tingilinde

the myth maker

How Trump forces others to paper over his business failures.  (via The Washington Post)

His core skills are lying about everything and being a thug and a bully.  Apparently core values for about forty percent of the country and one political party.

 

 

 

fantasyland

Perhaps Trump no longer knows what is real. 

This raises more serious probably about his party and supporters than him.

 

the religious right

Democracy is no longer their thing if it doesn't give them power. (via The Atlantic)

a tip of the hat to Jim

Some are into the idea of theocracy.  We've certainly see it on an isolated scale in the US since the early 19th century.

 

one of the four horsemen

The Tropical Trump and his minions are making despoiling the Amazon much easier.

 

crowdsourcing a second bill of rights

 government needs fixing.  

Greg has the right idea 

snip

...

A crowdsourced Bill of Rights would echo the public-driven process that molded not only the original Bill of Rights, but popular referenda in various states as well. Blonder points to Florida, where voters last November enacted voting rights for felons. Other states’ voters have created independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional district boundaries that aren’t gerrymandered.

State-level lawmaking by referendum has been criticized for creating ill-informed and expensive mandates, and for being vulnerable to misinformation from deep-pocketed interest groups. But supposed legal experts in Congress and the courts shouldn’t puff themselves up, Blonder says. Similar bungles have bedeviled their lawmaking over the centuries, from Constitutional amendments like Prohibition to Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott, which upheld slavery.

If We Amend “could just get people thinking about their government, realizing that they’re part of the solution,” the effort will be worthwhile, he figures. Given our polarized, gridlocked politics, he adds, it may be the only way to translate public wishes into public laws.

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He has a mechanism..  if people could only just get engaged.

white pride design capabilities

in addition to their bigotry and hate, they can't design

 

abortion rights - action and reaction

Legislation is finally moving in some blue states.

snip

...

This has been a rare flurry of legislative successes for abortion-rights advocates. About one-quarter of the state-level provisions that have protected and expanded abortion rights since 2011 have passed in the past two weeks, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports legal abortion. That dramatic increase isn’t a sign, though, that lots of states are moving to protect abortion — at least, not yet. For one thing, many of those provisions were bundled into a single bill, which the governor of Illinois is expected to sign soon. Moreover, the recent increase is mostly a testament to just how little state-level activity there’s been on this issue over the past eight years. Democrats have tried to protect abortion very differently than Republicans have tried to restrict it.

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talibama

Female oppression in Alabama

a tip of the hat to Bjarne for the link and state re-naming suggestion

 

fox news and measurement systems

cough

(tip of the hat to Xeni)

 

tactics behind the republican epa deregulation

Change the calculations to make it easy on polluters and hard on nature and people.

snip

...

When Tom Jorling was a Senate aide helping to draft the Clean Air Act in 1970, he often listened to executives from the nation’s biggest car companies warn that the law’s pollution-cutting requirements would put them out of business.

But during a break from one such meeting, an auto engineer told him the bosses were lying: Detroit had the expertise to make its cars much cleaner. “We can do whatever you want us to do,” Jorling recalls the technician saying. “But the executive leadership kept up with their mantra that it’s so expensive, and it’s going to threaten their viability.”

Exaggerating the costs of new regulations and understating their benefits has long been a favorite strategy in the polluters’ playbook. Now, experts say, the Trump administration wants to turn that approach into Environmental Protection Agency policy. It is pushing to rewrite the cost-benefit calculation that underpins an Obama-era rule on emissions of mercury, arsenic, and other hazardous metals from coal-fired power plants. The EPA wants to use a new, much narrower estimate of the 2011 rule’s health benefits to withdraw the legal designation that the regulation is “appropriate and necessary.”

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