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Polar bear with carrot

Monday, June 12, 2017

Nifty headline


If you don't laugh these days you will cry. I try to see the humor in all this mishigoss. We are going to give back pollution control to the states to deal with and then cut their pollution subsidies 30% to boot. No more protections for whales or turtles, the trumpsters figure there are plenty of fish out there. Kill Medicaid and give that to the states as well, but with inadequate subsidies. Shrink the national monuments, freeze chemical regulation and not implement air pollution regs and abolish the board that oversees chemical disasters. Ex EPA people have started the Environmental Protection Network, say Trump intends to cut scientific research by 47% and then cut state grant programs for air and water pollution program by an additional 30%. The prospective budget includes an additional 7.9 percent cut to the Science Advisory Board, which provides expert guidance on the science that underlies EPA rulemaking. War on science and the environment is in full swing, loved when Trump threw the binder on the floor the other day and had a tantrum about environmental regulations. I hope that a certain party will own up to all this one day because some of us will remember what you guys tried to do.

Heard a Republican talking head this morning say that none of this stuff will matter to the GOP base or affect their support for the Donald unless he is caught flagrant delicto with a live boy or a dead girl. Now that is funny.

1 comment:

Jon Harwood said...

Stay tuned. While it is probable that the Trump presidency will fail by finally messing up so badly that Republicans loose the stomach for it it is also POSSIBLE that Trump will carry out authoritarian measures such as firing the special prosecutor and retain enough Republican support to survive.

In my view the Republican party has been running out of ideas and relies on simply extending old Reaganite ideas like trickle down economics and vast military spending to assure coercive access for huge corporations to markets and resources. The most ominous thing though is the restless drumbeat of tax cuts for the 1% now at the expense of basic safety net programs. It is POSSIBLE that we have crossed the Rubicon into a repressive plutocracy masquerading unconvincingly as representative government. Should this be true it may mark the end of the American experiment in all ways except the window dressing.

Hopefully this plutocratic autocracy has not actually arrived and will not come to pass. Most likely our representative democratic republic will survive but the stakes are now very high and there are serious risks.