Nuclear Power

 

                                        On Nuclear Power

        This is, in essence, a repost from several years ago following the continuing lunacy of too many world wide, such as Germany, decommissioning their safe, economical nuclear power plants and now facing the Russian gas shortage. Their Nuclear industry was by far the safest and most eco-friendly mode of electric power production, other than hydro, available, but "Green" politics got in the way. This is not a rant against environmental conscientiousness but rather a truthful look at a much maligned (due to ignorance) energy source. Generating electrical power with nuclear power plants is the second most economical (after hydro, which is location limited) means of energy in the world, much cheaper and more reliable than solar and wind. The original post begins below.    

        I am sick unto nausea of seeing a Pam Bondi lookalike exhorting me to vote "for energy," followed by a multi-ethnic panel of paid actors who parrot the same party line. What is saddening is that this is presented as if it was just a common sense, non-partisan, effort sponsored from the largesse of the energy industry. Make no mistake - we are held captive by these people to a degree. The fossil fuel purveyors are the money behind these ads. Dig deep enough into the background of this commercial (for that's what it is, in truth), and the Koch Brothers, frackers too numerous to mention, and the coal industry are lurking there.

        Sadly, we, as a nation of sheep, were frightened away from nuclear power by an accident which has had zero measurable effects on the general population or the environment over the subsequent 37 years other than the higher cost of electricity as the utility recouped their self-inflicted monetary loss over the following years. The site was called Three Mile Island, for those with short memories or too few years to remember. Within the same week, a film (The China Syndrome) scared the beJesus out of many who understood little of all that was wrong with it, conceptually.

      I worked in a nuclear industry, the  Submarine Navy, for 26 years as an educator and operator/supervisor. Our hundreds of thousands (more likely millions, by now) of nuclear accident-free operating hours under conditions far more challenging than stationary power generation, are testimony to the safety of the types of reactors used in US nuclear facilities. The Chernobyl tragedy was largely due to the type of reactor involved, and the lack of both judgement and training of those who initiated the event, not the nature of the use of nuclear power. Even the more recent Fukushima catastrophe in Japan was caused by inadequate backup provision for power, and a site location and design which would not have been licensed in the US, nor would a US plant have been at risk of a once in a lifetime tsunami. What passed unnoticed, is that no one died because of nuclear issues of any sort, but several were killed by the initial event (earthquake/tsunami) itself.

        Since its inception in 1948, the U.S. Navy nuclear program has developed twenty-seven different plant designs, installed them in 210 nuclear-powered ships, taken five hundred reactor cores into operation, and accumulated over 5,400 reactor years of operation and 128,000,000 miles safely steamed. For some perspective that's over 550 trips to the moon! Additionally, ninety-eight nuclear submarines and six nuclear cruisers have been recycled, with fuel reprocessed and reclaimed, minimizing waste.

        The U.S. Navy has never experienced a reactor accident. By comparison, there have been more than one hundred fatalities in the US involving Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) one of the "safe" fossil fuels hyped by the Energy Lobby. Between petroleum, LNG and Coal industry accidents, thousands have died, including the flattening of one square mile of Cleveland and 132 dead by an LNG explosion in 1944, and 362 in just one West Virginia coal mine explosion. This of course ignores the continuing litany of cancers caused by carbon fuel off gassing, especially earlier coal fired plants.

        Both solar and wind powers are attractive, no fuel, no carbon, options, but at great carbon and financial price for the initial installation, and for wind power, as the Danes are finding out, a lifetime intense maintenance commitment, in the current state of wind technology. Solar ...well, it only works when the sun is up, and current technology options for energy storage for later use are in their infancy. It will also almost assuredly be shown that while initial solar installations are less costly than wind energy, storage will be far more so. Hydro is of course fuel free, but requires significant altering of the natural course of rivers and the accompanying loss of various habitats, while having the obvious downside of needing high volume flows to maintain output. Hydro is also subject to the effects of changing weather patterns on the amount of water available. The record low levels in Lake Mead are exemplary. In the meantime, safe nuclear energy offers a far better alternative than coal (no carcinogens) and fracking (fewer drill induced earthquakes).

        "Be an energy voter" is partisan to the max while pretending not to be. Don't be suckered.

Trump's Greatest Hits

 

                           Trump’s Greatest Hits                              

    A compendium in his own words demonstrating why Donald Trump was the worst President ever and should be exiled to Bithlo. (For the uninitiated, Bithlo is a  rural Florida hamlet east of Orlando where  the mayor is a possum and hopes and dreams go to die.) 

 Trump is a bigot:

“I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks,” (really? Read on!)

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” (!!!)

“Who the f knows? I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?” (He responded to a real estate question using a racial slur for the Japanese.)

This is court record: He argued in 2016 that Judge Gonzalo Curiel — who was overseeing the Trump University lawsuit — should recuse himself from the case because of his Mexican heritage and membership in a Latino lawyers’ association. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had initially endorsed Trump, later called such comments “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle: “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor. It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.” (And he "loves" black persons?)

Trump is a sexist pig:

Trump on how to handle the fairer sex. “You have to treat ’em like shit,” (Trump quoted by former friend Philip Johnson)

“Rosie’s a person that’s very lucky to have her girlfriend. And she better be careful, or I’ll send one of my friends over to pick up her girlfriend,” Trump continued. “Why would she stay with Rosie if she had another choice?” (Mind numbingly sexist and stupid)

“I’m going to be able to do things for women that no other candidate would be able to do, and it’s very important to me.” (But he didn’t, unless we count packing the USSC with justices who would overturn Roe v Wade, which was done to women, not for them.) 

“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” (Poor Megyn Kelly, apparently bleeding out right on camera.)

“When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one, there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.” (What a swine!)

“'I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” (Yuck!)

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.”

“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything....grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” (Including have an affair with one while your wife is pregnant?)

“I am the greatest” (with apologies to the late Muhammad Ali who actually was)

“'I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” (News flash: Mexico hasn’t paid a cent for the wall)

'My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure; it's not your fault.' (This explains why he threatened Warton with a lawsuit if they ever released his actual grades, Additionally the graduating program from Warton lists him as “graduating” with no honors whatsoever)

“I went to the Wharton School of Business…I’m, like, a really smart person. (Really smart individuals don’t have to tell you they are. For another take on this: Wharton professor William T. Kelley had another view. After Kelley’s death, a close friend of Kelley revealed that the professor felt the president was a fool. “Professor Kelley told me 100 times over three decades, and I remember his emphasis and inflection — it went like this — ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had’)

“Apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize sometime hopefully in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.” (Start now, you have a long list!)

'I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down' (How odd it is, that not one person saw him)

“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart…I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star, to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius…and a very stable genius at that!”

Writes and speaks like a Fourth grader:

'[The New York Times] don't write good. They have people over there, like Maggie Haberman and others, they don't - they don't write good. They don't know how to write good.  (Turns out he don't talk good either.)

“I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” (This may be be the most revealing and insulting comment yet, on his sheer willingness to say anything, no matter how inane and insulting which pops into his great orange head. He dodged the draft, citing a non-existent bone spur  with an excuse from a doctor who rented from his (Trump’s) father, and then says he wishes he had a medal awarded only to those who are wounded in military service.)   

“I think I am actually humble. I think I'm much more humble than you would understand.” (Yep, he’s the “humblest” ever, no one knows more about humility then him!)

“Eventually we're going to get something done and it's going to be really, really good.” (He was talking about “his” healthcare bill here, which never in four years saw the light of day, let alone actual Congressional debate)

"I think I could have stopped it because I have very tough illegal immigration policies, and people aren't coming into this country unless they're vetted and vetted properly." (Referring to the events of 911 which were perpetrated by persons legally in the country.)

Trump on sharing his financial success

"I look very much forward to showing my financials, because they are huge." (Yet he is still suing to keep from being forced to do so, and no US Bank will lend to him!)

Trump on Covid-19

“We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.” (Of course, it will!)

“Within a couple of days,” Trump announced, “[infections are] going to be down to close to zero. One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear.” (Still waiting)

Regarding killing coronavirus with ‘light inside the body’: “Suppose that we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said at a White House coronavirus briefing, before continuing: “Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.” (Meanwhile Dr Fauci turns his head and vomits. What’s really the joke here is that tanning salons use Ultraviolent lamps, and the sun emits UV rays. By Trump’s lunatic logic, anyone who tans should be COVID free!)

He said, “it’s an amazing thing” that the coronavirus “affects virtually nobody,” (This statement was made literally only a few hours before the United States officially surpassed two hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic. Ignorant and an almost pathological liar – a bad set of faults in President)

"Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? It sounds interesting to me, so we'll see. “But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That's pretty powerful." (Call Alex Jones, maybe he has an answer!)

And, because it shows him at his stumbling , mumbling, semi-literate best: Speaking of his own ‘positive negative’ test result, Trump actually stated that he “tested very positively” during his now-daily Covid-19 test. “In another sense, I tested positively toward negative, right? So no. I tested perfectly this morning, meaning I tested negative. But that's a way of saying it. Positively toward the negative.” (Another “way of saying it” would be “I’m a f***ing moron”)  

“Everybody (Everybody? Really?) says I’ve done a tremendous job with COVID. My leadership has been extraordinary, best in history. My quick actions have all but wiped out the virus, saving millions of lives, and I’ve got the economy ready to roar back to better than ever before. I think a little gratitude would be nice. Maybe a big ‘thank you Mr. President’ is called for. (No, the economy hasn’t “roared back” and the virus is nowhere near “wiped out.” Vaccines have saved millions of lives, aided by social distancing and masks. Anyone believing Trump showed real leadership during the pandemic is obviously suffering from the dumbshit variant.)  

“The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic. It certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick.” (First and foremost, the Flu epidemic didn’t end WWI; massive German battlefield losses did, since it was only eight months since the outbreak. However, Trump says it “probably ended WWII” which began twenty-one years later. It should be deeply disconcerting to any sentient person when a college graduate of Trump’s age and office doesn’t know when the two World Wars were fought. This is coincident with Trump asking, according to an aide who was there, while at Normandy, who the combatants were, and referring to them as “losers” for dying in battle after seeing the cemetery.)

Various other ludicrous or dangerous statements:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the second amendment [the right to have a gun].” He continued “if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. (The referral to “Second Amendment people” sounded a lot like an encouragement for one to “take out” Ms. Clinton)

"I'm an environmentalist. A lot of people don’t understand that. I think I know more about the environment than most people." - Despite his public stance against the existence of global warming. (Again, claiming to “know more about” something just because he’s a “stable genius.” This is similar to his “I know more about” comments on nuclear power because he has an uncle who actually does. In truth, The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules.  Over four years, the Trump administration dismantled major climate policies and rolled back many more rules governing clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. If Trump is an environmentalist, Pee Wee Herman is an NFL linebacker.

Speaking about China's President, who repealed the country's term limit laws. "He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday." (Just like Putin, too, huh? Heaven forbid!)

“We cut taxes more than, you know, the biggest tax cut in history. My Administration and I built the greatest economy in history, of any country, turned it off, saved millions of lives, and now am building an even greater economy than it was before. Jobs are flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the rest to follow. Sit back and watch! (Trump is serially lying here. His was not the biggest tax cut in history, and it has increased the federal deficit by $1 trillion every year since it went into law. As to the “Strongest economy: During the last two years of the Obama administration, annual median household income increased $4,800. This is three times more than the $1,400 increase during the first two years of the Trump administration. Additionally, economic growth through the last eleven Obama quarters was virtually identical to Trump’s first eleven. Unemployment was near historical lows under Trump, and yet growth in gross domestic product was well below what several previous presidents achieved, and other metrics such as wages and business investment ranged from average to simply mediocre.)

“You must go forth into the world, with passion, courage in your conviction, and most importantly be true to yourself. I did it!”

(Trump said this during a Commencement speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sound familiar? It might, since Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods said it first, in Legally Blonde, during her graduation speech. And no, Trump didn’t attribute the words to her)

Campaigning against Joe Biden: “He is going to do things that nobody ever, would ever think even possible because he’s following the radical left agenda. Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns.” (Just the litany of nonsensical and absurd claims about Joe Biden, who is an avowed Catholic, as opposed to Trump who, as an adult has been to church only when he married one of his serial brides.)

“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” (Remember, he still wants to build a hotel in Moscow! Trump signed a letter of intent to develop the building, provisionally named Trump World Tower Moscow, in October 2015.)

When asked what, as President, he would do to help Ukraine  during Russia's invasion Trump spouted this rambling litany of word salad:  “Well what I would do, is I would, we would, we have tremendous military capability and what we can do without planes, to be honest with you, without 44-year-old jets, what we can do is enormous, and we should be doing it and we should be helping them to survive and they're doing an amazing job." (This may be the world record for a non-answer answer.)

“I listen to [Vladimir Putin] constantly using the n word. That’s the n word, and he’s constantly using it: the nuclear word. And we never talk of, we say, ‘Oh, he’s a nuclear power.’ But we’re a greater nuclear power. We have the greatest submarines in the world, most powerful machines ever built. Most powerful, and they got built under me. Most powerful machines ever built, and nobody knows where they are. And you should say, ‘Look, if you mention that word one more time, we’re going to send them over, and we’ll be coasting back and forth up and down your coast.’” And finally, several things leap out here: We (the US military and especially Pentagon planners) never, ever discuss submarine deployment strategies publicly, and neither should an ex- president. Second, Trump’s claim that “They got built under me is diametrically false. No submarine whose construction was authorized under Trump has been commissioned. None, Period. This is a categorical lie and vintage Trump.  Additionally, Russia has only a sometimes ice-bound Arctic coast and a Pacific coast, neither within less than 2000 miles of Ukraine. Without going into more specific details (and I could!) suffice it to say that Trump’s comments on “coastal” patrols are irrelevant from a nuclear standpoint, and just demonstrate the huge scope of his ignorance.

I have assembled this small sampling of Trump’s blithering drivel just to show how, in his own words, he almost screams “I am not even fit to pick up dog turds off the White House lawn.” And he wants to run again in 2024!

Thank you and have a nice day. 

In the Aftermath

 

                                    In the Aftermath

 

        So, what's going on this week other than that election "thingy" on Tuesday.” First (and worst) of all, we still have many Far-Right members of the GOP scurrying to convince the deplorables that the attack on Paul Pelosi was the act of a “lone wolf” and not in any way engendered by their rhetoric. Texas’s Ted Cruz shared a tweet calling the attacker "a hippie nudist from Berkeley" and dismissed the idea that the attack was motivated by right-wing ideology as "absurd." Others have actually claimed the FBI orchestrated the attack as a “false flag” to discredit the GOP’s radical wing. The attacker was a known Far Right loony who might well have killed Speaker Pelosi had she been home. We now have many of the GOP, including multiple members of Congress, treating this incident as Alex Jones did the Sandy Hook school shootings.

This particular flavor of bullshit goes all the way back to well before Donald Trump's pre-election statements of 2016 and has continued right on through to the present. When we got stuck with Donald Trump, we saw a complete departure from presidential restraint and consensus building. What once were the natterings of isolated groups of malcontent morons, became mainstream poison. I've been politically aware since the Eisenhower administration and have never heard an American chief executive be as confrontational, derogatory, or vengeful as Donald Trump.

 Sadly, many of those Americans who have lurked in these shadows harboring feelings of racism, anti-Semitism, and dissatisfaction with the misery of their own lives, have come to feel empowered by this new openness of hate speech. To be frank, in the modern era Trump did not invent this concept of publicly digging into the hidden frustrations and bigotry of some Americans. Dissatisfied Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) went there in 1948, when Harry Truman urged the inclusion a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. They left the party and ran vile racist, Strom Thurman as an alternate candidate. It should be no surprise that they then became Republicans by 1952, in time to become a thorn in the side of Dwight Eisenhower. Later, Newt Gingrich refined this to a great extent, largely through his own rhetoric and even more so because of his support for people like Rush Limbaugh who became, in essence, “Alex Jones lite.”

When, in 1987, Ronald Reagan essentially quashed the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” which required media outlets to allow the presentation of both sides of controversial issues, he opened the door to the current plethora of unaccountable broadcast liars such as the Hannitys, Carlsons and Ingrahams.

The fairness doctrine consisted of two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been cited by many social observers as a prime contributing factor in the escalation of party polarization in the United States.

By the time this op-ed sees publication, we will know the outcome of Tuesday’s vote. Some recent political candidate ads were markedly more aggressive than the pre-Trump era. The tragic aspect of this is that many of the candidates who were running the most aggressive and confrontational ads are people who still see any indication of not supporting Trump as a negative among voters of their party, ergo they will say things they may not even believe in campaign ads because they don't want to anger the great orange Wizard of Oz. One current example would be Nevada Senate GOP candidate Adam Laxalt who like a disappointing number of other Republicans continues to use the words “open border” or something similar to imply that the current administration has “dismantled border security” (Laxalt’s words). In fact: funding for Customs and Border security in the Biden administration is precisely comparable to that of the Trump administration. Border Patrol staffing under the Biden administration is consistent with the Trump administration. And finally, the laws and policies to prevent immigrants from remaining in the US illegally continue under the Biden administration to remain exactly the same as they were. In point of fact, for fiscal year 2022 Congress appointed over a billion dollars more for border security than any of the four Trump budgets.

On a local note, we saw similar claims from Marco Rubio. We have seen him claim that Val Demings, his opponent, “votes with Pelosi 100% of the time.” (Just like he voted with his party?) He has falsely implied that Congresswoman Demings would support defunding the police when, in fact, she was one of the few Democrats who voted against a bill to open the doors to that happening. We were also exposed to Governor Ron DeSantis claiming that he's keeping Florida “free” while restricting the ability of public-school teachers to do their jobs. We also saw DeSantis decrying the economy under former governor Charlie Crist, which ignores the fact that Crist’s governorship coincided with the major economic national recession caused by eight years of inadequate supervision of financial markets and the housing bubble collapse. In other words, like Barack Obama would be in 2008, Charlie Crist was also the recipient of a bad economy that affected the entire world, not just the state of Florida.

As of my writing this, I am hopeful, but by no means optimistic, regarding the results of the election. We surely deserve better than we have in Rubio’s (and Scott’s, but he didn’t run this cycle) Senate seats and in the Governor’s mansion. I loved teaching my 20 years at Boone High school, but I don’t think I’d make it a full year teaching real history under current restrictions. Stay strong and please remain politically active.