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Assorted Politics, Etc.
Feb. 15th, 2016 09:39 pmThere have now been two states registering their preference as to which candidates they wish to see stand as candidates for the Presidency of the United States. I have been mostly silent on that matter, because I was waiting for the serious candidates to appear, but this does not seem to have been the case. There are now only a few left in the Republican nomination, and there have always been two in the Democratic nomination.
The Republican side seems to have many a person that have far too much working against them to make them qualified candidates. Mr. Trump's comment about trying to exclude Muslims from the country should have sent him away immediately. Mr. Cruz keeps the company of people that believe the deity should smite the country because it tolerates gay men and are unafraid to say so. (Other candidates can be tarred with this brush as well). Mr. Rubio seems unwilling to work toward a solution to handle immigration without deportation. Yet none of this seems to have been a fatal strike against any of their candidacies, and for some of them, it appears to have made them more popular. There are others, but they've become rather easily erased by the media's own hunger for people to say explosive things.
For the Democrats, I harbor judgment against the Clinton candidacy because of past performances of both Hillary and Bill with regard to their fidelity to liberal ideas that sit to the left of the standard Democratic candidate. Mr. Sanders has a better record on more liberal issues, but much of the conventional wisdom that I see says that unabashed liberalism makes Mr. Sanders likely to have to fight a heavy fight against any Republican, no matter how poorly the Republican would run the country.
I'm still waiting for the serious, respectable candidate to take over on the Republican side.
The other major politics element is the completion of Antonin Scalia's lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, leaving a vacancy that requires filing on the highest court.
There are qualified candidates to sit that vacancy, if any proposals actually ever get through. But when it comes to lifetime appointments, the gridlock and stubbornness that comes from a division between houses of Congress or between Capitol Hill and the White House magnifies to the point where it would need a change of government to break the jam. For the Republicans, a year of waiting to see whether or not their preferred candidate can capture the White House is very easy - they've already committed to obstruction where possible since recapturing the House, and they have enough votes to sink a candidate on pure spite when it comes to Senate approval.
There may also be an extra edge of desperation on this candidate, considering that so many things that liberals take as basic human rights only exist because of narrow Court decisions, including the one that happened in 2015 preventing any state from deciding that marriage was to be reserved only to persons with particular genital configurations. Or that the gradual chopping away at the guarantee of Roe that is coming to a head soon. Or the Affordable Care Act and its ways of getting insurance into the hands of people that can't afford insurance. More than a few things that are hard-fought may burn away in the presence of a different Court, and the option of getting the legislators to do it instead isn't available with the divided legislature. Blargh.
Then there's the thing that really should be getting the national attention, and should have been getting it from the very beginning: The city of Flint, Michigan was poisoned with lead from their water pipes after untreated water from the Flint River was used as the primary water supply - the initial decision to switch from Detroit to a Genesee County cooperative resulted in Detroit's water department serving a termination notice that left the city of Flint with no alternatives.
But then things got messed up. And then the state tried to cover it up by lying to the people of Flint, and making sure state employees had fresh bottled water to drink from as opposed to the tap. But children with rashes and signs of lead poisoning do not get covered up easily, and neither does contaminated water.
Except then there's the part where majority-black cities, including Detroit and Flint, have been under the control of state-appointed officials and their city councils and elected representation have no actual power to do anything, so if there are people to blame, it's the emergency managers, and then the state officials, including the governor, and everyone involved in the cover up and the slowness to declare emergencies and switch back to safe water. Because those managers ostensibly don't care about anything other than being the cities back into some form of financial solvency.
Because of this, it's not hard to speculate that someone did this deliberately, or that once the crisis was underway, they deliberately drug their feet even more before engaging with the coverups. Because who would care about black people dying in Flint? The state has been trying to get rid of them anyway. If they could do the same to Detroit and other places that are so financially strapped and get away with it, surely they would.
The current solution in Flint right now is to collect bottled water from the fire station, assuming that you can get to the fire station. But that's just for drinking. There's still not water for bathing or washing or other things that are related to hygiene. And, even with federal aid coming in, the state is claiming they don't necessarily have to spend that federal money on helping people in Flint.
The state of Michigan makes very little secret of how much it hates its minority residents. And while there have been resignations at all levels involved in the crisis so far, the governor hasn't resigned and has no intention to. Even though his administration did this, from authorizing the switch to covering up the disaster, and probably did so with his direct knowledge.
Such is the state of our politics - the people who are unfit contest for office, the people who should receive fair consideration will be mired for reasons unrelated to them, and those who deliberately commit evil go unpunished, at least for the moment.
The Republican side seems to have many a person that have far too much working against them to make them qualified candidates. Mr. Trump's comment about trying to exclude Muslims from the country should have sent him away immediately. Mr. Cruz keeps the company of people that believe the deity should smite the country because it tolerates gay men and are unafraid to say so. (Other candidates can be tarred with this brush as well). Mr. Rubio seems unwilling to work toward a solution to handle immigration without deportation. Yet none of this seems to have been a fatal strike against any of their candidacies, and for some of them, it appears to have made them more popular. There are others, but they've become rather easily erased by the media's own hunger for people to say explosive things.
For the Democrats, I harbor judgment against the Clinton candidacy because of past performances of both Hillary and Bill with regard to their fidelity to liberal ideas that sit to the left of the standard Democratic candidate. Mr. Sanders has a better record on more liberal issues, but much of the conventional wisdom that I see says that unabashed liberalism makes Mr. Sanders likely to have to fight a heavy fight against any Republican, no matter how poorly the Republican would run the country.
I'm still waiting for the serious, respectable candidate to take over on the Republican side.
The other major politics element is the completion of Antonin Scalia's lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, leaving a vacancy that requires filing on the highest court.
There are qualified candidates to sit that vacancy, if any proposals actually ever get through. But when it comes to lifetime appointments, the gridlock and stubbornness that comes from a division between houses of Congress or between Capitol Hill and the White House magnifies to the point where it would need a change of government to break the jam. For the Republicans, a year of waiting to see whether or not their preferred candidate can capture the White House is very easy - they've already committed to obstruction where possible since recapturing the House, and they have enough votes to sink a candidate on pure spite when it comes to Senate approval.
There may also be an extra edge of desperation on this candidate, considering that so many things that liberals take as basic human rights only exist because of narrow Court decisions, including the one that happened in 2015 preventing any state from deciding that marriage was to be reserved only to persons with particular genital configurations. Or that the gradual chopping away at the guarantee of Roe that is coming to a head soon. Or the Affordable Care Act and its ways of getting insurance into the hands of people that can't afford insurance. More than a few things that are hard-fought may burn away in the presence of a different Court, and the option of getting the legislators to do it instead isn't available with the divided legislature. Blargh.
Then there's the thing that really should be getting the national attention, and should have been getting it from the very beginning: The city of Flint, Michigan was poisoned with lead from their water pipes after untreated water from the Flint River was used as the primary water supply - the initial decision to switch from Detroit to a Genesee County cooperative resulted in Detroit's water department serving a termination notice that left the city of Flint with no alternatives.
But then things got messed up. And then the state tried to cover it up by lying to the people of Flint, and making sure state employees had fresh bottled water to drink from as opposed to the tap. But children with rashes and signs of lead poisoning do not get covered up easily, and neither does contaminated water.
Except then there's the part where majority-black cities, including Detroit and Flint, have been under the control of state-appointed officials and their city councils and elected representation have no actual power to do anything, so if there are people to blame, it's the emergency managers, and then the state officials, including the governor, and everyone involved in the cover up and the slowness to declare emergencies and switch back to safe water. Because those managers ostensibly don't care about anything other than being the cities back into some form of financial solvency.
Because of this, it's not hard to speculate that someone did this deliberately, or that once the crisis was underway, they deliberately drug their feet even more before engaging with the coverups. Because who would care about black people dying in Flint? The state has been trying to get rid of them anyway. If they could do the same to Detroit and other places that are so financially strapped and get away with it, surely they would.
The current solution in Flint right now is to collect bottled water from the fire station, assuming that you can get to the fire station. But that's just for drinking. There's still not water for bathing or washing or other things that are related to hygiene. And, even with federal aid coming in, the state is claiming they don't necessarily have to spend that federal money on helping people in Flint.
The state of Michigan makes very little secret of how much it hates its minority residents. And while there have been resignations at all levels involved in the crisis so far, the governor hasn't resigned and has no intention to. Even though his administration did this, from authorizing the switch to covering up the disaster, and probably did so with his direct knowledge.
Such is the state of our politics - the people who are unfit contest for office, the people who should receive fair consideration will be mired for reasons unrelated to them, and those who deliberately commit evil go unpunished, at least for the moment.
