Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Maybe We Aren’t Evolving After All

All I want for Christmas is a little science literacy.

This is the season for lists, and Mother Jones recently ran a list of the dumbest science deniers of 2014.

Topping that list was Donald Trump, who may well be the most ludicrous and least self-aware person on the planet. Trump (who regularly takes to Twitter to embarrass himself) responded to freezing temperatures in parts of the country as evidence that “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.”

Umm…Donald, there is a difference between weather and climate. Look it up.

The Donald also joined the anti-vaxxers, pointing to the thoroughly debunked link between autism and vaccination, and–to top it off– insisted that we shouldn’t allow those doctors and nurses who had been selflessly tending to Ebola patients back in the country. The tweet:”People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences.”

We can laugh at Trump (most people do), but far more portentous than the nattering of an ignorant, narcissistic billionaire is the ongoing attack on sound science from Congress. That attack is genuine cause for concern.

Republican Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas took his opposition to basic science straight to the source: The grant-writing archives of the National Science Foundation. In an unprecedented violation of the historic firewall between the lawmakers who set the NSF’s budget and the top scientists who decide where to direct it, Smith’s researchers pulled the files on at least 47 grants that they believed were not in the “public interest.” Some of the biggest-ticket projects they took issue with related to climate change research; the committee apparently intended to single out these projects as examples of the NSF frittering money away on research that won’t come back to benefit taxpayers. The investigation is ongoing, and the precedent it sets—that scientific research projects are only worthwhile if they directly benefit the American economy—is unsettling….

Science denial on Capitol Hill is set to get even crazier next year. When Democrats (and environmentalists) got a sound whooping in the midterm elections, a new caucus of climate change-denying senators swept in. Almost every new Republican senator has taken a position against mainstream climate science, ranging from hardline denial to cautious skepticism. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the incoming majority leader, has vowed to make forcing through an approval of the Keystone XL pipeline his top agenda item in the new year; he also wants to block the Obama administration’s efforts to reign in carbon pollution from coal plants. And the incoming chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is none other than James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who actually believes that global warming is a hoax orchestrated by Barbra Streisand. You can’t make this stuff up.

Maybe evolution is more selective than we thought…..

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No Deep Thoughts Today…

…but maybe someone can answer a very unimportant question that has been nagging at me for some time: Why don’t men like Donald Trump and Pat Bauer change their haircuts/toupees? Both have been mocked incessantly. They have to know that people think they look ridiculous. If they really want to be taken seriously, why wouldn’t they ditch the dos?

And yes, the constant rain has turned my brain to mush…..

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When Will We Ever Learn?

I wasn’t one of those people who believed the election of Barack Obama was a sign we’d entered a “post-racial” society. But I also failed to appreciate the extent of racism that still festers in this country. The unremitting attacks on Obama personally–attacks utterly unconnected to any policy disputes and clearly motivated by outrage over his very existence–have shocked me.

Donald Trump’s racially-motivated slurs don’t just reflect his own long-standing bigotry (in the 1970s, the Department of Justice sued him for refusing to rent to African-Americans); they also are tacit recognition that a large percentage of the remaining hard-core GOP base is racist. Periodically, leaked emails and “jokes” from Republican officeholders and party officials confirm our worst suspicions: the Obama family portrayed as monkeys, the White House shown in the middle of a watermelon patch. Pretty disgusting stuff.

As if we needed added confirmation, yesterday the Tulsa World reported that during a debate on a bill to eliminate Affirmative Action in state government, Oklahoma State Senator Sally Kern testified in favor of the bill, saying : “We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school?  I’ve taught school and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

As appalling as her testimony was, the thought of this woman teaching is arguably more frightening. But of course, she is still teaching, and so are all of the people who pretend that their attacks on the President–their insistence that he is not a “real” citizen, their denial of his academic achievements–are just political differences of opinion. Those of us who enable them by refusing to call these attacks what they are, are also teaching. And the lesson is an ugly one.

What was the refrain from that old song from South Pacific? You’ve got to be taught to hate.

The Inmates and the Asylum….

Every morning I wake up to additional evidence that America has lost its collective mind. Just a brief sample from the morning news:

  • Obama finally got so fed up with the birther nonsense that he posted the long-form birth certificate that Hawaii normally declines to provide. As we might have guessed, that simply moved the target, with crackpots claiming it was never about the place of his birth, but the fact that his father was Kenyan. This, despite clear language in the 14th Amendment that makes any child born in the U.S. a citizen. We know the crazies are aware of that language, because they want to change it in order to deny automatic citizenship to children of immigrants. The Onion was right: next the “afterbirthers” will demand to see the umbilical cord. (Stephen Colbert has already called for Obama to release his grade school report card…but how do you satirize people who are already walking self-parodies?)
  • John Yoo–author of the infamous Bush Administration memos–says the President doesn’t have the authority to require businesses bidding on government contracts to disclose their political contributions. According to Yoo, U.S. Presidents can authorize torture, issue Signing Statements that invalidate duly-enacted legislation (and by implication invalidate the Constitutionally-required Separation of Powers), but in his alternate universe, they can’t require people who want to do business with the government to provide information that might disclose improper influence-peddling.
  • Donald Trump is still on my teevee.

I rest my case.