Month: November 2021

USA Today

With Trump out of office, Republicans would prefer life in the 1950s, survey shows

Nina Mandell, USA TODAY November 14, 2021

At the end of the 1950s, more than 15% of residents in seven southern states plus Hawaii had completed less than five years of elementary school, this graphic from the 1960 U.S. Census shows.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated when Social Security was passed into law and Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the name of the organization that did the study.

A recent survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that only 29 percent of Republicans say that American culture and way of life have changed for the better since the 1950s.

The number is a leap down from 2020 when 46 percent of Republicans said American culture and way of life had changed for the better since the 1950’s, but is only two points off from what Republicans said in 2016, before Donald Trump was elected President.

“It is notable that Republicans have gone up in their views during the Trump administration at the end at the height of his presidency and just a year later they have dropped down to where they were when Trump was running for President back in 2016,” said Robert P. Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of “The End of White Christian America”.

“Clearly they thought Trump was taking it back to a version more consistent to the vision of the country that was more consistent with the 1950s.”

‘The best of America’: Biden honors military members at Veterans Day ceremony

The ‘golden age’ for white, Christian America

Politically, culturally and demographically white, protestant Christians did hold the most sway in American culture and way of life, Jones pointed out. And, of course, over time that’s changed but the nostalgia for those who reflected that demographic continued to grow. Jones pointed to a quote from his book, “The End of White Christian America.”

“In its heyday, a set of linked institutions reinforced White Christian America’s worldview across generations: the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Boy Scouts, the Masonic Lodge, and the local country club with limits or even outright bans on membership for Catholics, Jews, and ethnic minorities,” he wrote.

“White, Christian America had its golden age in the 1950s, after the hardships and victories of World War II and before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. June Cleaver was its mother, Andy Griffith was its sheriff, Norman Rockwell was its artist, and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were its ministers.”

Jan 6 committee: Trump claimed executive privilege to shield info from Jan. 6 committee. Here’s what that means

Northwestern University professor Kevin Boyle said one thing that was striking to him about the survey results is that “presumably huge numbers of Republicans who answered the question didn’t live in the 1950s.”

But for a certain portion of the population, he said, life was pretty good especially in the latter half of the decade.

“It was a really positive time because what it reflected was their values, their sense of how the world should look, a strong sense of stability and security that they had never had before,” he said. “So for the white middle class, for the upper end of the white working class, there were a lot of things that were positive of the 1950s.”

Paul Croce, a professor at Stetson University, said a lot of the allure of the 1950s was that there was a spirit of cooperation in politics and across communities, trust in institutions and each other and an economic boom, which garners a lot of nostalgia.

A ‘stability’ built on unquestioned power dynamics

But even that, he says, keep in mind wasn’t perfect.

“While, yes, these were positive things, they were built on unquestioned power relations,” he said. “You are trusting that pastor, that businessman and that politician and you’re deferring to their power and you had a society where it took a Civil Rights movement to start in this period. They were just beginning to ask questions like maybe it isn’t a good idea to have second-class citizenship for different races.”

As a historian, he said, he looks back at the spirit of cooperation, trust and economic boom as something “built right on top of some things that weren’t too pretty.”

Minorities – particularly Blacks – and women also faced discrimination. The poverty rate for Blacks was 50 percent, according to Boyle. Jim Crow laws still existed in the South and the north was segregated by a number of other forces.

And of course, everything even for the privileged class wasn’t perfect, Boyle points out. Not only did their sense of security rest on racial exclusion and discrimination but it also rested on America building up its military and the memory of a world war that killed 60 million people.

“It rested on racial exclusion but it also rests on the economic benefits that came from a giant military state that made the world unsafe,” he said. “That made peoples’ worlds unsafe.”

Sixty three percent of Democrats who participated in the survey think American culture and way of life has changed for the better, which is about the same as it was in 2020.

Beaver County Times

Shell to pave roads with plastic-enhanced asphalt

Chrissy Suttles, Beaver County Times November 12, 2021

POTTER TWP. — Shell Polymers will partner with a chemical recycling company to pave roads at its petrochemical site with asphalt enhanced with recycled plastic additive.

Shell on Thursday announced plans to pave nearly six miles of site roads and 47,000 square yards of parking lots with the mix at its Beaver County site, which will begin turning natural gas into plastic pellets next year.

Company representatives said the project will “utilize the equivalent of 3 million plastic grocery bags, reducing waste in landfills.”

The partnership with Canada-based GreenMantra Technologies began in March 2020, when crews at the future Potter Township facility laid a test strip with the modified asphalt next to traditional asphalt and monitored it for a year. The test strip’s performance, compared to its partner, prompted leadership to use it more broadly throughout the project.

GreenMantra converts waste plastics such as grocery bags and film into specialty chemicals for use in roofing, paving and other industries. The technology aims to reduce energy use and carbon emissions during asphalt production and installation.

Hilary Mercer, Shell Polymers senior vice president, called the move a “win-win” for the environment and the cracker plant project “by using materials that would otherwise have been plastic waste.”

The company is now working to identify other possible uses for the technology across its other projects.

“We believe there are tremendous opportunities for combining asphalt and polymers to reduce both (carbon) emissions and plastic waste,” Mercer said.” “Governments, industry and the private sector can deploy this technology and deliver environmental benefits that were once unthinkable.”

HuffPost

Trump White House Repeatedly Blocked Critical COVID Warnings, Officials Tell House Probe

Mary Papenfuss – November 13, 2021

The Donald Trump administration intervened multiple times to block critically important warnings to the public from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as COVID-19 was exploding across the nation, top health officials have told congressional investigators, according to newly released interviews and other records released Friday.

A furious Trump immediately curtailed CDC officials’ media appearances after agency health expert Dr. Nancy Messonnier warned early last year that the spread of COVID-19 was inevitable, she told the House select subcommittee on the pandemic.

“Our intention was certainly to get the public’s attention,” Messonnier told investigators, but she was later reprimanded for the warning, including by then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

The CDC held no news briefings between early March 9 and the end of May last year as the pandemic was building and despite repeated requests from the agency, The Washington Post noted.

Trump appointees also pressured the agency to change its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports to align with the White House’s optimistic messages about COVID-19, health officials said.

In the newly released excerpts of information from White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, she accused Trump’s controversial White House adviser Scott Atlas of working to cut access to COVID-19 tests last year.

“This was an intent of Scott Atlas when he came to the White House, to change the testing guidance,” Birx said.

Trump frequently complained publicly that U.S. statistics looked bad because too many tests were revealing the nation’s high number of cases. Stopping tests was his solution to minimizing the appearance of a problem.

“If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” Trump insisted in June last year.

Birx said that Atlas triggered changes to CDC testing recommendations two months later that called for excluding people without visible symptoms, even if they had been exposed to infected people.

“This document resulted in less testing and … less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread,” Birx told investigators.

In information from Birx released by the subcommittee last month, Birx said she believes the COVID-19 death toll could have been cut as much as 40% with better decisions by the Trump White House.

Trump himself admitted to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward that he knew COVID was “deadly stuff,” but that he deliberately downplayed the risk to the public.

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward, the journalist reported in his book “Rage.” “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

In February 2020 Trump said there were only 15 cases of COVID-19 in the nation, and that it would soon be “close to zero.”  He also said that “like a miracle” the virus would “disappear,” and congratulated himself on doing a “pretty good job.”

Since then, 762,000 Americans have died of COVID.

HuffPost

Man Arrested After Allegedly Making Death Threat To GOP Lawmaker Over Infrastructure Vote

Mary Papenfuss November 12, 2021

A man from Long Island, New York, was arrested Wednesday after allegedly threatening a Republican lawmaker who voted for the Biden administration’s infrastructure package.

Kenneth Gasper, 64, was arrested following a telephoned death threat against Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Nassau County police said in a statement.

Gasper “was extremely upset over an infrastructure bill” and vowed, “If I see that mother (expletive) in the street, I’m going to kill him,” according to the criminal complaint against him.

The call, made Monday, came just days after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted that Garbarino and 12 other Republicans were “traitors” for voting for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The tweet also included the phone numbers for those GOP lawmakers.

“It’s amazing people want to kill me over paving roads and clean water,” Garbarino told BuzzFeed News.

He has also emphasized the seriousness of the issue, and said that “misinformation” spread by his House colleagues and conservative pundits has put lawmakers at risk.

“There are members of Congress that are fundraising off of their misinformation and attacking us, and it’s causing us to get death threats,” he told The New York Post.

Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said at a press conference Friday that his department has “zero tolerance for this type of behavior for any of our residents,” referring to the death threat, The Long Island Press reported.

“In the world that we’re living in today, the climate that is out there, these threats we take very seriously,” he added.

Gasper was charged with second-degree aggravated harassment and was arraigned Thursday. He pleaded not guilty, was released on his own recognizance, and was ordered to stay away from Garbarino and the aide who answered his phone.

His attorney, John Rey, has denied that Gasper made the threat.

“Ken is an ordinary American who was offended when politician Garbarino became an overnight Democrat and voted, in Ken’s view, to wreck our country,” Ray said, according to a local ABC News affiliate.

Gasper is due back in the court later this month.

Several other GOP lawmakers have reported receiving hateful calls and death threats since voting on the infrastructure bill.

The chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, J. Thomas Manger, told The Associated Press in September that his department was seeing thousands more threats against lawmakers than just a few years ago. He predicted that authorities would respond to close to 9,000 threats against members of Congress this year.

Rolling Stone

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon Is Reminding Everyone That the Right Is Very Much Trying to Destroy Democracy

Peter Wade November 12, 2021

Steve Bannon was criminally charged on Friday for defying a subpoena issued by the House committee investigating Jan. 6. The charges were announced not long after Bannon very emphatically reminded listeners of his War Room podcast that the he and the right are trying to do away with democracy by “taking over elections” and overturning Trump’s loss last November.

“We’re taking action. We’re taking over school boards. We’re taking over the Republican Party with the precinct committee strategy. We’re taking over all the elections,” Bannon said.

“Suck on this!” he added. “Ninety-five percent of the ballots in Virginia were occupied with election officials and poll watchers and that is a principle reason we secured the election of Youngkin. They know it. They’re there to have a free and fair count. We’re going to continue that and get to the bottom of 3 November and we’re going to decertify the electors and you’re going to have a constitutional crisis.

Don’t worry, though. Bannon took the time to comfort his listeners. Everything will be totally fine, he said. Just trust him as he walks the nation off a constitutional cliff. “But you know what?” Bannon said. “We’re a big and tough country, and we can handle that, we’ll be able to handle that. We’ll get through that.”

Bannon is currently engaged in a battle with the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. He has refused to comply with a subpoena from the committee, following Trump’s direction to claim his communications with the president were protected by executive privilege. It’s an odd claim considering that Bannon was not working in the federal government at the time of the insurrection and that Trump is no longer being president. Bannon even failed to show up to give testimony before the committee in response to the subpoena.

Bannon’s refusal led the committee to hold him in contempt. The House of Representatives then voted to approve the measure, sending it to the Justice Department. On Friday, the Justice Department announced that a federal grand jury indicted him on two counts of contempt of Congress.

The Conversation

The Hatch Act, the law Trump deputies are said to have broken, requires government employees to work for the public interest, not partisan campaigns

Matthew May, Senior Associate, Boise State University – November 12, 2021

Thirteen top officials of the Trump administration violated the federal law known as the Hatch Act, which prohibits political campaigning while employed by the federal government. That’s the conclusion of a federal government report issued by the Special Counsel, Henry Kerner.

The officials, including then-acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the reelection of President Trump in violation of the law.”

The Trump administration members were not the first federal employees to have crossed the line into prohibited political advocacy. Over the past few decades, government employees have been documented violating the Hatch Act in their offices, at meetings and in memos. And in a world awash in social media, it has become much easier for people to share their views about politics digitally.

But government employees work for the people of the United States. Paid with the tax dollars of Democrats and Republicans, they are supposed to work in the public interest, not use the power of the federal government to pursue partisan political causes.

Public dollars, public mission

The ideal of public employees as politically neutral is, at its core, driven by accountability.

For many government employees, the appearance of political impartiality is an overriding principle that governs their professional lives. Upholding this principle can even cause them to sacrifice their own electoral influence outside of the office.

I am a scholar of public policy and administration, and my research indicates that many would rather not vote in a party’s primary election, where they would be required to publicly state what party they belong to.

Where is the line between professional standards and political speech?

Public servants, the argument goes, should be neutral and concerned only with implementing public policy that is decided by elected officials. This principle has driven the field of public administration for more than 100 years.

Passed in 1939, the Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from running for partisan office, encouraging subordinates to engage in political activity, soliciting political contributions or engaging in political activity while on duty. It does not prohibit affiliating with a political party, discussing politics or attending fundraisers.

The Hatch Act generally only applies to federal employees. It does not apply to the president, vice president or Cabinet appointments. It can also cover state and local government employees, if their work is at least partially funded by federal dollars. Several states, such as Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio, have additional laws that can further restrict the political activity of public employees, even if their positions aren’t federally funded.

From 2010 through 2016, the Office of the Special Counsel, or OSC, which investigates Hatch Act violations, received an average of 315 Hatch Act complaints per year, which resulted in an average of 102 warning letters per year. An average of nine employees per year have resigned from their positions in response.

Some recent examples of Hatch Act violations include asking others to “help our candidates” and pressuring supervisors to allow employees time off in order to campaign for their union’s preferred candidate. Others coordinated partisan elections using taxpayer-funded resources. Even retweeting a post from the president of the United States on social media constituted a violation.

From patronage to neutrality, via assassination

During the early years of the United States, the federal government operated under a system known as “patronage.”

Under that system, a newly elected president could replace federal employees with a person of their choosing. Often, they chose only from among their supporters, campaign workers and friends. This was especially true if the presidency changed political parties.

The public bureaucracy was constantly changing, and few officials were around long enough to develop institutional memory. In addition, patronage led to the appointment of people who were not qualified for the positions they got, leaving the government inefficient and the public dissatisfied.

President Woodrow Wilson, prior to his presidency, and Frank Goodnow, writing separately at the end of the 19th century, first articulated the theory that there should be a wall between elected officials who set public policy and the professional staff charged with implementing that policy.

A professional class of government employees was not the tradition of the United States at that time, and the public had to be convinced of its virtue. Wilson’s essay tried to help the wider population understand why civil service reforms were necessary.

There was another event that also helped move government employment from patronage to professionalism. In 1881, a man who felt he had been unfairly passed over for a patronage job shot and killed President James Garfield. This assassination helped highlight the problems of the patronage system and led to the passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883. That legislation instituted a merit-based civil service system that remains largely in place today.

Under the system instituted in 1883, only the top levels of federal agencies can be replaced by patronage appointments – friends, supporters and allies of the new administration. The remaining levels of rank-and-file staff are expected to be nonpartisan professionals. In many respects, the Hatch Act can be seen as an outgrowth of this ideal.

A ‘fanciful’ distinction

The boundary between politics and civil service employees is not necessarily easy to see or maintain. Scholars have wrestled with whether government employees, charged with implementing vague public policy, can really be separated entirely from political concerns.

In fact, some scholars have rejected the separation as fanciful. In an important debate between preeminent public administration scholar Dwight Waldo and Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon, Waldo argued that when some decision-making is left to administrators, an administrator’s own politics will influence those decisions. In short, public employees are not actually neutral. Simon, on the other hand, argued that efficient government required that administrative decisions should emphasize objective facts and not be influenced by a public employee’s personal values.

While most public administration scholars have moved beyond debate about the dichotomy itself, public employees still have to grapple with their proper role. And they do so as they work for elected policymakers, who themselves still think that they are the only ones who should drive what all levels of government do.

Neutrality not getting easier

For over a century, public employees have generally subscribed to an ethos that theirs is a professional role separated from the daily political grind. In the modern era, it takes far more discipline to maintain that separation. And it does not appear to be getting any easier.

In 2015, the Hatch Act was clarified to prohibit federal employees from, among other things, liking or retweeting a political candidate while on the job, even during break time. Some in sensitive positions, like law enforcement or intelligence, are even prohibited from doing so during their off-hours.

Despite that attempt at clarity, in today’s hyperpartisan climate, social media and 24-hour connectivity have helped blur the line between a public employee acting in their official capacity and their private life.

The Trump administration officials’ violations help remind us that the line between political activity and professional neutrality still exists for federal employees. And in this increasingly connected world, the opportunities to fall short are plentiful.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 23, 2018.

Los Angeles Times

Letters to the Editor: Why Trump isn’t on trial yet, and what that says about justice in America

November 12, 2021

To the editor: In a way, the most interesting thing about how the media discuss the future for Republicans and former President Trump (including Jonah Goldberg’s column on the recent Virginia election) is a crucial underlying assumption: There is no justice or accounting for the powerful in America.

A primary example is that no explanation is even attempted for why the ex-president is not on trial or in prison.

With all his apparent crimes — ranging from tax evasion to obstruction of justice to attempted electoral fraud — he appears to be immune from prosecution from the federal government as well as from state authorities, particularly in Georgia and New York.

The near-silence of the media on this testifies to the corruption of justice in this country.

Roger Carasso, Santa Fe, N.M.

..

To the editor: Weighing in on the future of the GOP, Goldberg claims like many Republican politicians that one of the lessons of last week’s elections is that Republicans can win back suburban and independent voters by talking about real issues rather than Trump.

For those of us who followed the Virginia race, we learned that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe had at least six pages on his website detailing his plans for Virginians. Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, the Republican winner, stated next to nothing on his website beyond his “educational” goals of giving control of schools to parents and keeping critical race theory out of the classroom.

In reality, critical race theory is not currently being taught to Virginia students. Those of us with an actual education can see the history of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy being replayed.

Fear and racism win elections, not policies.

Constance Mallinson, Woodland Hills

The Courier

The dumbing down of America

Dan Tackett – November 11, 2021

I enjoy reading opinion pieces in the newspaper. Sometimes I agree with the writer; other times I disagree. Whatever, I think it’s good to understand the varying viewpoints of the day.

One of my favorite columnists is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. He definitely leans to the left, but more importantly, he leans heavily on common sense. Last month, he nailed it with a column about the dumbing down of America, only Robinson framed it into a more blistering description. He expressed his personal fear the country is quickly diving into “lip-blubbering, self-destructive idiocy. How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb?”

He cited what he believes are clear examples of a dumb America, including Congress too often flirting with economic chaos and disaster, all in the name of politics, to the large segment of citizens who deny science and ignore some 700,000 deaths to preach against the evils of COVID-19 vaccinations.

Evidently, some folks on the loonier side of reality read Robinson’s column and set out to give him even more and stronger proof we as a country are going bonkers. I’m referring to two recent news stories, one involving QAnon believers waiting for the dead to return in Dallas and the other, an attack by right-wing Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas against Sesame Street’s Big Bird. Yes, you read that last part correctly; you can’t make things like this up.

First, the QAnon tale. I will tell you truthfully, even though I’ve heard the term “QAnon” many times on the news, I’m still a bit puzzled by what it is. Is it a group? An individual? I turned to Wikipedia for its take, which describes QAnon as “a far-right conspiracy theory and movement centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known by the name ‘Q,’ that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against former president Donald Trump during his term in office. QAnon has been described as a cult.

“One shared belief among QAnon members is that Trump was planning a massive sting operation on the cabal, with mass arrests of thousands of cabal members to take place on a day known as The Storm.’ QAnon supporters have baselessly accused many Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking government officials of being members of the cabal.”

If you are still scratching your head, still wondering what QAnon is, sorry, I can’t offer more understanding than the Wikipedia explanation. What happened in recent days in Dallas, Texas, has truly skewed my viewpoint of the mysterious group far into the Twilight Zone.

A group of QAnon disciples gathered in Dallas to await the promised Nov. 2 return of John F. Kennedy Jr.

QAnon had promised its many followers that JFK Jr. was returning to Dealey Plaza, where his father, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, to declare Donald Trump president of the United States. Not only that, Trump intended to name JFK Jr. as his vice president.

There was a minor problem with QAnon’s visions. JFK Jr. died in a plane accident in 1999. As such, he indeed was a no-show at the Dallas rally.

But visions and conspiracy theories don’t die easily. Followers who expressed mild disappointment that JFK Jr. never appeared were now clinging to a new vision by their leadership, that Junior would suddenly make his appearance on July 4.

Other disciples took a more – dare I say it – outlandish path. They embraced the theory that Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones is actually JFK Jr. That made good sense to those embracing this theory. After all, Richards and the Stones were in Dallas for a concert on that very date. It might be just too much of a coincidence to ignore, don’t you think? Well …

So much for the Kennedys, Rolling Stones and QAnon. Let’s take flight to the controversy Ted Cruz hatched up over Big Bird, that sweet, loveable, canary-yellow critter from Sesame Street.

Big Bird and his Sesame Street pals Elmo and Oscar the Grouch have been part of an outreach effort that included a town hall on CNN on Saturday morning — the Muppets’ sixth such special since the pandemic began. Afterward, Big Bird tweeted: “I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.”

That may have assured Big Bird’s young followers, but it lit a fire under Ted Cruz. The Republican Texas senator called it “government propaganda for your 5-year-old.” The “government propaganda” claim apparently was a reference to Sesame Workshop receiving a small amount of its budget in the form of government grants.

But gee whiz, doesn’t the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, both publicly funded agencies, rely almost exclusively on government funding? And, aren’t both groups highly involved in promoting vaccinations against COVID-19? For the sake of goodness, Senator, give the beloved Big Bird a break. Shame on you!

No matter how ridiculous Cruz’s attack seems, it nonetheless received support from the right-wing media. Said Fox News host Lisa Boothe: “Brainwashing children who are not at risk from COVID. Twisted.”

And this from Seattle conservative radio host Jason Rantz: “Big Bird is spreading misinformation. He didn’t get the vaccine. He’s lying.”

To which, I respond by repeating Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson’s words: “How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb?”

Chicago Tribune

Column: Could Biden’s infrastructure bill fix real problems instead of fake ones? Yes! It’s an outrage!

Rex Huppke, Chicago Tribune November 9, 2021

For President Joe Biden to get his outrageous, socialist, communist, Maoist (and probably Satanist) $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed, he had to pull off the most devious act of his administration: tricking 13 Republicans in the U.S. House into governing.

I don’t know if he used big-tech-facilitated mind control or some form of sleepy witchcraft, but it happened. Biden distracted this same-sex-wedding-cake baker’s dozen of GOP lawmakers from the party’s sworn mission of being outraged about things that don’t exist while offering no policies to address the things that do.

You should be enraged over this deception, and also very, very frightened about whatever Tucker Carlson is currently telling you to fear. (Remember, if you allow your brain to stop being terrified of unseen boogeymen even for a moment, it might start working, and that’s tyranny.)

So let’s take a closer look at what this nefarious new infrastructure bill will NOT do for America.

Will it audit the results of the 2020 presidential election in every state in the country and then reinstate President Donald Trump so he can pass a similar infrastructure bill that we Republicans will praise as the greatest legislation in human history? No.

Will it eradicate “the woke mob” and “wokeness” in general while allowing us to never actually define what either of those terms mean? Of course not.

Will it keep Antifa super soldiers from patrolling the Christmas decoration aisles at Walmart and telling me at gunpoint that I have to say “Happy Holidays”? Again, no.

Instead, this liberal plan — supported by radical left-wing organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — will invest money in things Americans need, when we should be investing money in things Americans have been told to fear.

For example, the infrastructure bill puts $110 billion toward fixing the country’s aging roads, highways and bridges. Ridiculous! Real Americans embrace the possibility they might fall to their deaths when driving across a bridge. Bridge safety is for effete Europeans.

And will our modernized roads and highways make it easier for large migrant caravans to go from school to school teaching our children about Critical Race Theory? Yes, probably. You should feel very worried about that.

The bill also provides $65 billion to improve the nation’s power grid, which is absurd. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz showed Americans how to patriotically handle power grid issues earlier this year when a winter storm caused massive outages in Texas. He bravely gathered his family and flew to Cancun, Mexico.

Biden’s America-destroying infrastructure plan will give another $65 billion to improve internet service in rural areas, a clear effort to poison MAGA country with knowledge. And it will throw money at improving airports, upgrading public transportation and replacing lead water pipes, all of which sounds highly suspicious. What about our freedom to drink lead-contaminated water while waiting in a broken-down bus on our way to the airport for a flight that has been delayed?

Perhaps most galling of all is that Biden — who is clearly senile and incapable of stringing thoughts together and also the most diabolical politician to ever live — keeps calling the infrastructure bill “bipartisan,” just because members of both parties debated, gave concessions and then voted for it. As if that’s what “bipartisan” means.

Here’s Republican Sen. Mitt Romney traitorously tweeting about the bill on Monday: “Utah has over 2,000 miles of roads in poor condition. Commute times are up and road conditions are costing Utah drivers money. Our bipartisan infrastructure bill authorizes roughly $3 billion in highway funding for Utah to construct, rebuild, and maintain our roads and highways.”

What kind of Republican tries to improve the living conditions of his constituents?

Mitch McConnell, clearly hypnotized, continued to tarnish the GOP brand, saying Monday: “I was delighted that the House finally found a way to pass the infrastructure bill last week.”

And after the bill was passed in the House, Republican Rep. John Katko, a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and CWAG (Conservative Who Accidentally Governed), tweeted that it was “a historic day,” adding: “The bill will make a once in a generation investment in our nation’s physical infrastructure including our roads and bridges, ports and waterways, broadband networks, electrical grid, clean water systems, and airports.”

You know what’s missing from that list, Mr. So-Called Republican? Anything having to do with condemning Big Bird for recently bragging about getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

And what about the War on Christmas? Do these Republicans in Congress not appreciate the seriousness of this battle for the soul of Starbucks holiday cups?

This is not a time to spend money fixing the problems Americans can see with their eyes. It’s a time to fearmonger the problems Americans hear with their ears because we keep telling the same scary stories over and over.

Shame on Joe Biden for luring these once-good Republicans into his web and convincing them to do what they were elected to do.

I and my fellow conservatives will not stand idly by and allow this sort of governing, mixed with a glimmer of bipartisanship, to continue.

We must stand strong in the face of productive policy ideas and stick to our All-American style of governing via scary internet meme. It’s what the founders wanted before they were canceled by woke social justice warriors who sent their children to liberal re-education camps and put microchips in their mutton.

Amen.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

More than 300 polluted lakes and rivers added to Minnesota’s impaired waters list

Greg Stanley, Star Tribune November 8, 2021

Another 305 streams, lakes and rivers in Minnesota have become too polluted to meet federal water standards, and will be added to the state’s impaired waters list.

The list, updated Monday by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), now includes about 3,000 bodies of water with more than 6,000 specific impairments.

“These are streams with degraded habitat or with too much sediment for fish to find food,” said Peter Tester, deputy commissioner of the MPCA. “Many have high bacteria levels that make them unsafe to swim. Many have too many nutrients that grow algae. Some have more than one impairment. That’s too many.”

Every lake or stretch of river on the list tested too high for at least one pollutant that can harm swimmers, kill off aquatic life or make fish unsafe to eat. The most common problems in recent years have sprouted from pollutants that have many sources, including some from miles away or even from out of state, which makes them especially daunting to regulate.

Much of the Le Sueur River in south central Minnesota, for example, was added to the list because its fish now have too much mercury to be safe to regularly eat. The vast majority of that mercury has been building up slowly over time from air pollution originating outside of Minnesota, according to the MCPA. The mercury is carried in by the wind and lands either directly into Minnesota’s rivers and lakes through dust particles, or washes into the water through erosion and runoff after collecting on the soil.

For the first time, the state added rivers and lakes that were impaired by two pollutants that are quickly becoming more of a health and environmental concern: sulfate and chemicals known as PFAS.

Sulfate pollution is high enough in 35 bodies of water, primarily in north eastern Minnesota, to prevent wild rice from growing, according to the updated list.

That pollution is likely coming from mines and wastewater treatment plants, said Catherine Neuschler, who manages water assessment for the MPCA.

The agency is coming up with plans to reduce sulfate contamination in those lakes and streams, which could include new monitoring requirements from companies or cities that may be contributing, she said.

Polyfluoroalkyl substances — also called PFAS and PFOS — are a wide-range of chemicals that don’t break down in the environment. They can accumulate in blood and have been linked to certain types of cancer and other health risks.

At least some PFAS pollution is now in virtually every water body in the state. But it has built up in high enough numbers to cause special concern in 15 lakes and streams, all of which are downstream from known contamination or disposal sites, said Miranda Nichols, coordinator of the impaired water list.

“We looked at water across the state and found low levels of PFAS in just about all of them,” she said.

The majority of PFAS impairments are near the Twin Cities, including the St. Croix River. Three lakes and rivers downstream from the Duluth International Airport were also contaminated.

Phosphorus and other nutrients that are carried into streams from agricultural runoff and sediment from erosion continue to be problems throughout much of the state. More than 50 lakes and streams, including parts of the Chippewa and Buffalo rivers, were added to the list because of nutrient pollution, which can suck oxygen out of a water and spawn toxic algae blooms that kill dogs and make swimmers sick.

The majority of the additions to the list this year were made because the stretches of water were simply polluted to the point where fish and other aquatic life died off.

“That has been true for the last ten years,” Nichols said.