It's really important that those of who wish to see Trump, Sessions and the rest of them gone be accurate and wary or we will play into the Trump-defenders' hands.
1. You don't know who leaked this story. It may well be a part of an effort to get rid of Sessions so a new (non-tainted) AG can shut down the special counsel probe as unnecessary since DOJ can do it without a "compromised" AG.
2. The text of the WAPO story does not support the headlines. What it says is that Sessions is said to have discussed a Trump administration's likely Russia policy not that Sessions discussed the campaign itself or any intervention in it.
3. Why attack potential allies (the intelligence agencies)? Is it really the job of the intelligence agencies to "leak" the story if Obama --the president and obviously a Clinton ally--chose not to do anything with the information? Plus, last year, would there have been risk to sources and methods in doing so? (That horse left the barn a few months ago with the Flynn story so it is no longer a consideration.)
There are a lot of smart people who will work to protect this administration not because they care about Trump but to advance their own ends which have nothing to do with Russia. Don't underestimate them.
Let's not forget the nearly $600 billion in tax cuts in the AHCA. Nothing could make this moral monstrosity clearer. Nickel and diming over $8 billion that everybody knows won't begin to cover the otherwise uninsurable while this huge tax reduction looms over the next decade! Put the GOPpers who claim everyone will be covered to the test:
place half the tax cuts in a ten year escrow account to cover
cost of high-risk pools, with the balance distributed back to those who paid the taxes at the end. Watch them scream like stuck pigs. They know that not a dime would come back.
No, no, no! It's not Independence Day, it's The Arrival! In this 20 year old prophetic film, aliens disguise themselves as humans (including fake hair) and buy up failing power plants around the globe. They transform the plants into earth warmers and atmosphere transformers to make the environment more suitable for the colonizing life form. Washington power players have been co-opted. No one believes the scientists who figure it out.
Many who back a carbon tax urge an equivalent distribution to tax payers or a reduction in individual income or FICA tax which should make it politically palatable. "Tax carbon, not work" is a good slogan.
All true but you forgot to mention a key one: OBAMA. His skin is black and seeing a black president was too much to bear for a lot of Civil War losers and disempowered whites elsewhere. Hatred of Mexicans and Muslims resonates in that same strata of the American collective subconscious. Also worth mentioning are gun-possession identification (fanned by the NRA and GOP), the persistence of Reagan era delusions about rugged individualism, and (here's to blame the Dems except for Bernie Sanders and a few others) the minimal attention to the very real and painful worker displacements caused by free trade, globalization and likely in the near future. a response to climate change.
I'm not sure what Prof. Cole was basing his comments on but credible estimates going back 2 million years are now emerging. See Carol Snyder's article in Nature published on-line this week. These do suggest that there have been few periods where the temperature is hotter in the last 100,000 years and more chillingly (ironic pun intended) a persistent close correlation with CO2 levels that suggests that we have already set in motion 5C changes that will manifest in the longer term (millennia).
"You can’t watch everyone who goes..... to fight in Syria and comes back...."
Why are people in Europe allowed to go to Syria to fight or be trained by Daesh or other jihadists in the first place? In the US you would be subject to criminal prosecution for giving material support to a terrorist organization. If returnees knew they were likely to face jail at the border, they wouldn't come back or wouldn't go in the first place. I would add to criminalization the threat of loss of citizenship for active, military participants . This seems to me like a likely avenue for narrowing the sweep of anti-terrorism activity. I have not seen it mentioned. To be sure some potential terrorists may still slip past intelligence surveillance and some may think criminalization of travel to wage jihad too severe a human rights deprivation but the alternatives are far worse and as we are seeing, are leading to demands for unacceptable abridgments of the rights of millions of European Muslims.
I think we should round up all Apple devices, inspect them thoroughly and embed a tracker on each. Who knows what Steve Jobs' Syrian refugee father forced him to do!
Plus, there were close to a dozen Cuba-related terrorist incidents in Canada, some around the time Ted C. was born there. Can Ted prove that his dad was not a Cuban terrorist? And that he (Ted) wasn't influenced by his dad?
We need to be vigilant; truth is hard to find.
While I would agree that there are darker forces at work in much of the "conservative" climate change denial, conservatives are not wrong in thinking the Pope brings a radical-- at the root-- challenge. He does see humanity as a "part" of nature, not just its steward.
Quoting from the Laudato Si: The universe is "shaped by open and intercommunicating systems". He extols being "intimately united with all that exists". And of the other Francis, he represents "something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into something to be used and controlled." At times he sounds like his fellow Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin speaking of a whole universe in evolution to the "fullness of Christ" and begins the encyclical by reminding us that "we ourselves are dust of the earth....our very bodies made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters."
And from all this he goes on to build a vision that is deeply hostile to unfettered capitalism.
While it's true that Spain's rising use of clean energy is remarkable, it's also true that taken alone it does next to nothing to protect it from the effects of climate change. I was in Andalucia in early November. I drove through groves of giant windmills interspersed through acres of olive groves. The olive groves are parched from drought and a disastrous 2015 crop is expected.
Or one can travel to the Donana Nature Preserve—the first area ever protected by the World Wildlife Fund. Donana includes a marsh that in the fall normally hosts millions of nesting and migrating birds. The marsh was dry; the birds absent. No one was sure where they had gone.
So Spain has gone from knights errant jousting at windmills to towering windmills jousting with the dry, hot wind, a reprise of futility. No single country can stop the ecocide. There is no solution except a global one.
It's really important that those of who wish to see Trump, Sessions and the rest of them gone be accurate and wary or we will play into the Trump-defenders' hands.
1. You don't know who leaked this story. It may well be a part of an effort to get rid of Sessions so a new (non-tainted) AG can shut down the special counsel probe as unnecessary since DOJ can do it without a "compromised" AG.
2. The text of the WAPO story does not support the headlines. What it says is that Sessions is said to have discussed a Trump administration's likely Russia policy not that Sessions discussed the campaign itself or any intervention in it.
3. Why attack potential allies (the intelligence agencies)? Is it really the job of the intelligence agencies to "leak" the story if Obama --the president and obviously a Clinton ally--chose not to do anything with the information? Plus, last year, would there have been risk to sources and methods in doing so? (That horse left the barn a few months ago with the Flynn story so it is no longer a consideration.)
There are a lot of smart people who will work to protect this administration not because they care about Trump but to advance their own ends which have nothing to do with Russia. Don't underestimate them.
Let's not forget the nearly $600 billion in tax cuts in the AHCA. Nothing could make this moral monstrosity clearer. Nickel and diming over $8 billion that everybody knows won't begin to cover the otherwise uninsurable while this huge tax reduction looms over the next decade! Put the GOPpers who claim everyone will be covered to the test:
place half the tax cuts in a ten year escrow account to cover
cost of high-risk pools, with the balance distributed back to those who paid the taxes at the end. Watch them scream like stuck pigs. They know that not a dime would come back.
No, no, no! It's not Independence Day, it's The Arrival! In this 20 year old prophetic film, aliens disguise themselves as humans (including fake hair) and buy up failing power plants around the globe. They transform the plants into earth warmers and atmosphere transformers to make the environment more suitable for the colonizing life form. Washington power players have been co-opted. No one believes the scientists who figure it out.
Many who back a carbon tax urge an equivalent distribution to tax payers or a reduction in individual income or FICA tax which should make it politically palatable. "Tax carbon, not work" is a good slogan.
All true but you forgot to mention a key one: OBAMA. His skin is black and seeing a black president was too much to bear for a lot of Civil War losers and disempowered whites elsewhere. Hatred of Mexicans and Muslims resonates in that same strata of the American collective subconscious. Also worth mentioning are gun-possession identification (fanned by the NRA and GOP), the persistence of Reagan era delusions about rugged individualism, and (here's to blame the Dems except for Bernie Sanders and a few others) the minimal attention to the very real and painful worker displacements caused by free trade, globalization and likely in the near future. a response to climate change.
I'm not sure what Prof. Cole was basing his comments on but credible estimates going back 2 million years are now emerging. See Carol Snyder's article in Nature published on-line this week. These do suggest that there have been few periods where the temperature is hotter in the last 100,000 years and more chillingly (ironic pun intended) a persistent close correlation with CO2 levels that suggests that we have already set in motion 5C changes that will manifest in the longer term (millennia).
"You can’t watch everyone who goes..... to fight in Syria and comes back...."
Why are people in Europe allowed to go to Syria to fight or be trained by Daesh or other jihadists in the first place? In the US you would be subject to criminal prosecution for giving material support to a terrorist organization. If returnees knew they were likely to face jail at the border, they wouldn't come back or wouldn't go in the first place. I would add to criminalization the threat of loss of citizenship for active, military participants . This seems to me like a likely avenue for narrowing the sweep of anti-terrorism activity. I have not seen it mentioned. To be sure some potential terrorists may still slip past intelligence surveillance and some may think criminalization of travel to wage jihad too severe a human rights deprivation but the alternatives are far worse and as we are seeing, are leading to demands for unacceptable abridgments of the rights of millions of European Muslims.
I think we should round up all Apple devices, inspect them thoroughly and embed a tracker on each. Who knows what Steve Jobs' Syrian refugee father forced him to do!
Plus, there were close to a dozen Cuba-related terrorist incidents in Canada, some around the time Ted C. was born there. Can Ted prove that his dad was not a Cuban terrorist? And that he (Ted) wasn't influenced by his dad?
We need to be vigilant; truth is hard to find.
While I would agree that there are darker forces at work in much of the "conservative" climate change denial, conservatives are not wrong in thinking the Pope brings a radical-- at the root-- challenge. He does see humanity as a "part" of nature, not just its steward.
Quoting from the Laudato Si: The universe is "shaped by open and intercommunicating systems". He extols being "intimately united with all that exists". And of the other Francis, he represents "something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into something to be used and controlled." At times he sounds like his fellow Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin speaking of a whole universe in evolution to the "fullness of Christ" and begins the encyclical by reminding us that "we ourselves are dust of the earth....our very bodies made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters."
And from all this he goes on to build a vision that is deeply hostile to unfettered capitalism.
While it's true that Spain's rising use of clean energy is remarkable, it's also true that taken alone it does next to nothing to protect it from the effects of climate change. I was in Andalucia in early November. I drove through groves of giant windmills interspersed through acres of olive groves. The olive groves are parched from drought and a disastrous 2015 crop is expected.
Or one can travel to the Donana Nature Preserve—the first area ever protected by the World Wildlife Fund. Donana includes a marsh that in the fall normally hosts millions of nesting and migrating birds. The marsh was dry; the birds absent. No one was sure where they had gone.
So Spain has gone from knights errant jousting at windmills to towering windmills jousting with the dry, hot wind, a reprise of futility. No single country can stop the ecocide. There is no solution except a global one.