The crisis of the day

This week there are stories in the news about a heat wave in London. Wildfires as a result of the heat in France, Spain, and Portugal. Five hundred fires in Alaska. Record low levels of water in Lake Mead (low enough that sunken boats can be seen). San Antonio, Texas usually gets two days of temperatures above 100F in June and this year had 17 days. And last Thursday Sen. Joe Manchin officially sunk any chance for reasonable climate change legislation this year. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported this comes after months of stringing other senators through tortured negotiations as they try to come up with something, anything, Manchin will support. Climate change is the greatest threat facing the nation and the world. Significant action is needed to address it. Manchin said no to doing something about it – while raking in record cash from Big Oil and dirty coal.

John Podesta, former aide to President Barack Obama, put it this way: “It seems odd that Manchin would chose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.” But the truth is simply this: Manchin is being paid to destroy humanity. Anything, anything, anything else he says is simply filler. He is collecting that check, and nothing else matters to him.

I wonder if it is just the money, though that certainly is a big part of it. He’s a supremacist in that he values his money more than the lives a great number of people. Is he also a supremacist that he really wants all those people to die? Does he believe, as so many billionaires do, that he’ll escape the consequences of an unlivable world? Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Manchin is doing all he can to spin that he’s not the bad guy. As it’s someone else’s fault. He said something about really wanting an energy and climate policy – but he has to check July inflation numbers first (see above about “filler”). John Harwood, a White House correspondent for CNN, tweeted that Manchin could strike a deal on this or any number of bills at any time – but he doesn’t want to. That’s clear when he cites inflation as a reason to oppose a bill that would reduce inflation McCarter wrote that it is time to make Manchin obsolete. His term isn’t up this year so we can’t yet vote him out. But we can make him irrelevant by getting a 51st Democrat in the Senate. And we can demand he be removed as chair of the Energy and Natural Resource Committee where colleagues are challenging him. Alas, Democrats seem to rely too much on voting him into irrelevancy rather than pulling him into line. We get tired of being told we have to “vote harder” each election. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about the other culprits in this mess – the Supreme Court and their ruling that strips some power away from the Environmental Protection Agency. This court will be remembered for five words, for referring to all those things at the top of my post as “the crisis of the day.”

So this is the way it plays out. Ten, 20, 30 years from now, long after Clarence Thomas’ harassing days are over, long after Brett Kavanaugh has sipped his last beer, and long after Amy Coney Barrett finally realizes that her imaginary white Jesus is never showing up to save her and her church friends from the “Tribulation,” those of us still around will be staring out at the bleak, heat-ravaged landscape, cursing the memory of John Roberts’ words. Every time a town ends up underwater, every time a power grid collapses from the heat, every time crops fail, or the heat outside becomes unlivable, and the air from the fires just burns out our lungs, we can look to those five little words for our cold comfort. Because, after all, it was only “the crisis of the day.”

Dr. Leah Stokes, a professor of climate and energy policy, tweeted with a link to an article in the New York Times saying Manchin’s legacy will be climate destruction.

Hold your children close tonight. Leave some water out for the birds. And make a plan to rip out your gas furnace. The climate crisis is getting worse, and thanks to Manchin, Congress is one vote short of saving us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.

According to my notes I replaced my furnace in December of 2017. It’s the second furnace I’ve had installed in my 30 years of living in this house. I can see from the way the ductwork has changed each new furnace has been shorter and more efficient. And this one is quite efficient. But it is still a gas furnace. At the time I didn’t think of installing anything different. Since it was installed in winter it was because the old one went kaput and I needed something now. With a furnace less than five years old I’m reluctant to buy another, especially since the air conditioner will need to be replaced soon. Hunter of Kos started a post with an example of one of the things I need from a government – protecting the little guy from the big guy. It’s a concept many federal agencies were designed to do and which Republicans are determined to eliminate (or at least make unable to function). I made a list of the departments in the federal government back in March of 2017 when the nasty guy first started a move to gut them. I also listed which ones protect the little guy from the big guy, which is most. Hunter wrote:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exists to keep consumers from being scammed. That's it. Its very existence was staunchly opposed by the nation's business community because post-capitalism all but requires scamming people in its bid to invent ever-more-exotic ways to squeeze money out of the economy while doing as little as possible to earn it, and the financial industries that do the most scamming are the ones who have devoted the most time to whining that the bureau is oppressing them.

Hunter went on to describe the pathetic complaints the US Chamber of Commerce has issued against the CFPB. Added Hunter “Never has a collection of wealthy tycoons suffered like they are suffering now, according to them.” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, noted the Emmy nominations include a category of best commercial. Two of the nominees are about school shootings. One, titled Teenage Dream, features the voices of teens shot in school and some of what they did to still be alive. The other, Lost Class, features a former NRA president “practicing” his graduation speech in front of 3,044 empty chairs. Why that number? It’s the number of seniors who didn’t graduate in 2021 because they had been killed by a gun. Yeah, the speech rehearsal wasn’t used in the way the NRA guy thought it would be. Bill also linked to an article by Natalie Neysa Alund in USA Today discussing a protest organized by Change the Ref. It is made up of 52 school buses in a mile long convoy that have 4,368 empty seats. That’s the number of children killed by gun violence in 2020. The roofs of the bus show the location and date of a shooting. Some of the buses have exhibits of photos and artifacts of those children, so the whole fleet is known as the NRA Children’s Museum. Where they can the buses are parked so from above they form the shape of an assault rifle. The convoy stopped at the home and office of Sen. Ted Cruz. He said he’s committed to doing something about the carnage, but his actions haven’t matched his words. Janie Har of the Associated Press reported that to retain teachers many school districts are building subsidized housing on their property that their teachers can rent. It is a way for teachers to live in the communities where they work. An example is in Daly City, California, off the southwest corner of San Francisco. Rents in the area are quite high and teachers weren’t making enough money to pay those high prices. Alas, some of these places limit the stay to five years. The assumption is teachers will save enough money to buy a house in that time. Teachers say the houses will still cost too much. I’m pleased school districts make sure their teachers have a place to live, but it is wrong to think it’s appropriate to pay teachers so little they can’t afford a place to live in the community where they work. There isn’t a lot new in a Ukraine update by Kos of Kos. I mention it because he included a tweet from Julia Davis:

Meanwhile on Russian state TV: Apti Alaudinov, the commander of Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechen detachment "Akhmat," tells state TV host Olga Skabeeva that Russian forces in Ukraine are fighting "holy war" against the LGBT & the Antichrist. He hopes Russia will soon face off with NATO.

Yeesh! Because it is important for as many people as possible to know... Americans can now dial 988 to be connected to mental health services, including a suicide hotline. Alas, it isn’t completely up and running yet. The goal of no busy signal and not being put on hold may not happen for a while.