Old quote, new day, and some things never change. “It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: ‘America’s right to know.’ It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ‘America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Forei[...]
Archive for March, 2021
The saga of the “Defcon toddler”
This message made some people nervous. One asked, “Should we be ducking and covering now?” A coded alert? A hacker? Nope. “In a statement issued late Monday, StratCom said the person who manages the command’s Twitter account was working from home when he briefly stepped away from[...]
How to save coal towns
Not by bringing back coal jobs, as Trump tried to do (unsuccessfully). Even without climate change, coal would have disappeared from the energy mix, a victim of competition from cheap natural gas (and, now, cheap solar power). The decline of coal has been an economic disaster in West Virginia and pa[...]
March 31st, 2021 - 4:48 pm § in Misc.
Capitol cop attacker busted
“Federal authorities have arrested Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, the 38-year-old Donald Trump fanatic” who assaulted a police officer with a stun gun during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Huffington Post reported on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. Read story here. “Rod[...]
March 31st, 2021 - 4:14 pm § in Law and Courts, Politics
Democratic loser ends election challenge
A Democratic candidate who lost a House election by 6 votes has withdrawn her request for a House review, CNN reported on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. Rita Hart (photo, left), who ran for Iowa’s 2nd congressional district seat in 2020, contended 22 more ballots should have been counted. It isn&#[...]
March 31st, 2021 - 3:04 pm § in Law and Courts, Racism
Only in Texas: How can voting provisionally even be a crime?
“The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has agreed to review the illegal voting conviction of Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County woman facing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while she was on supervised release for a federal conviction,” the Tex[...]
March 31st, 2021 - 1:02 am § in Misc.
Biden’s agenda is about lifting up workers
For 40 years, the U.S. economy has been dominated by Republican policies that enriched the wealthy and “left the working class as roadkill,” and GOP “government is the problem” ideology gave ruthless capitalists a free hand. But Covid-19 exposed that ideology as a lie, and Pr[...]
March 30th, 2021 - 5:56 pm § in Law and Courts, Politics
Matt Gaetz investigated for teen sex traffickiing
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL; photo) may have violated federal law by paying for an underage girl to travel with him across state lines, The Hill and Huffington Post reported on Tuesday, March 30, 2021. Read story here and here. A Department of Justice investigation, begun while Trump was president, of an [...]
Matt Gaetz is tired of Congress
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a strident rightwing foghorn in Congress, is “seriously considering not seeking re-election” and may leave before his term ends to take a job at Newsmax, the news-summary website Axios reported on Tuesday, March 30, 2021. Gaetz apparently hopes becoming a rightwin[...]