We’re Getting Buried in Trash but Americans Are Oblivious »

On the first day of 2018, China announced that it would no longer accept "loathsome foreign garbage". The world’s largest importer of trash had decided to deal instead with its own "towering mountains of waste”. Beginning in the 1990s, as it grew into an industrial behemoth, China would ultimately take in 40% of America’s plastic, glass, metals and waste paper to feed its insatiable demand for raw materials. It was cheap to ship in otherwise empty container
Trash-pickers in Turkey. An industry elsewhere, we don't want
that here, but waste is going out of control.

ships, returning to China after unloading the products into which the trash had been converted, and low-cost labor made it economical to sort the imperfectly separated shiploads coming from the U.S. into clean stocks. The U.S. and other countries shipped 106 million tons of… Read More »

By the People, For the People? But We Don’t Seem to be Getting the Breaks »

We like to boast that we are a free people, and for the most part we are. But the pithy warning that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" may not have been passed on to new generations all that successfully because they don't seem to notice the many ways congress, the courts, the president are finding ways to put the cuffs on individual freedom and hand the keys to corporations.

Donald Trump won the presidency with pledges to help working-class… Read More »

Trump’s 100-Day Plan: The Great Unraveling Begins »

Just moments ago the media universe was forecasting the demise of the Republican party, riven as it was by dissension between the moderate and the extreme, and split in third by a rogue independent who had rented the Party name to catapult himself into the presidency.

Instead, suddenly finding themselves victors, Republicans of all stripes are scrambling to fall in line, seeing their chance to enact every reform in their
wish list. Winning the trifecta of the presidency and control of both Senate and House has given Republicans a nearly clear path to overturning just about everything Obama accomplished in the last eight years.

Just before the election, confident that Democrats would upend the… Read More »

Are You For Net Neutrality, and Against Government Regulation? »

It's all so confusing. To most of us the Internet may seem to be a Utopian phenomenon existing somewhere in cyberspace and belonging to the people of the world but the governments of that world have a different view. They want to claim it for their own.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission appointed itself as custodian, even though there is nothing on the books — no act of Congress, say — that confers this privilege. The FCC has been grappling interminably with just what to do with the beast.

The commission had set rules that the public likes, rules that are a light touch and primarily support “net neutrality”, which could be defined as requiring… Read More »

Immigration Breakdown: Republican Right Calls a Halt »

No sooner had the votes been counted in the 2012 election than immigration reform became a top priority. After doing nothing to fulfill a 2008 campaign pledge, after instead
deporting more undocumented immigrants than any president before him, Barack Obama owed reform to the Latino population, 71% of whom voted for him.

For that same reason, Republicans realized that they had better spearhead reform, because if they failed to attract the growing Hispanic voting bloc, the party’s gradual extinction was a possibility. Mitt Romney’s vow… Read More »

First Prize for Nastiest State Goes to… »

There's a theory that Americans are savvy enough about government that they vote for a legislature in opposition to the president, a kind of populist check and balance scheme to make sure that no one side runs away with the country. And so we have a Democratic president; a Democratic majority in the Senate, hemmed in by the strange filibuster rule that now requires 60% to pass anything; and a… Read More »

Trump Was Momentarily Receptive to Gun Control Ideas – But the NRA Wanted to Arm Teachers »

They were tearful, they were angry, they demanded action and an end to the epidemic of death killing our youngest. It was commendable and cathartic that Donald Trump brought together those suffering from the Parkland shooting to listen to their pleas.

But then came the reveal. When the president began to speak, it became evident that the people who had come up from Florida were props at a staged event for
Trump to deliver his… Read More »

It Was Thoughts and Prayers Time Again »

Donald Trump   @realDonaldTrump

Contributions from the NRA:… Read More »

How to Get Rid of Gerrymandering:
First, Get Rid of Congress »

“We've got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around”, President Obama has said. He was referring to the practice of gerrymandering, of political parties rigging districts so as to assure the election of their candidates. It has been with us for two centuries, is manifestly undemocratic, yet the Supreme Court avoids confronting it, and Congress likes things just as they are.

Once every ten years, based on the population census, each state usually must reconfigure its voting districts, first to conform to the number of congressional representatives that its newly-counted population permits, and then to arrive at approximately equal numbers of voters in each district. That… Read More »

A Gallery of Gerrymanders »

The contorted shapes that gerrymandering produces are grotesque reminders that our democracy needs an asterisk. The word derives from 1812’s governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who rearranged election districts to his liking. The shape of one of them

The 1812 cartoon in the Boston Gazette mocking the shape of one of Gov. Gerry's contrivances.
reminded people of a salamander. Hence Gerrymander.

Here is a selection of the most notoriously contrived to make an election outcome a certainty for the party controlling the process.

Maryland's 3rd District: As your eye will bear witness, this bug splat is
considered the most gerrymandered district in the country. Connected by tiny threads and leaping… Read More »

Congress Avoids the War but Quickly Acts Against its Refugees »

Congress lost no time when threatened by refugees. It rushed to pass a law to hobble their admittance, hastily throwing aside Paul Ryan's promise that the House would return to the orderly process of developing legislation in committees.

The President called them out: "Now suddenly they're able to rush in, in a day or two [after the Paris attacks], to solve the threat of widows and orphans and others who are fleeing a war-torn land and that's their most constructive contribution to the effort against ISIL?"

Obama was undoubtedly referring as well to the avoidance by Congress to authorize force in Syria. With much the same motivation for speedily acting against… Read More »

Obama v. Leakers and the Press:
Bad as Nixon Says Journalism Group »

In the wake of the government shutdown and the threat of the U.S. defaulting on its debt, a report on the Obama administration’s hostility toward the press and its
reporters went by hardly noticed. The report is a formal statement in support of what the media have contended all along — that the Obama regime’s aggressive actions against press freedom has introduced a climate of fear that inhibits both journalists and sources alike. ”The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration”, says the author, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.… Read More »

Obama v. the Press: A History Worse Than Nixon? »

As a candidate he had called warrantless surveillance “unconstitutional and illegal”.

In his first inaugural address he said, “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration”.

On his first day in the Oval Office he commented, “For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city", as he signed executive orders to reverse some of the Bush Administration policies.

And just days ago President Obama said, “…a free press is also essential for our democracy. I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism… Read More »