Louisiana Voice

“Some 80 minutes after her (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) death was reported, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a man without a shred of decency and seemingly without a soul, announced his intent to replace her as fast as possible, before the next president is sworn in. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) soon joined the Senate majority leader, announcing a 180-degree reversal from his position toward Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016, and somehow blaming the Democrats for his rank hypocrisy and dishonorable conduct.

“And some of my colleagues in the media, regrettably, furthered the immediate politicization of Ginsburg’s death or demanded to know senators’ positions on the new nominee — before Ginsburg, whose dying wish was that the next president name her replacement, was even in her grave.

 “Aren’t we better than this?”

—Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, on Sunday.

“I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision.”

—Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Col.), 2016.

“I don’t think we should be moving on a nominee in the last year of this president’s term — I would say that if it was a Republican president.”

—Sen Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), 2016. [Well, let’s just see if he still says that.]

“What Republicans are trying to pull off with the post-Ginsburg power grab has no precedence in American history and represents a corrupt power maneuver by an unpopular president. That’s how the press should cover the unfolding story.”

—Eric Boehlert, writing for Press Run, a daily online newsletter that critiques coverage of major news stories.

“Over the coming days, we are all going to come under tremendous pressure from the press to announce how we will handle the coming nomination. For those of you who are unsure how to answer, or for those inclined to oppose giving a nominee a vote, I urge you all to keep your powder dry. This is not the time to prematurely lock yourselves into a position you may later regret.”

—Mitch McConnell, in email to Republican lawmakers. [Yes, Virginia, there really is a hypocrite (or two) in Washington.]

 “If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term, and the primary process has started, we’ll wait to the next election. I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say ‘Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.'”

—Lindsey Graham, 2018.

“I don’t want to speculate, but I think appointing judges is a high priority for me in 2020.”

—Lindsey Graham, 2020. [My, how quickly the chameleons can change colors.]

“Let me be clear: If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year. Nothing is off the table,” 

—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, on Saturday.

“The last 70 years, a Supreme Court justice was not confirmed in the final year of a president’s term.”

—Faux News host Laura Ingraham, 2016. [Wrong again, Laura; the Democratic-controlled Senate in election year 1988, unanimously confirmed Anthony Kennedy, Ronald Reagan’s nomination. It was Mitch McConnell who changed the rules in 2016 and who now wants to change them again.]

“It was the most beautiful thing. It’s called law and order.”

—“Law and order” candidate Donald Trump, gloating about MSNBC reporter Ali Velshi.

“What law did I break while covering an entirely peaceful (yes, entirely peaceful) march?”

—Reporter Ali Velshi, responding to comments by a very sick Donald Trump.

“You love your president, and your president gets honored. I’m not being honored, you’re being honored, with the Nobel Peace Prize for Israel, what we did with Israel.”

—Donald Trump, at a campaign rally in Fayetteville, N.C. [Um, Donnie, you might want to hold off on the boasts for a bit. You’ve been nominated, but you haven’t actually won yet.]

[Curriculum on race is a] “toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds.”

—Donald Trump, in announcing his 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education” by downplaying America’ legacy of slavery. [Stephen Miller couldn’t have written it better.]

“These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years . . . And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months . . . And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left . . . the Wehrmacht [German armed forces] will take care of that.”

—Adolf Hitler, 1938. [The Hitler Youth organization was founded in 1926 to train young boys for membership in the Sturmabteilung (SA; literally Storm Detachment), the Party’s main paramilitary organization at the time. In 1933, leaders of the Hitler Youth decided to integrate boys into the Nazi national community and prepare them for service as soldiers in the SS. From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, but by the end of the year this figure had increased to more than 2 million. By 1937 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939. The German authorities then prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations.]

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/indoctrinating-youth

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/17/critics-condemn-trumps-rewrite-of-americas-legacy-of-racism-in-dc-speech

“The efforts by the president of the United States to use his powers to censor a work of American journalism by dictating what schools can and cannot teach and what American children should and should not learn should be deeply alarming to all Americans who value free speech.”

—Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of “The 1619 Project,” a story that cast a spotlight on the 400^th anniversary of slavery in America published in The New York Times last year which won a Pulitzer Prize, commenting on Donald Trump’s announced plan for the “1776 Commission,” a program to teach “patriotic” American history to students that would downplay the history of slavery, genocide and land theft.

“If the Democrats win, … that’s the end of democracy. It’s the end of the two-party system. We’re gonna have a one-party government that is going to devote itself to eliminating all opposition. That’s what’s at stake. If they win, I think the Republican Party essentially ceases to exist. One of the first things they will do is grant statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, and that will give them four Democrat senators. They will never lose control of the Senate.”

—Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show, Sept. 18. [Rush, you are consistent with your hysterical rants. Remember what Trump said about not wanting to panic the American people?]

The good news about projections of what climate change will do to South Louisiana by the year 2040 is in all likelihood, I won’t be around to witness the destruction to human quality of life.

The bad news is my children and grandchildren will be.

The New York Times Magazine has just published an extensive look at the worldwide effects of climate change expected over the twenty-year span from 2040 to 2060 and the expectations are alarming, to say the least.

One of the features of the study that jumped out at me was an ANALYSIS of each of the 3,071 counties (and parishes) in the U.S. to determine which counties/parishes are at the greatest risks when considerations such as heat, wet bulb (humidity), farm crop yields, sea level rise, large fire dangers and economic damages are factored in.

The third-worst in overall ratings was St. Martin Parish and the sixth through ninth-worst were, in order, Assumption, Jefferson Davis, Livingston and St. John the Baptist. Livingston is where I have called home since 1981. That means that Louisiana has five of the nine counties at greatest risk over the next 40 years.

Heading the list were Beaufort County, S.C. and Pinal County, Arizona. Others among the 10 worst were Colleton County, S.C. and Wakulla County (4^th and 5^th-worst, respectively) and Jackson County, Mississippi (10^th.).

Louisiana had 15 of the worst 50 counties on the list. The other 10 and their ranking include Calcasieu, Lafayette, St. James and St. Landry (in order, 12^th through 15^th), Beauregard and Lafourche (24^th and 25^th), East Baton Rouge, Iberville, Pointe Coupee, and Tangipahoa (in order, 39^th through 42^nd.

The three biggest factors for those 15 South Louisiana parishes were heat, humidity and sea level rise, as might be expected, though none of the 15 had the worst rating in all three categories.

Of course, California, Nevada and Arizona were plagued with the most intensive heat seen in those states in generations with a surge in the demand for air conditioning straining the electrical grid strained to the breaking point. California was hit with an unprecedented 900 wildfires that forced 100,000 to be evacuated from their homes. Some of the fires spread into adjacent Oregon and the entire Pacific Northwest was covered in thick blankets of smoke that made the air quality in Portland and Seattle the worst in the world, worse even than Hong Kong, which has been notorious for its smog levels for decades.

But the most alarming projection was the predicted shift of today’s most “suitable zone by temperature and precipitation” from the nation’s breadbasket (currently extending from the Atlantic coast westward into Oklahoma and Kansas and from the Gulf Coast north into Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia) in a northerly direction bordered on the south by Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia to a new northern border in the lower Great Lakes area by the year 2070.

Heat was described as “one of the largest drivers driving the niche of human habitability northward out of Arizona, Texas and Louisiana.

And while most don’t think of humidity when speaking of southwestern Arizona or Missouri, scientists project that residents of those areas will in 50 years feel like South Louisiana does today and wildfires will continue to be a major problem in the West, Northwest and Rocky Mountains as well as a growing threat in Florida, Georgia and the Southeast.

Sea levels will rise along all coastal areas of the U.S., including the entire lengths of the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines as well as the Gulf Coast while farm yields, just as with human migration, will move northward.

Gulf Coast states and the Carolinas are projected to feel the worst effects of economic damages with losses in such places as Houston and Miami running into the billions of dollars, due largely to the impact of rising sea levels, storms and heat.

The greatest climate risk will come from “compounding calamities,” the report says, which is cause for much of the concern over counties and parishes in Texas and Louisiana, including those 15 Louisiana parishes projected to be the hardest hit.

You can read the entire report by clicking HERE

But set aside plenty of time to read it. It’s one of the most comprehensive studies on the worldwide effects of climate change ever undertaken – the opinions of Donald Trump and his science-denier followers about global warming notwithstanding.

[Mining for quotes by and about Donald Trump

is like hunting wild game in a zoo.]

“We have 20 percent of the cases [in the world] because of the fact that we do much more testing. If we wouldn’t do testing, you wouldn’t have cases. You would have very few cases.”

—Trump, repeating his absurd assertion that is equivalent to saying if you never take a pregnancy test, you won’t get pregnant. [And if you don’t ever slap on that Yella Fella, we won’t be laughing at that ridiculous fake tan.]

“If Joe Biden ever got in, I think you’d have a depression the likes of which we have never seen in this country. If you look at his policies, where he wants to raise everybody’s taxes.”

—Trump, in another false claim during his town hall meeting. {Biden does not propose raising taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. [Trump also claimed the greatest economy under his administration. The economy was better under both Bill Clinton and Eisenhower – and the tax rate for the richest Americans under Eisenhower was 90 percent.]

“I will say this: They said at the Democrat convention they’re going to do a national mandate. They never did it, because they’ve checked out and they didn’t do it. And a good question is, you ask like Joe Biden — they said we’re going to do a national mandate on masks.”

—Trump, at Tuesday’s town hall. [Uh…Mr. Trump, no one can initiate such a mandate except the president – and right now, that’s still you. Joe Biden has never been president and won’t be until next Jan. 20. So, what the hell do you even mean by that? Plus, Biden said that would be something governors would have to do, albeit at his urging.]

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear … Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power.”

—Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the complicity of churches with Hitler’s Germany.

“There is no more powerful force than a parent’s love for their children — and patriotic moms and dads are going to demand that their children are no longer fed hateful lies about this country.”

—Donald Trump, on Thursday, during ceremony commemorating the 233^rd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. [If only we could believe that. Instead, Trump says he will establish a commission he calls the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education by “encouraging” educators to “teach” students “about the miracle of American history.” Excuse my cynicism, but that sounds a little too similar to indoctrination camps for my taste – and just who will write the history?]