Three items on the menu today — do them all or pick your favorite(s)!
SCOTT PRUITT: With robot-loving, minimum-wage hating, allegedly wife-abusing fast food magnate Andy Puzder taking himself out of the running for labor secretary, the focus now turns to Scott Pruitt, the litigious EPA-botherer who now wants to run the agency. His confirmation vote is set for Friday, and it’s not a sure thing. Republican Susan Collins and Independent Angus King say they’ll be voting against him.
So call your senators! For more on what a disaster Pruitt could be as the head of the EPA see this MIT Technology Review piece; 5calls also has a quick summary of Pruitt’s flaws and a script for calling.
TRUMP’S TAXES: So it turns out there’s an old law that could compel Trump to hand his tax returns over to the House Ways and Means committee. Unfortunately, in a vote earlier this week, Republicans on that committee voted against using it to pry Trump’s tax returns loose.
If you’d like to give any of the 23 “no” voters a call, you can find their names and numbers here. Or call your rep and get on their case about making another request. If your rep is Bill Pascrell, send him a thank you for digging up the law and trying to put it to use.
RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA: This is the thing that could bring Trump down. Call your senators. Call your representative. Demand an immediate and INDEPENDENT investigation. 5calls has more info and a brief script.
Hell, make this your daily call on any day you’re not calling about something else. Use any new news on Trump and Russia your excuse to call. Right now, obviously, that’s the Flynn resignation. But there’s new stuff happening with regard to Trump/Russia pretty much every day.
See my posts here and here for more advice on how to call/write your congress members. And here’s some advice on calling politicians if you have social anxiety. If you can’t call, writing a personalized email is also effective.
Oh, and if you need some encouragement, here’s the cover of the latest Time magazine.
I don’t think Trump is going to be bragging about this one.
@magnesium I knew about this whole situation (which given the circs just makes it clear how tribal Carl and his ilk think), but I hadn’t read her take on it. Now that I have, all I gotta say is: you go, girl! Don’t take shit from nobody, especially not from Carl of Wikipedia and his cringingly short attention span.
@lith:
If it all seems overwhelming, just take it one day at a time. And it’s not the end of the world if you take a break for your own sake.
@Magnesium, thank you for linking that. I love that woman. She says that his shit-slinging stops with her. Love it, love it to pieces. Go get’em, girl. Go punch a Nazi. Metaphorically! (Unless actual Nazi. Then go ahead)
@Jack, just saw on Twitter a pretty chilling account. Exxon bought 60,000 square miles of land in Russia for oil extraction in 2012. Russia, obviously, is in on this. However, Ukraine is heavily taxing 3 out of 60 pipelines for export out through the Black Sea. 2014, Russia illegally occupies the Crimea, where most of those oil exports happen. Obama applies sanctions on that oil. Now, the ex-CEO of Exxon is the Secretary of State, and the Russians have been told by the (now ex) National Security Advisor to “not worry” about the sanctions, because Trump will be lifting them. I also seem to recall evidence that Trump was given 20% stock in that oil company as well.
https://twitter.com/Rosie/status/832012245471223808
Not sure on the source for that, so don’t believe it. Still pretty chilling.
Thanks @MrsObedMarsh.
It does get to me.
Currently watching Kindness Diaries, which is doing a great job of reminding me that Trump and his ilk are not the rule.
Oops, double post hahahahahaha aaaah.
Why…why must it always come down to oil…
There doesn’t appear to be a source so I’ll have to keep that at the back of my mind. Where it will fester.
But ffs OIL.
IT’S ALWAYS OIL. ENOUGH WITH THE OIL. FUCKING EVERYONE GET A FUCKING PRIUS ALREADY GOD DAMN.
On the tax returns… I’m still pretty sure he won’t release them because he doesn’t want everyone to know that he’s been exaggerating his own fortune for decades.
He really always just boils down to “tiny – not tiny”.
Easy. They roll over for Fuckface, or get primaried by someone who will.
Oil is money. Every industry, every economy, everything runs on oil. Our infrastructure is oil based.
It just makes me cry sometimes. We can print solar panels with the same efficiency as we can print newspaper now. Literally, we can print the things in rolls – cut it to the length you want, solder on some contacts, bish-bash-bosh, solar panel.
(Yes, I’m aware that the rolls are plastic. That’s entirely beside the point.)
China and India, love you guys, are currently charging as fast as they can into a sustainable energy network. I don’t blame them – it will help free them from the grip of imperialistic western oil-based economies. The future is theirs. In the west here, though, those same imperialistic economies have us completely on lockdown. They’re killing renewable so that they can squeeze as much as they can out of the current crumbling infrastructure.
It’s one of the biggest reason why Trump terrifies me. There’s a big block of people who don’t care about Trump’s corruption, the willingness to throw women and minorities under the bus, the lies, the graft, his blatant moneymaking, the cronyism, the assault on the press, the destruction of regulation. None of that matters, so long as they get a decent job out of the deal.
So Trump’s gutting the endangered species act, which will allow extraction companies to move into protected areas – primary industry jobs at the expense of a massive dieback of north american biodiversity. So Trump is killing the EPA, which will allow more of the same. And Trump is removing regulations preventing companies from dumping heavy-metal-rich mining tailings into streams and water sources, so that there will be no recovery.
All of this is horrendous – but it’ll make jobs. They’ll live out their retirements in big houses paid for with oil money, die fat and happy, and then their grandchildren will choke and starve. It’s all so nauseatingly awful. Fucking white baby-boomers. (Deep apologies to white baby-boomers in the room)
I don’t think I need to say this around here, but, it actually doesn’t.
Oh, I agree – it’s not going to make good jobs. They’ll be resource extraction jobs. I’ve worked in that field before. Camps will be built, giant holes will be dug, oil will be pumped, ore will be crushed – and then it’ll disappear. The jobs will move elsewhere, the national parks will be pock-marked with gravel pits and tailings ponds, all the water in the watershed will be full of mercury, and people will talk sadly about how the geese don’t come around anymore these days. Enough to make me cry, I tell you.
@Scildfreja: When I was a child, in the mid to late 1970s, the air was considerably more polluted (compared to today) in the New Jersey and New York areas. Do people really want to return to that? Like in China, where people wear masks to filter the air they breathe?
Just taking a nostalgic little journey here…my late grandmother lived near Newark, NJ. I’ll never forget the ODORS that assailed us as we neared where she lived. There must have been a rendering plant near where she lived. You know how you boil hot dogs in water? Well, imagine that odor, multiplied by 10,000.
PAPER MILLS – unbelievably bad-smelling, too. Of course, these industries have to be located somewhere, I’m just saying that they are a mixed blessing for the people who live near them.
I had several great-uncles who died from emphysema – they called it Black Lung – from mining coal. They told the younger generation, whatever you do, don’t be a coal miner! And there are people who want to return to THAT?
@Dormousing_it (formerly RoscoeTCat)
B-But muh satisfy male insecurity and jerbs. When it comes from folks who say that sincerely, it usually means they have zero experience with professions that have a track record of killing your body. Or do know what will happen but are too empathy deprived to reflect/care.
@Doormousing it, i know right? We’ve done this before. We know what happens. We can look at countries with less regulation and see what’s happening there right now!
Friend of mine says that all most Trump voters seem to care about is whether they’ll have a job. I think it’s more than that, but I can certainly agree that they don’t care whether minorities suffer or the world goes to hell; they don’t care about the lives of their children and they certainly don’t care about their grandchildren. All they care about is what’s happening in their own little life, right here, right now. Nothing outside that circle matters.
They’ll learn that they were wrong to think so small. We’ll all unfortunately have to go along for their lesson, if it gets to that. We may not get the opportunity to repeat it, either.
@magnesium I shop in that Lush! Next time I’m in I’ll offer moral support in person. Hopefully won’t run into Carl of Swindon.
EDIT: Oops never mind. ‘Either way, it’s creepy and unnerving to hear that people are actively seeking you out in person after something like this has happened.’
Re Russia oil deal:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/14/donald-trumps-russia-scandal-is-just-getting-started/
‘Putin and Sechin announced on Russia’s national television that the country had sold to foreign investors 19.5 percent of Rosneft, almost exactly the portion cited by the dossier.’
@Guest
Yeah, I think a supportive comment on her blog would be more appreciated than in person – she can’t know that you’re a good stranger after all.
Thought: a while ago trump was saying that if the Russians hadn’t interfered, he would have won anyway because he’d have done more campaigning in swing states.
If the Russians hadn’t interfered, he would have done things differently.
That’s only possible if HE KNEW.
Although good luck basing a court case on trump’s word.
@Zephkiel They probably do know me–I shop there, and I’m kind of distinctive (as in, unusual for this particular area).
@ guest
Of course round there that could just mean you don’t have an electronic ankle tag. 🙂
Burrrnnnnn…. Actually Swindon kind of grows on you. It’s funny how places like Swindon or Hull get these reputations….
@ guest
I quite like the place. Got some friends who live there (technically they live in South Marston but we insist on saying Swindon) and we do occasionally venture to the bowling alley. Plus it’s always fun playing with the roundabout (“Shall I clockwise or anti-clockwise this time?”)
And Hull (or Kingston, Hull’s the river) is great. Got an old flame there and she works on a street called “Land of Green Ginger”. How cool an address is that!
@Scildfreja:
And it has to be the right kind of job. Something manly and traditional, so they don’t have to challenge their minds or their assumptions about the world. A transition to renewable energy would create so many jobs, building and maintaining the new infrastructure, but these guys don’t want to hear it.
@Karalora, that really is it, isn’t it. They don’t just want a job, they want an appropriate job. A job that’s manly enough for a manly man like them. I mean, perhaps it’s generalizing to say that? But a unifying factor amongst Trump voters is that we know that every one of them voted for Trump – which means that at the least they were willing to vote rampant sexism and racism into the office.
I like how Keith Olbermann put it on one of his recents. All the jobs that those 11 million illegal immigrants do? Picking cucumbers in the hot summer sun, scrubbing toilets at the downtown stadium? Yeah, line up, Trump voters – oh, you aren’t willing to work those jobs? Even if you get paid better than the immigrants trying to feed their families? Imagine that.
God, they’re a bunch of whiny babies. Nnnngh.
@Dormousing_it, Scildfreja:
I was born in Prince George, B.C., and while I don’t remember it all that well, I spent some of the 70s in Quesnel, which is just a little south of it.
You could always tell there when the wind was coming from the north because you could smell the pulp and paper mills from Prince George, 120km to the north.
As for rendering plants, I now live in Toronto, not too far from the old Junction stockyards that originally gave Toronto the nickname ‘Hogtown’. Those actually got significantly cleaned up just in the mid-1990s; when I first moved to Toronto, you could still smell them even if they hadn’t been in active use for years at that point.
I remember acid rain being a big thing in the 1970s and 1980s.
I remember flying into L.A. in about 1990 and being able to tell when we got over the main valley from the smell… from inside the airplane.
It reminds me of anti-vaxxers, where a lot of these people must obviously be too young to remember what things were actually like back in the ‘good old days’ they keep talking about…
(Land of Green Ginger? I read that book so many times when I was little! … now you’ve made me want to see if it’s on the shelf anywhere … ::long pause, searching dark corner with torch:: … no, it seems to be gone :-((((((
oh, and I have some rellies in Kingston. T’other one, though)