OK, that might be a little premature. How about Joshua Preston for Minnesota House District 60B? One has to start on the cursus honorum somewhere, but give him a few years.
Joshua is a former UMM student, and also the creator of Giraffes Drawn By People Who Should Not Be Drawing Giraffes. He’s a good smart guy, so go to his campaign page and donate. Or at least cheer him on.
This seems like a good loophole: he’s not really our president, he’s a president who leaked through from a parallel universe. For instance, he thinks we’ve got invisible airplanes.
Amazing job, and amazing job. So amazing that we’re ordering hundreds of millions of dollars of new airplanes for the Air Force, especially the F-35. Do you like the F-35? I said how does it do it in fights, and how do they do in fights with the F-35. He says we do very well, you can’t see it. Literally you can’t see. It’s hard to fight a plane you can’t see right? But that’s an expensive plane you can’t see. And as you probably heard we cut the price very substantially, something other administrations would never have done, that I can tell you.”
He repeated this claim several times!
According to the pool report of the president’s Thanksgiving Day visit to Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet, in Florida, Trump told his audience he had discussed the
invisibleplane withsome air force guys. He asked them, he said, if it would perform in a dogfight like similar planes he had seen in movies.
They said: ‘Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it, even if it’s right next to it, it can’t see it,’Trump said.
I guess he’s from the universe where Wonder Woman is real.
Also, he seems to think we peons have to show our ID when we buy groceries.
You know if you go out and you want to buy groceries you need a picture on a card. You need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture. In this country, the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But we’re turning it around.
I’m kind of afraid, though, that he’s not a dimension-hopping alien, and that what he’s actually saying is what he hopes to be true, or wants to make true, and he’s unable to distinguish his fantasies from reality.
I guess we better make sure to bring our passports next time we visit the local Dairy Queen.
Even if these ICE child detention centers were happy little paradises staffed by loving, caring child psychologists and nurses (they aren’t), it was statistically inevitable that at some point one of the children would die while separated from their parents. It seems to have happened.
Update: The child died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children.
The events took place in Dilley Family Detention Center in south Texas.— Mana Yegani (@Law_Mana) August 1, 2018
The question is whether the institution takes responsibility for the death, and whether it made reasonable efforts to prevent the circumstances that led to it. The tweet mentions “possible negligent care” and an infection caught in the crowded conditions, in which case ICE is responsible for the death. ICE has also been aware that their policy actively damages children, and don’t seem to care.
Unfortunately, since law enforcement can literally gun down unarmed people in the back, I have no faith that anyone in our government will take responsibility. They’ll make excuses again.
Rutledge seems to be one of those people representing the future of the Republican party.
Leslie Rutledge, the attorney general of Arkansas, is a rising star in the Republican Party, especially under President Donald Trump. She gave a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, which she dedicated to bashing Hillary Clinton with conspiracy theories about the alleged evil deeds of the Clinton Foundation. Rutledge is currently head of the Republican Attorneys General Association and has been Arkansas attorney general for three years. (She is up for re-election this fall.)
Rutledge, who worked for former Gov. Mike Huckabee both in state government and on his presidential campaign, appears to be tight with the Huckabee family, who are immensely powerful in Arkansas.
First sign of trouble: she’s buddies with the Huckabees? Why are those cornpone sleazy yokels “powerful” in Arkansas in the first place?
But, you should be asking, “What about her emails?” She has a very ugly history.
Most of the emails are smarmy sex jokes or contain foul language, which was clearly embarrassing for a Republican with a wholesome image. But one stands out, in particular, for the racist content.
Rutledge apparently copy and pasted another email from “a friend of mine” who “works d’town with battered women” that purportedly tells a story about clients coming to her office. Rutledge’s friend wrote it in a heavily stereotypical dialect that appears meant to mock the clients. Here is an excerpt:
De problem be wit his baby momma. Actually it turn out he not be de daddy (I saw the paternity test results) but he done been payin’ chile suppote fo 5 year cuz Jesus done sent dat baby and it doan make no diffence who be de daddy iffn Jesus want him to be de daddy and take o’ dat baby what nobody want ‘cept him and his own mama.
The email goes on for five paragraphs in that vein, as the author writes that “baby’s momma done turn into a ho and a stripper and she be raisin’ fusses” and mocks a client’s mother by writing, “we be getting de Gospel Punctuation from his mama: ‘Hallelujah! Amen! Oh yes Jesus! Um hm!'”
That’s the kind of thing that would be the kiss of death for a Democrat — we’d be waving their career bye-bye. It’s no problem at all for a “Christian, pro-life, gun-carrying conservative woman,” though.
Something did get her booted out of one Arkansas office, at least. We don’t know exactly what she did, but it must have been terrible if it offended an Arkansas Republican.
These two emails were sent in August and October of 2007. Rutledge left Arkansas DHS in December of that year. After that, a note was added to her file accusing her of “gross misconduct” and instructing that she not be rehired. It is unclear whether the alleged misconduct was related to these emails or to other matters. Emails from Salon to Arkansas DHS asking for further clarification received no response.
She’s definitely one to watch. At this rate, she’ll be running for president in 2020.
His new movie is called “Death of a Nation“. It looks insane, with his usual ahistorical befuddling of the modern Democratic party with the racists of 60 years ago (sorry, guy, that wing of the party stampeded over to the Republicans when Democrats started advocating for civil rights), and a strange twisty story about Abraham Lincoln vs. the Nazis, at least if you go by the trailer.
Sorry again, guy. The Nazis favor Donald Trump, who is nothing like Abraham Lincoln. Even if the movie tries to pretend they’re identical.
Oops, there goes my lunch.
We just have our own problems over here in the US.
But one hopeful sign: there aren’t any tariffs on flint or obsidian, so we can all look forward to the resumption of the transatlantic stone tool trading routes.
I hear you guys used to make a pretty good beaker, too. Maybe we can exchange beaver pelts and buffalo hides, if there were any left.
This is what I worry about, too.
Except I don’t think the conditions that led to Trump are all that complicated. I’d rank them this way:
Gerrymandering and voter suppression, Republican party specialties.
A history of anti-government propaganda, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan.
A complacent media sucking up to power.
Russian meddling.
I’d say, though, that the Russian meddling was exploiting weaknesses already present in the country — they just fed the corrupt beast a few snacks. They would have gotten nowhere if the other four factors weren’t also present, and they are our problems.
Those aren’t complicated problems. They’re just intractable and serve the interests of the people in power, so they have no interest in correcting them.
I got a letter from a science student in Mexico who is concerned about the results of their national election in which they elected a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has begun appointing the various secretaries and advisors to form a government. His concern is that the appointment of María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces to the directorship of Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), the state science council, is problematic.
So I looked into it. My first superficial impression is that she seems to be a good choice: she’s chair of the ecology department at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she already has a position on CONACyT, and she’s a developmental evolutionary ecologist, a field I find fascinating. She’s qualified and has great credentials. She is so much better than anyone Donald Trump would appoint here that I’m wondering what Mexicans have to complain about.
But then my correspondent points out that she has some troubling ideas about science. In particular, she’s got things wrong about GMOs, which is one of her obsessions.
- She has mentioned that “Western Science” is the responsible of giving us the flashiest achievements but perhaps the most useless such as putting a man on the Moon.
She stated that GMOs are poison and that these can lead to cancer
She has mentioned that there is a rise in the US for autism which is caused by the consumption of GMOs
She of course links to the Seralini studies.
(The Seralini studies, you may recall, are the notorious bad experiments that claimed to show that the RoundUp Ready genes, not RoundUp itself, caused cancer when injected into rats.)
I might be slightly sympathetic to the argument that the moon landings were a superficial flash in the pan, since we haven’t bothered to sustain that effort, but it smacks of the usual ignorance of a different field of science and engineering than hers — like Sarah Palin’s ridiculous dismissal of fruit fly research. I also am not sure what “Western Science” means. There’s just science, and you can do it no matter what side of the world you live on. And isn’t developmental evolutionary ecology also “Western Science”?
“Genetically modified organism” refers only to a process for generating targeted, planned gene changes. A GMO is no more poisonous than organisms with random genetic changes…which are basically all organisms. You could argue that glyphosate is potentially toxic, but study after study has failed to find evidence of that.
There is no causal connection between GMOs and autism. This is just the worst. Autism is the default villain of so many anti-science arguments.
These claims call her judgment into question. There is good reason to have reservations about her appointment. As a citizen of the US, of course, I have no right to impose on the Mexican science establishment, so all I can do is suggest that my Mexican colleagues take a look at the Facebook page for the resistance, #ResisCienciaCONACyT, their blog at # ResisCiencia18, and follow their Twitter feed. Make up your own mind, organize and fight back!
I also have another suggestion. The US president currently has not bothered to appoint a science advisor, and in the vacuum, the default leadership of American science policy has fallen to a guy with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and in general his appointments to science and engineering positions have been jokes (our Secretary of Energy is Rick Perry, who didn’t even know what the DOE was). Perhaps María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces could be sent up here to do the job? Maybe even a notoriously anti-GMO scientist would be an improvement on what we’ve got now.
But still…Mexico and the US can do better.
P.S. You know the three largest cities in the Americas are São Paulo, Mexico City, and Lima, right? New York only makes it to #4. The population of Latin America needs a strong agriculture to sustain itself, so why is Mexico rejecting a key strategy for improving their crops?
A woman attended a Democratic rally, was appalled, and wrote about how awful it was. I’m thinking we ought to pay her to attend more rallies and publish her reactions, because dang, this is great stuff.
But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.
If you’re like me, your first thought was that this has to be satire. No one could be this oblivious. But no, this isn’t someone mocking the right-wing’s inability to grasp elementary civics, this woman is an associate editor at the Daily Caller, and went on Fox & Friends to repeat her gasp of horror.
I was listening to them talk – to Ocasio-Cortez and also to Cori Bush, who she was stumping for in St. Louis – and they say things, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent,the writer said.They talk about education for your kids. They talk about health care for you kids. The things that you want. If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and to say, ‘My kids deserve this,’ and, ‘Maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that.’
It’s revealing. The mole people have so thoroughly absorbed the ideas that government is bad and the ethos of libertarianism that they’ve lost the ability to recognize that government is a social structure specifically intended to provide for the well-being of its citizens. It’s right there in the preamble to the US Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Providing for the health and education of our children is what government is for, among other things…but I suspect this person is one of the fearful ones who only sees “for the common defense”, and imagines that justice, peace, and the general welfare are things that detract from the military.
