I Have Informed You Thusly

I wish this story about the Pence family was isolated, or specific to them. I have no respect for their particular brand of politics, but they are no different than the Koch’s or Rockerfeller’s or DuPont’s before them, just a smaller scale.  These are the ones that bitch and complain the loudest about the waste of government, and then leave their mess to be cleaned up by that government.  Then they get themselves appointed to regulatory office, and work to defund that office and refuse to enforce the law completely. Not for any purpose other than because it does not matter to them that people will be permanently injured or possibly die from their pollution and actions. I suppose this is not about the Pence’s as a rule, but about the state of regulation we voted for. The EPA was an outgrowth of myriads of events, like Love Canal, NY, and other sites that ended up being Superfund sites. Now, we have taken this fever that somehow, the EPA is the problem.  Regulating...

242 years ago, there was a momentous moment in history. Our Founding Fathers, in a humid and hot Philadelphia, approved a declaration of our independence from England owing to tyranny, terror, discrimination, lack of representation, taxation and violence. Down through our history, we have seen many different conditions on this celebration of our independence. Depending on how you define the start of the revolution, from the Boston Massacre or from "the shot heard around the world", by 1776 we had been at war with England for 1-6 years. As with most things about Congress, they were late to the party and behind the times. When our nation was only 85 years old, 1861, we were grinding into the most deadly war in our history, fought amongst ourselves, on our own land, to determine whether that independence we proclaimed would apply to all living souls on this land, or not. We still have not decided that question, though we have almost ended the physical fighting. One hundred...

There are significant disagreements and fighting and partisan wrangling ahead of us.  There has become a partisan knife fight ritual about Supreme Court Justices.  Not that it is any worse than the past, but with the advent of social media, unfortunately these things bring out the obvious failings of the education system. According to the Constitution, the President picks a nominee.  That nominee is then vetted by the Senate, and interviewed. The Senate’s responsibility is to advise and consent to the President’s nominee. There is very little required for a person to be qualified to be a Justice.  The person must be a citizen. The person must receive approval from the Senate, and that is about it.  There have been Justices that were not lawyers.  There have been Justices that were Klan members. There have been Justices that had never voted in their lives. There have been Justices that were nothing but political hack appointments (and many nominated that...