You likely have seen the news that China is no longer accepting material the U.S. sends for recycling. If you’re like me, your reaction was, What? We’re burning fossil fuels to ship our waste to the Far East? China’s reasons that most of what we sent was adulterated with garbage and could not be recycled.
If you’re thinking, okay, we’ll just recycle it at home, you’d be right, partly. There has been some investment in paper and plastic production from used materials. The news is mostly not good, though.
“I hope his constituents are watching,” she said. “You’re more likely to get sued by your member of Congress if you live in Fresno or Tulare County than to see him at a town hall and talk to him about constituent issues.”
Trump toady and fake-Russian-news creator Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Fresno) is threatening more lawsuits against those who have said mean things about him. He already had filed suits against Twitter accounts “Devin Nunes’ Cow” and “Devin Nunes’ Mom.” The suits are asking for $250 million for the damage to his reputation. He also sued the Fresno Bee newspaper for $150 million because of its reporting of unseemly activities that took place on a yacht he is partial owner of.
The latest lawsuit is against a Central-Valley California farmer who had tried to have Nunes’s “Farmer” occupation removed from a ballot because Nunes does not actually do any farming.
Side note: The last public town hall meeting Nunes held with constituents was in 2010.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, Republican lawmakers fled the state to prevent a quorum as the legislature considered a carbon-tax bill. State Senator Brian Boquist responded to the possibility of the state police looking for them, saying they should “send bachelors and come heavily armed.” He also threatened Democratic Senate President Peter Courtney before the walk-out, that “hell is coming to visit you personally” if Courtney sent the police.
Courtney and Boquist both attend the same Catholic church. Boquist declared he “does in fact believe President Courtney’s soul is completely lost now.”
Boquist has filed suit in federal court against new security regulations requiring he give twelve hours notice when reporting to the capitol, in order to provide state troopers time to make public safety accommodations. Who is the real Boquist? Is he the posturing tough guy or is he a snowflake?
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.
“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.”
We celebrate the Fourth of July, aka Independence Day, with fireworks and bombastic patriotism. But it took more than a decade following the Declaration of Independence in 1776 for our revered Founding Fathers to cobble together a real constitution and set a functioning nation on its course.
By the 1780s, it was clear that the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” wasn’t working. Drafted by the Second Continental Congress in 1776-1777 and finally ratified by the thirteenth state in 1781, our nation’s first constitution set up a federal government that could print money that was worthless, could borrow money but couldn’t pay it back, was spectacularly ineffective in collecting taxes – individual states paid only what they felt like paying – and had little means of dealing as a sovereign nation with foreign powers.
The Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia on May 14, 1787. Its stated purpose was to “render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union.” Virginia and Pennsylvania were were the only states to show up. Deliberations finally began on May 25 with seven states, a quorum, represented. Eventually twelve states took part; Rhode Island, opposed to a strong central government, thumbed its nose at the gathering.
Census-taking was a contentious issue from the very beginning. Population of the various states determined representation and distribution of Federal largesse, such as it was. Southern states did not want the more populous North to control the government; they wanted non-citizens, i.e. slaves, counted. Eventually the delegates reached a compromise: a slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person.
It took a year. The new constitution was ratified by the required nine states on June 21, 1788. The Continental Congress voted on September 13 – eleven states had ratified by then – to begin the new government, effective March 4, 1789. The initial meeting of both the House of Representatives and the Senate were immediately adjourned for lack of a quorum. George Washington was inaugurated as the first President on April 30. And Rhode Island? The tiniest state finally ratified the constitution on May 29, 1790.
The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were added in 1791, as promised during the 1788 debates by supporters to gain the support of doubters who were concerned about a too-powerful centralized government. Among the rights enumerated are a prohibition of religious favoritism, guarantee of a speedy and public trial, and the necessity of a well-regulated militia.
And so the representative-democracy experiment continues. Can we avoid sliding into autocracy?
1846 After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, it addressed the problem of its northern region. The sparsely-settled area was subject to harassment from Comanche, Navajo and Apache tribes who felt they had some right to the land just because they were there first. Mexico thought attracting settlers from the United States might help. They tempted Americans with promises of cheap land grants, if the new settlers became Mexican citizens, spoke Spanish and converted to Catholicism.
Immigrants from the U.S. poured into the Mexican province of Tejas. Most came from slave states. By the early 1830s, the 5,000 Mexicans in the province were overwhelmed by the 20,000 settlers and their 5,000 slaves.
