Persons – Page 12 – GEORGE ROTHERT

Cruz and Paul and Inhofe, Oh My!

Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and James M. Inhofe and James Lankford, both of Oklahoma… okay, you know this will be about ignorance, maybe willful, maybe not.

Continuing their fight against science and knowledge, Cruz, Paul, Inhofe and Lankford tried to prevent a nonprofit educational organization called Climate Central from providing documented climate information to our nation’s TV weather forecasters. Climate Central provides information and graphics to about 750 meteorologists who have requested it. Material supplied by Climate Central has appeared in more than 1,200 broadcasts in the first half of 2019.

The four senators — is it necessary to mention they’re Republicans? — demanded an investigation into the $4 million federal funding the non-profit receives from the National Science Foundation. The four snowflakes said the NSF had “issued several grants which seek to influence political and social debate rather than conduct scientific research.”

After an investigation at who knows what cost, the NSF’s Inspector General said Naw, the program was thoroughly vetted, scientifically sound and non-political.

In other Cruz news, the Texas senator wrote to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and FBI director Christopher Wray urging an investigation into Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s handling of recent Antifa demonstrations in the Rose City. He says the Antifa group was mean to the far-right groups Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys who also were demonstrating in Portland. Cruz said it was like when authorities failed to protect civil rights demonstrators against violence from the Ku Klux Klan. To date, Mayor Wheeler has not commented on Senator Cruz’s demands.

Where Men Were Men and…

As we know from television, movies and other media, the westward expansion to our manifest destiny was the work of white men of European stock. The women were there for, well… you know what went on upstairs at Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon.

But in the Old West a person could get away from life’s previous entanglements, get a fresh start or simply lose oneself.

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July 26, 1919

This is the centennial anniversary of my mother’s birth. Marion Yvonne Riley was a product of the Heartland, born and educated in Iowa. She was the first woman reporter for the Mason City Globe-Gazette newspaper. During World War II she taught Army Air Corps (now the Air Force) servicemen who were training to be radio operators on bomber aircraft. (It was then she picked up the nickname “Mike” that stuck with her the rest of her life.)

Moving to Plutocracy

“The wanton disrespect that these elected Republicans showed Mueller was perhaps the most alarming testament yet to Trump’s total conquest of the Party. In today’s G.O.P., as in Stalin’s Russia, evidently, decades of loyal public service count for nothing when the leader and his henchmen decide someone represents a threat and the apparatchiks have been ordered to take that person down.”

John Cassidy – The New Yorker

Read it here.

A World Gone MAD

It was 1960… or thereabouts. I was sitting in the principal’s office, across the desk from Mother Mary I-forget-the-rest-of-her-name. (Why nuns of the Holy Child order were addressed as “Mother” and not “Sister” I never learned.) Sitting in a chair next to me was my mother, who had been summoned to this meeting addressing my egregious behavior.

“Do you approve of your son’s reading this?” she scowled, holding up the MAD magazine that had been confiscated from me.
“If that was the only thing he read I’d be concerned,” Mom replied. “But it isn’t.”
Thanks, Mom. Unfortunately for me, she agreed that it wasn’t what I should have been reading in class.

100 Years Ago: Black Sox

As Major League Baseball takes a break for its annual All-Star game, let’s take our time machine back to 1919. A year after the end of the Great War, the U.S. was recovering from the Great Influenza Pandemic and beginning a decade of prosperity. Baseball was truly the national pastime. But a hundred years later, the 1919 World Series is still remembered in infamy for the “Black Sox” players who conspired with gamblers to lose the Series.

The White Sox were World Series champions in 1917. The following year several of their players, including star outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, went off to war and the Sox fell to sixth place. Back to full strength in 1919, they won the American League pennant and faced the Cincinnati Reds in the Series. Several Sox players followed the lead of ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte: In exchange for $10,000 each ($146,000 in 2019 dollars) they made a deal with gamblers to lose.