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Silencing Elizabeth Warren backfires on Senate GOP


The Beat Goes On!! Our current Congress again shows how un-American they are ( or are they?). In my opinion this is one  of if not the worst Congress we have had in years. This particular Congress has shown that they are incapable of doing the job they campaigned on and have further moved us back 20 years. This TOTUS will soon prove to be the undoing of the GOP along with their anti-American activities. If as a voter you think we will be OK, think again. This administration has the potential to out us in more danger than any previous and the GOP is determined to install poor choices for his cabinet. I have reproduced the letter below this post. MA.

Washington (CNN)The Senate has silenced Elizabeth Warren.
And by doing so, majority Republicans just handed the liberal firebrand a megaphone — further elevating President Donald Trump’s fiercest and most prominent critic in the Senate and turning her into a Democratic hero.
The rebuke of Warren came after the Massachusetts Democrat read a letter written 30 years ago by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for a federal judgeship.

#LetLizSpeak: ‘She persisted’ becomes rallying cry for Warren supporters
Warren cited the letter during a debate on the nomination of Sessions — now an Alabama senator — as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Reading from King’s letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, Warren said: “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”
Republicans cried foul — charging that Warren violated Senate rules against impugning another senator. A vote along party lines upheld that decision, turning what could have been an ordinary late-night partisan floor speech for political devotees into a national story.
“They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth,” Warren later told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Warren is now forbidden from participating in the floor debate over Sessions’ nomination ahead of a confirmation vote expected Wednesday.
“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said on the Senate floor.
The line was an instant classic — the kind liberals imagine being replayed ad nauseum in TV ads in a future presidential campaign.

Elizabeth Warren set to release book taking on Trump
It couldn’t have come at a better time for Warren, who is up for re-election in 2018. On Tuesday, she announced she hired an aide who is an expert on national security, a move that could help burnish her expertise in that area, as well as the publication of a new book, which will become available in April.
Liberals had been frustrated with Warren’s vote in committee in favor of Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Coretta Scott King letter Elizabeth Warren was trying to read
No more.
By Tuesday night, the hashtag #LetLizSpeak was trending on Twitter.
Warren used Twitter to attack Sessions and McConnell.
“I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory & racist comments that have no place in our justice system,” she wrote.
In a follow-up tweet, she said: “I will not be silent while the Republicans rubber stamp an AG who will never stand up to the @POTUS when he breaks the law.”
And then: “Tonight @SenateMajLdr silenced Mrs. King’s voice on the Sen floor – & millions who are afraid & appalled by what’s happening in our country.”

President Trump and the end of the American Century


Matt Bai
National Political Columnist
Yahoo News January 19, 2017

It’s inauguration week just as the Framers must have imagined it: citizenry streaming into the capital from every state to celebrate the most sober and symbolic moment in the democracy, even as the soon-to-be president tears into an American hero, fends off criticism from allies, deflects a sexual harassment suit and wails that his public approval ratings are rigged.
This is how the Trump presidency begins, and the American Century ends.
I don’t say this in a way that’s gloomy or hysterical; don’t count me among those who assume the nation is headed off a cliff. (Count me, instead, among those who think the odds of us doing all this again in three years or less are about 50-50.)
I’m only saying that political epochs, like the one into which every one of us was born, have demarcation points that can only be clearly seen in retrospect. And we’re living through one right now.
Any calendar will tell you, for instance, that the 19th century ended in 1901, the year President McKinley was assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt took his place. But most historians would argue that, for any practical purpose, the previous century of British dominance — Pax Britannica and all that — really saw the curtain fall in 1914, at the onset of the First World War.
The empire would hold together for another 30 years after that, give or take, but beginning with the campaign against Germany and its allies, the orchestra was playing Britain off-center stage. The costs of planetary preeminence, already a burden in peace, were unsustainable in war.
The 20th century as we think of it probably began about 30 years later, after Franklin Roosevelt solidified American dominance over the western half of a globe riven by ideology. From then on, Washington was at the epicenter of world events, the seat of unrivaled might among free nations.
America was the most expansive country in the world, but whereas Britain had chiefly expanded its physical domain, we expanded our standard of living at a staggering rate. We expanded our markets to much of the world, education to all reaches of the country and — at long last — civil rights to the citizenry.
We expanded the cultural reach of America — movies and sitcoms, soft drinks and sports teams, transcendent celebrity and defiant individualism — to every hamlet on earth where you could string an electrical wire.
But just as the British Empire strained to maintain its momentum in the decades leading up to World War I, so too did our vast expansion run up against the boundaries of time and technology.
Globalism, made possible by cheaper technologies and transportation, gave rise to competitors, even as automation made our own workers redundant. Factory towns cratered. The price of maintaining global hegemony, both in lives and in credit, became harder to justify.
Government continued to grow, but now so did the chasm between the rich and everyone else.
Still, well into the 21st century, the nation’s political establishment clung tenaciously to this ideal of an essential, expansive America. It was at the heart of George W. Bush’s calamitous adventure in Iraq and of his party’s bid to create a new federal program for prescription drugs. It was the vision behind Barack Obama’s health care plan, his pact with Iran and his failed effort to forge a new market in Asia.
And it’s precisely what Donald Trump’s election repudiates.
Trump has said all kinds of conflicting things about almost everything; I expect he’ll contradict himself a half dozen times on the Capitol steps alone. But in this one respect he has been faithful: He believes the time has come for withdrawal and isolation, rather than expansion and globalism.
Trump rejects free trade. He rejects our disproportionate role in the military defense of Europe and the West. He rejects the diversifying of our culture and the opening of our borders.
He embraces the kind of tariffs that were once thought the relic of an old international system. He would cede the shaping of markets to a Chinese leadership that now, improbably, seems to be the world’s largest cheerleader for trade. He imagines profound beauty in a wall.
Ronald Reagan, to whom Trump would like to compare himself, defied his critics by reaffirming our global ambition to enemies abroad. Trump launches his presidency by telling our allies we’ve had enough.
His antipathy toward the political establishment is an antipathy toward globalism itself. His ambition is personal, not national. His promise to make America great is a promise only to a subset of Americans to whom modernity has been callous.
It is a vision that resonates widely. In fact, it is the only aspect of Trump that does.
A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News this week found that Trump arrives in Washington with the lowest approval rating of any president-elect in 40 years — about half as much support as Obama had at the same time in 2009. Remarkably, though, Trump inspires enviable confidence when it comes to creating jobs and stopping terrorism.
Americans may not countenance a literal wall, but they see promise in the idea of hunkering down for a while, of trying to do a little less abroad and at home.
You can say this is only a momentary digression. You can imagine that Trump represents a kind of national catharsis, after which we will get ourselves together and continue on with the sober business of statecraft and global leadership.
But here’s the thing: Once you leave a vacuum, it’s not so easy to step back in and say you were only messing around. Economic rules get written. Rising powers exploit the moment. The world looks elsewhere for predictability.
This is what Vladimir Putin understands, by the way. This is why he loves Trumpism. Russians are nothing if not patient, and they’ve been waiting about 75 years for this moment. Even as Trump prepares to place his hand on a Bible, the world is shucking its reverence for American democracy, aghast at our penchant for triviality. When I was in Australia last summer, when Trump was just a nominee, the comment I heard again and again from the political elite was some version of: What exactly do you people think you’re doing? Do you not get how much the world relies on your stability? Yes, we get it. And apparently we’re tired of it. No offense, but we’re all expanded out over here.
Of course America can still be great in the decades ahead. (And yes, Mr. President-elect, it is.) We’re bound by demographics to become a more diverse, more enlightened country, not less so. We remain the world’s leading exporter of culture and consumerism. We’re awash in technological talent, and we command more military machinery than any nation in history.
But like the British before us, we’re increasingly reconciled to being one power among many — to act modestly on our own behalf, rather than grandly in the service of what Joe Biden, speaking at Davos this week, called the “liberal international world order.”
The vastness of America’s vision gives way now to the smallness of Trump’s appeal. The American Century recedes, 140 characters at a time.

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We’re probably underestimating how quickly electric vehicles will disrupt the oil market


 David Roberts

1 day ago

Seba says electric vehicles will be cheaper than regular cars, unpredictably rapid growth happens pretty predictably. 

Just about every analyst agrees that the electric vehicle market is poised for rapid growth. But how rapid?

It’s not an idle question. The rate of EV growth will have huge implications for oil markets, auto markets, and electric utilities. Yet it is maddeningly difficult to predict the future; forecasts for the EV market are all over the place.I don’t think the wide range of projections means that we’re blind here, though — I think we can make educated guesses. Specifically, I think history justifies optimism, the belief that the high-end projections (like those in a new study I discuss below) are closer to the truth.

Let’s walk through it.

EVs could do serious damage to oil — or not much

Transportation accounts for a huge portion of US carbon emissions. As recently as 2014, it was behind the electricity sector — 26 percent of US emissions to electricity’s 30 percent. But as Vox has reported, and the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) just confirmed, as of 2016, they have crossed paths. “Electric power sector CO2 emissions,” EIA writes, “are now regularly below transportation sector CO2 emissions for the first time since the late 1970s.”

This is happening because power sector “carbon intensity” — carbon emissions per unit of energy produced — is falling, as coal is replaced with natural gas, renewables, and efficiency.

The only realistic prospect for reducing transportation sector emissions rapidly and substantially is electrification. How much market share EVs take from oil (gasoline is by far the most common use for oil in the US) will matter a great deal.

However, as Rice University’s Dan Cohan explains in The Hill, EV forecasts are all over the map.

The EIA’s “Annual Energy Outlook 2017” is much more bullish about EVs than in previous years — its forecast for the EV market is “nearly double its forecast from last year, and nearly 10 times its forecast from 2014.” It no longer thinks hybrids or plug-in hybrids will play a major role. It believes EVs are ready.

However, even with that boost, EIA has EVs at 8 percent of US market share in 2025 (it’s 1 percent today), plateauing there as US mileage standards stop falling. The other big, influential forecast, BP’s 2017 Energy Outlook, has EVs at just 6 percent of global market share by 2035.

“Overall,” BP writes, “the increase in demand for car travel from the growing middle class in emerging economies overpowers the effects of improving fuel efficiency and electrification, such that liquid fuel demand for cars rises by 4 [million barrels a day through 2040] — around a quarter of the total growth over the Outlook.”

That is … something short of revolutionary.

As Cohan notes, however, others are more optimistic:

Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects electric vehicles to represent 35 percent of new car sales globally by 2040. Greentech Media Research expects 11.4 million electric vehicles on the road in the U.S. in 2025, compared to 7.5 million in the EIA’s latest Outlook.

Projections for EV growth feed into projections for oil demand. EIA, IEA, and BP expect demand for oil to continue rising into the 2040s and even beyond.

On the other hand, Michael Liebreich, the head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, expects oil demand to peak in 2025. The CFO of Royal Dutch Shell agrees — he said the company expects it to peak within five to 15 years. The World Energy Council predicts peak demand in 2030.

Into this milieu comes a big new study that claims all those previous projections are hopelessly pessimistic.

New study says oil and coal are in trouble

Today saw the release of a new study from the Grantham Institute for Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative. It argues that solar photovoltaics (PV) and EVs together will overtake fossil fuels, quickly. “Falling costs of electric vehicle and solar technology,” they conclude, “could halt growth in global demand for oil and coal from 2020.” That would be a pretty big deal.

The “business as usual” (BAU) scenarios that typically dominate these discussions are outdated, the researchers argue. New baseline scenarios should take into account updated information on PV, EV, and battery costs. (The EIA doesn’t expect inflation-adjusted prices of EVs to fall to $30,000 until 2030, even as multiple automakers say they’ll hit that within a few years.)

And baseline scenarios should take into account the commitments made in the Paris climate agreement, they say.

(All the data and assumptions are available along with the study, and there is an interactive dashboard that allows you to fiddle around with scenario results, if you want to dig in.)

Using that new baseline produces some pretty eye-popping numbers. To wit: “EVs could make up a third of the road transport market by 2035, more than half the market by 2040, and more than two thirds of market share by 2050.” And also: “Oil demand could be flat from 2020 to 2030 then fall steadily to 2050.”

Again, that would be a very big deal! Most big forecasters, and big energy companies, expect coal to rise at least through 2030 and oil to rise basically forever.

These new scenarios do not reflect hippie idealism, they just take seriously a) the cost curves demonstrated by PV, EVs, and batteries so far, and b) what countries said they would do in Paris. They assume that all this talk about climate change is not a bunch of BS — that it’s a real problem and we’re really going to try to solve it. (Admittedly, Trump has complicated that picture, but he can’t stop the rest of the world.)

If these forecasts play out, fossil fuels could lose 10 percent market share to PV and EVs within a decade. A 10 percent loss in market share was enough to send the US coal industry spiraling, enough to cause Europe’s utilities to hemorrhage money. It could seriously disrupt life for the oil majors. “Growth in EVs alone could lead to 2 million barrels of oil per day being displaced by 2025,” the study says, “the same volume that caused the oil price collapse in 2014-15.”Yet, according to the study’s authors, virtually none of big fossil fuel companies are taking the possibility seriously, or planning for it.

 

So EV forecasts range from modest to revolutionary. What should we make of this?

It seems to me that we don’t come to these questions with a clean slate. The very kind of models this study critiques are the ones that have consistently underestimated the growth of solar and wind. They use baseline scenarios that assume no further cost and policy changes when, in reality, cost and policy changes are both rapid and inevitable.Multiple drivers (pardon the pun) are lining up behind EVs — rapidly falling battery costs, rising range, synergy with other new energy technologies, widespread international policy support, growing consumer interest, and (my pet dark horse) wireless EV charging. Experience shows that markets at the center of this kind of interest and activity do not continue to grow on a steady, linear path. They take off, lurching into exponential growth. That shift is impossible to predict in advance with any precision, but at this point, we ought to know that it’s coming.By now, we need not be neutral toward this range of projections. History has taught us that for new, distributed, consumer-focused technologies, unexpected explosive growth is … to be expected. Big oil companies and investors would do well to prepare.

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Which Name? Trumpism Or Bannonism?

In the 1950’s Senator Joseph McCarthy went on a “witch hunt’ for communists, in the process he ruined many lives and in the end was proven to be a purveyor of unproven lies and innuendo (sound familiar?). We now have a similar situation which we can call by several names: Trumpism, Bannonism,Trumpedation or just Racism. I have posted below a short history of McCarthyism during the 50’s in the hope that it explains what could be coming down the road at us. Communism does exist and we all know it, it also has an existence here and around the world in one form or another. We must remember American style freedom has a worldwide existence too along with many variations according to the culture where it exists. In our current history we have a President who mirrors McCarthy through the influence of others (his Staff) or through a need for recognition as a celebrity  or a bully, its hard to be sure which. Given Mr. McCarthy’s meltdown and end, we are not sure how Mr. Bannon  (or Trump) may end.MA

McCarthyism, named after Joseph McCarthy, was a period of intense anti-communism, also known as the red scare, which occurred in the United States from 1948 to about 1956 (or later), when the government of the United States actively persecuted the Communist Party USA, its leadership, and others suspected of being communists. Loyalty tests were required for government and other employment and lists of subversive organizations were maintained.

The word “McCarthyism” is not a neutral term, but now carries connotations of false, even hysterical, accusation, and of government attacks on the political minority. From the viewpoint of the political and cultural elite, the suppression of radicalism and radical organizations in the United States was a struggle against a dangerous subversive element controlled by a foreign power that posed a real danger to the security of the country, thus justifying extreme, even extra-legal measures. From the radical viewpoint it can be seen as class warfare. From the viewpoint of the thousands of innocents who were caught up in the conflict it was a massive violation of civil and Constitutional rights.

One of the tools used was the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 which required Communists and Communist organizations to register with the federal government. The McCarran Act was gradually ruled unconstitutional in a series of Supreme Court decisions, beginning in 1964, and it was completely repealed in 1990. Another was the Smith Act of 1940, a federal criminal statute outlawing “advocacy of violent overthrow of the government.”

Under the Smith Act, the leadership of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party were prosecuted, as was the leader of the Communist Party, Eugene Dennis, and eleven members of the party’s National Committee. Since CPUSA had not explicitly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, the prosecution was on somewhat shaky ground, and based its case against the party’s leaders on Communist works of literature they possessed. Instead of arguing this legal technicality, the CPUSA leadership denounced the law under which they were tried itself, a defense which failed. Others who were tried under the Smith Act in later years successfully based their defences on more technical grounds. The Smith Act was declared unconstitutional in its full form by the Supreme Court in 1957, and limited to much more specific offences.

Another major element of McCarthyism was the internal screening program on federal government employees, conducted by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. This comprehensive program vetted all federal government employees for Communist connections, and employed evidence provided by anonymous sources whom the subjects of investigation were not allowed to challenge or identify. From 1951, the program’s required level of proof for dismissing a federal employee was for “reasonable doubt” to exist over their loyalty; previously it had required “reasonable grounds” for believing them to be disloyal.

The hearings conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy gave the red scare the name which is in common usage, but the red scare predated McCarthy’s meteoric rise to prominence in 1950 and continued after he was discredited by a Senate censure in 1954, following his disastrous investigation into the U.S. Army which started on April 22 of that year. McCarthy’s name became associated with the phenomenon mainly through his prominence in the media; his outspoken and unpredictable nature made him ideal as the figurehead of anti-communism, although he was probably not its most important practitioner.

McCarthy headed the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations; other significant legislative committees were the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), officially called the United States House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities, and the Senate equivalent, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. These committees independently investigated specific individuals and made allegations that many were communists. They had no official power of punishment, but those named as communists or communist sympathisers by the various committees often found themselves fired from their jobs and sometimes ostracised from society. These committees often received information on suspected communists and communist sympathisers from the FBI, which found them useful to attack suspects against which it did not have enough evidence to push for a criminal prosecution. These national committees were imitated by committees within state and even local government; these committees, sometimes known as ‘little HUACs’, were however generally less effective than the national committees.

Charlie Chaplin was one person accused of un-American activities, and the FBI was involved in arranging to have his re-entry visa cancelled when he left the States for a trip to Europe in 1952. In effect, his film career was over despite not being found guilty of any offence. Walt Disney worked closely with the FBI at this time also, chiefly by way of giving inside information from the film industry, but himself came under suspicion at one stage. Some people feel he used these alleged powers to denounce people who may have been a commercial threat to his operations.

The most publicly visible elements of McCarthyism were the trials of those accused of being communist agents within the government. The two most famous trials were those of Alger Hiss (whose trial actually began before McCarthy started brandishing his lists, and who was not in fact convicted directly of espionage, but of perjury) and of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Such trials typically relied on information from informers, such as Whittaker Chambers (whose testimony led to the downfall of Hiss) and the three men whose confessions and testimony were vital to the Rosenberg trial, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold and David Greengrass. It was revealed in the 1990s that the government had been relying on access to secret Soviet communications that showed that all of these, Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, and many others, including Harry Dexter White, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, were in fact paid agents of the Soviet Union. These communications are known collectively as the Venona papers.

The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and executed in 1953. Hiss was convicted in 1950 of perjury for denying on oath that he had passed documents to the Soviet Union while working for the State Department in the 1930s, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Both cases have aroused considerable controversy down the years and remain debated in the present day, and have to some extent been revitalised by the opening of much of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s. This provided new evidence on all these cases, but the Venona evidence is still disputed by partisans.

The red scare affected many people in Hollywood, resulting in arrests of various figures in the film industry. Many were also “blacklisted”, meaning that they were unable to work in the film industry (although some screenwriters were able to work under pseudonyms).

McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade faltered in 1954 as his hearings were televised, for the first time, allowing the public and press to view firsthand his bullying tactics. The press also started to run stories about how McCarthy ruined many people’s lives with accusations that were not supported by any evidence in some cases. Famously, he was asked by the chief attorney of the Army, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” McCarthy suffered a backlash in public opinion and was investigated and then censured by the Senate for not cooperating with the investigating committee, and for publicly calling them the “involuntary agent” and the “attorneys-in-fact” of the Communist Party. After the censure, McCarthy lost his other committee chairmanship, and reporters stopped filing stories about his claims of continuing communist conspiracies. He faded from the spotlight overnight. McCarthy died in office of hepatitis, probably caused by alcoholism, in 1957.

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Why So Many People Loathe Congress


This column for Mr. Hightower supports my statements about paying attention to Congress rather than the big elections, too many of forget that Congress enacted a law that they receives a cost of living increase each year so they do not have to publicly talk about it and at the same time keep that information from us the taxpayers who pay them.MA

Jim Hightower
Uncle Sam wants you. Not the symbolic Uncle Sam, but Sam Johnson. Although he’s been a member of Congress more than a quarter of a century, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of him. He’s a lawmaker who holds a congressional set but just sits in it, achieving so little that he’s unnoticeable. But Look out, Johnson has suddenly leapt into action, and we all need to take notice, because this Texas Republican has unveiled what he calls his “plan to permanently Save Social Security.” To get you to support the plan, Uncle Sam wants you to believe that this successful and very popular retirement program is “going bankrupt”. He knows that’s a lie, but he hopes it’s a big enough lie to panic you into doing anything to save the program. Then, to make his particular plan easy to swallow, he coats it with another lie, claiming that he’s merely “modernizing, updating and ensuring” the benefits and solvency of Social Security, which a big majority of Americans count on to avoid living out their golden years in stark poverty. In fact, conniving old Uncle Sam’s plan is to “save” Social security by gutting it. The congressman’s press release announcing his “reform act” doesn’t even mention the key fact that it’s entirely a scam, based o making worker keep paying the same 12.4 percent tax on their wages but getting drastically less paid back to them when they retire. How much less? It would range from about 20 percent less to 69 percent less, adding up to a total cut of 11.6 trillion in promised benefits to America’s workers.
It was bad enough that a so-called public servant would slap the middle class with such a raw deal, but worse that he tries to do it so dishonestly. Maybe he just doesn’t care – after all, having been a congress critter for 28 years, not only can Johnson draw a big social security check, but he can also get more than $70,000 a year from his congressional pension. What a deal. For Uncle Sam that is. For nearly half a century now, America’s middle class working families have been pummeled by corporate greedmeisters and their political henchmen. Haven’t they been punished enough?
No, says House Speaker Paul Ryan. Along with Uncle Sam and other top Republican leaders of Congress. Ryan intends to slash the little bit of retirement that middle class and low income workers depend on. And ultimately, Speaker Ryan is out to kill our social security program altogether, piously preaching that dependence on such public “entitlements” weakens our nation’s morality. Entitlements? Social Security isn’t a welfare program-regular working people pay a large percentage on every dime of their wages into the Social Security pension fund year after year. They earn their retirement. Morality? Social Security embodies America’s core moral value of fairness and our society’s commitment to the common good. And it works- before it was enacted, half of all American’s spent their “Golden Years” in poverty. Social Security has saved the great majority of us from old age penury. Where is the morality I taking this earned retirement and modicum of dignity from millions?
Besides a sermon on the morality of entitlements should never come from a Congress Critter’s mouth. Speaker Ryan himself wallows in a mud pit of Congressional entitlements that working stiffs couldn’t imagine: A $223.500 annual paycheck, free limousine and chauffeur, a maximum-coverage health plan, a tax-paid PR agent, lavish expense account, free travel… and, of course a platinum level congressional retirement program funded by the very taxpayers who’s Social Security he’s out to kill. Yet Ryan wonders why Congress’ public approval rating is plummeting toward single digits.

Jim Hightower is a National radio commentator and author

How Did Groundhog Day Start?


Every year on February 2, crowds gather at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to watch a groundhog emerge for the day. You know the drill—if he sees his shadow, bad news: There will be six more weeks of winter. But if he doesn’t see a shadow, spring is right around the corner.

In reality, groundhogs don’t make the best meteorologists, and poor Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t have a great track record (as of 2016, he’d made the right call just 39 percent of the time, according to Stormfax). So how did the bizarre tradition of Groundhog Day get its start?

The roots of Groundhog Day aren’t as random as they might seem. The beginning of February marks the halfway point between winter solstice (the shortest day of the year) and spring equinox (when night and day are about the same length). Pagans would celebrate February 1 or 2 with a festival of light to mark the start of spring. Gaelic legend says that if the goddess Cailleach wanted a long winter, she’d make the day bright so she’d have sunlight to gather more firewood. But a dreary day she’d stayed in because spring was on its way.

Medieval Christians adopted the festival and handed out candles. The feast day falls 40 days after Christmas, marking the end of the period when Jewish tradition would have considered Jesus’ mother unclean after giving birth. (Learn about the surprising histories behind your favorite Christmas traditions.) She would have been allowed to worship in the Temple again, so February 2 is also considered the day that baby Jesus would have been presented there for the first time. One old English song connects the day to the weather:

“If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.”

Eventually, Europeans started looking to animals’ hibernation patterns on Candlemas to predict the weather. Some watched to see if bears would come out of their dens, while the English looked for hedgehogs, and the French waited for marmots.

Germans, whose tradition said a badger would walk out of its hole if there was snow but retreat back inside if the sun was out, brought the custom to the United States. The Pennsylvania Dutch gave it their own twist by replacing badgers with groundhogs, probably because the hibernating animals were so common in the Keystone State.

In 1887, watching for Punxsutawney Phil became an official event. Since then, other cities have started looking to their own groundhogs, like New York’s Staten Island Chuck and Georgia’s General Beauregard Lee. Whichever furry forecaster is your trusted favorite, cross your fingers for a speedy, shadow-free spring.

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Donald Trump’s White House is in chaos. And he loves it.


I cannot possibly add anything to this and offer it as a better explanation than I can devise.MA

By Chris Cillizza
January 31, 2017 at 11:44 AM
On Monday night on CNN, Carl Bernstein made this proclamation: “The president and his presidency is in chaos.”
It’s a remarkable statement given that we are only 11 days into the presidency of Donald Trump. It’s also very hard to dispute.
Consider this amazing — and I do mean amazing — WaPo story today about how Trump and his inner circle produced the very controversial executive order instituting a travel ban on refugees and all visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The story details the infighting and blame game among Trump’s top advisers and includes some eye-popping lines.
Among them:
* “Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly fumed privately to associates over the weekend because they had been caught unaware by a travel ban that was drafted and set into action largely in secret by the White House, according to three people who have spoken with them.”

* “The problem they’ve got is this is an off-Broadway performance of a show that is now the number one hit on Broadway,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich of the Trump administration. (Sidebar: Gingrich is an informal adviser to Trump!)
* “A little bit of under-competence and a slight amount of insecurity can breed some paranoia and backstabbing,” one White House official said of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. “We have to get Reince to relax into the job and become more competent, because he’s seeing shadows where there are no shadows.”
Any one of those lines is problematic in a normal White House. The quote from an anonymous White House official about Priebus who, let me emphasize, is the White House chief of staff, is stunning. If that line was used in “House of Cards,” I would roll my eyes and say it would never happen in real life.
And, it’s not just the Post story that shows the seeming tumult among Trump’s senior advisers. A piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday details how Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly is at odds with the White House over staffing in his organization. A Vanity Fair post details the struggles of Trump son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner as he seeks to exert influence over the president.
Read any one of those stories and the word “chaos” jumps to mind. Or “turmoil.” Or “dissension.” All of them convey the same thing: Less than two weeks into his presidency, there is a knife fight happening daily among Trump’s top aides.

Bernstein clearly meant his chaos comments in a negative way. Chaos, in traditional political thinking, is bad. It suggests a president who doesn’t really have control over his people and a White House that resembles a roller coaster car shuddering as it travels at too high a speed down the tracks.
And, maybe that’s all true. It’s possible that the Trump train is on the verge of jumping the tracks. (Mixed metaphor alert!)
But, every indication from what we know of Trump the businessman and reality TV star suggests that he revels in the chaos, that he believes the chaos produces just the sort of results he likes.
Think back to the “boardroom” on “The Apprentice.” Bring everybody in. Let them attack one another and level allegations. Consult with a few of your consiglieres — George for the win! — and then make a bold and, often, unpredictable decision. Yes, that was a TV show. But it was a TV show created by Trump (and Mark Burnett). That means that the way the show worked came directly out of Trump’s brain and generally speaking represents his view of how things should work.
Remember that for Trump, appearances matter most. And he likes the perception of himself as the decider, the buck-stopper, the only one who can cut through all of the noise and battling egos to make the call. In order to make that image truly work, you need noise around you at all times. So Trump put in place a senior leadership team that would create it.
The other important point here is that Trump believes all of life — business and politics included — amounts to a sort of survival of the fittest/toughest. His critique of Hillary Clinton’s health during the 2016 campaign was based on the idea that anyone who has a weak moment — as Clinton did at a 9/11 memorial service — can’t possibly be up to the top job in the country. For Trump, the constant battles between his aides are a sort of real-life “Survivor” episode. The toughest SOB is the one Trump wants. And only through political combat can that be determined.

The combination of chaos, combat and constant sniping is not a bad thing in the worldview of Donald Trump. In fact, it is the one truly necessary thing.

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“It will not get better”: Former Bush administration official has a warning about President Trump’s administration


A short read that sums up a Trump (TOTUS) Presidency and its effect.MA

Ex-Condoleezza Rice aide Eliot A. Cohen also has strong words for conservatives who are working with Trump
Matthew Rozsa

Topics: Donald Trump, Eliot A. Cohen, Frank Lavin, Lezlee Westine, richard w. painter, News, Politics News.

Yet another former official for President George W. Bush has gone on the record criticizing President Donald Trump — this time it’s Eliot A. Cohen, who served as a counselor to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009.
Trump’s first week as president has already been marred by a “dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims,” Cohen wrote in The Atlantic. He pointed out that “because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better.”
Cohen predicted that Trump’s poor character and choice of advisers will “probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have.” Cohen continued, “It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.”
He went on to condemn his conservative friends who are thinking of working with or even for the dangerous new president.
“For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time,” Cohen wrote. “Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.”

That said, Cohen ended his article on an optimistic note: “In the end, however, he will fail,” Cohen predicted. “He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible — The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends.
Added Cohen: “He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say ‘enough.’ He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Cohen is not the first former Bush administration official to speak out against Trump. In an opinion piece for The New York Times posted earlier this month, former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard W. Painter slammed the president’s numerous conflicts of interest:
“He continues to refuse to release his tax returns, even though many of his cabinet nominees will have to disclose theirs in order to get confirmed by senators skeptical of, among other things, foreign business entanglements,” Painter wrote. “He also did not announce a divestment of ownership interest in his businesses, even though this is a step that his own cabinet appointees will have to take in order to comply with a federal conflict of interest law. Instead, Mr. Trump will simply turn management of the businesses over to a trustee chosen by him, and to two of his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. This is not a separation at all, and from a conflict of interest vantage point, it won’t work.”
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Similarly Lezlee Westine, who served as White House director of public liaison and deputy assistant to the president under Bush, endorsed Hillary Clinton in August. Although she didn’t directly attack Trump, her reasons for endorsing Clinton seemed to indicate that she was concerned about Trump’s lack of experience.
“Our nation faces a unique set of challenges that require steady and experienced leadership,” Westine said. “That is why today I am personally supporting Hillary Clinton. She has the expertise and commitment to American values to grow the economy, create jobs and protect America at home and abroad.”
The former political director for president Ronald Reagan, Frank Lavin, returned to the themes of Trump’s character when endorsing Clinton that same month.
“Trump falls short in terms of the character and behavior needed to perform as president,” Lavin wrote. “This defect is crippling and ensures he would fail in office.”

Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and his work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

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Donald Trump, The Radical Right Is Setting You Up In Washington!


This post from Russell Simmons speaks directly to what the Trump Presidency could mean. MA

Russell Simons

01/26/2017

I know we haven’t spoken since your run for office. The truth is, I never thought you would become president. I’m sure the comments I made publicly and to the press against your platform broke our friendship apart. That said, I still have some advice for the man I used to consider a friend. You are being set up.

I am convinced you are the Trojan horse. The extremists in the Republican Party and religious right have been praying for a long time to put a candidate in the position to turn back the tide of our forward push for justice and equality, which is in effect the American dream. The pendulum of consciousness always swings towards compassion and justice. There are moments that it swings back but once given a taste of freedom the people will thirst for it and will not let anyone take that away. African-Americans will never again be slaves, women will never again lose their right to vote or go quietly back into the coat hanger days, the LGBTQ community will not go back into the closet, the right to worship as we see fit will not be taken from one — you will have to strip it from everyone.

No American president has ever entered the Oval Office with an agenda so set on trying to undo the civil, social and political gains for equality that have been so long fought. And now we are bracing to have all of our victories overturned. Those lowest common denominator radicals of the Republican party have you locked in a role to do their bidding.

You came into the race as a strong independent voice and now you are going down a path of having the mainstream Republican party impeach you for many of your questionable choices that some of them support privately, but don’t want to carry the weight of.

I find it hard to believe you are comfortable going down in history as being impeached as the president who was taken out for Russian ties or signing off on the Dakota/Keystone pipelines benefiting a company you held stock in? When this happens where will they be? They will tell the American public it was all on you as they reap the rewards of some of the worst decisions a president has made for the people he is supposed to serve. If you are impeached, Vice President Pence will have the position he has always wanted with all the dirty work done for him without having lifted a hand. And in the best case scenario for you, which is you stay for the entire term, you will leave a legacy of heightened racial discord, massive environmental destruction and the shame of having repealed legislation that promoted equality and fairness for all Americans. You will continue to be shunned and protested against by the majority of citizens who will blame you for your radical and dangerous attacks on everything America stands for.

My advice to you is don’t let yourself get played by these suckas in Washington. Or we, the American public, will all pay for your naivety. We will be left to suffer as individuals who must deal with racism being accepted again, women being treated as second class citizens, the aftermath of immigrant families broken up and deported and an environment that will succumb to the mounting crisis of climate change. Future generations will be in an irreversible position of not being able to sustain the Earth they live on. You will be forgotten and dismissed by the radical right when you are long gone. A foolish blip in the big story of a sad American tragedy.

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TOTUS


It is evident that we are in for a rocky four years of governing, we have a President who seems to have no idea of the job he has taken on and seems to believe he can govern alone. Add to this a neer do well Congress and you have a perfect cocktail of ineptitude.MA  

Donald Trump’s Profound Laziness Is Already on Full Display
Jay Willis
January 23, 2017 9:27 AM Getty Images
Welcome to the first “fake it ’til you make it” presidency in American history.
President Donald Trump’s first three days are in the books, and they proved exactly as horrifying and surreal as the last 18 months that Candidate Trump inflicted on America. On Saturday, while on an official visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters—and in front of a memorial honoring the men and women of the intelligence community who died in service of their country—Trump rambled angrily about his “running war with the media,” just moments after trotting out newly minted White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to shout delusional, easily disprovable lies about, of all things, the number of people who attended his inauguration. What’s clear is that unapologetic propagandists now occupy the White House dais, and for the next four years, Americans will be governed by officials who remain wholly uninterested in earning their trust.
Trump’s obsession with crowd size is emblematic of his most crippling insecurity: He has no creativity, no originality, and no clue what to do next. His desperate craving to be liked runs so deep that, as he transformed from political outsider to major-party nominee to president-elect, he began shamelessly borrowing ideas from the types of respected, popular politicians that he wished he could be. His wife’s address at the Republican National Convention lifted entire sections from a speech delivered by the previous First Lady. He stole an inspiring photograph of giddy, euphoric crowds taken at the inauguration of his predecessor, because no such crowds attended his. Even the smallest subjects cannot escape this creatively bankrupt laziness: When planning the inaugural ball, his people requested an exact replica of the cake President Obama had made four years earlier. So, yes, Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by plagiarizing a cake.
The little indiscretions are funny, but they are more revealing than entertaining. For years, the Republican Party has solemnly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, that dastardly albatross responsible for making healthcare available to 20 million previously uninsured Americans, as soon as they are given the chance. Every serious GOP presidential candidate—including Trump—made their plan for replacing the ACA a central tenet of their pitch to prospective voters. On his first day in office, Trump’s version of delivering on his promise was issuing an executive order that “directed” federal agencies to try really hard to make Obamacare go away.
It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148), as amended (the “Act”). In the meantime, pending such repeal, it is imperative for the executive branch to ensure that the law is being efficiently implemented, take all actions consistent with law to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens of the Act, and prepare to afford the States more flexibility and control to create a more free and open healthcare market.
This isn’t leadership. It demonstrates no coherent vision. It’s a feeble, feckless, empty gesture, the kind you make when you (1) know you’re supposed to think that something is bad, but (2) also aren’t really sure what that thing is and can’t be bothered to read the Simple English Wikipedia article describing it, either. Even Trump’s omnipresent campaign slogan—”Make America Great Again”—shows just how brutally bereft of original ideas he is. It’s the sort of vague, aspirational nonsense that one would expect to hear from a man who learned everything he knows about being president of the United States from watching other men play one on TV.
Of course, no newly elected president steps into the White House fully prepared for the myriad challenges he or she will face. But Trump is unwilling or unable to grasp his shortcomings, and instead appears prepared to mask them by employing a two-pronged strategy: Come out with strong, forceful takes on substantively irrelevant subjects that he can easily understand, and glibly borrow from others when it comes to the hard political decisions that Americans expect him to make. This patchwork, smoke-and-mirrors approach to governance isn’t sustainable, but so far, it’s all he’s got.

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