Posted on by rjonakait

The Texas Tragedy

Does Trump bear responsibility for deaths in the Texas floods? Do Elon and Doge? They recklessly slashed government, including the National Weather Service. (Funny how Musk was a genius when upending departments, but now, according to Trump, he is off the rails. Mature people don’t change that radically in only a few months.) We do know that the NWS was understaffed in Texas, but we can’t know how results would have been different if positions had not been vacant.

The harm from Trump policies will often be unknowable. How much will farmers and others be hurt by cuts to weather forecasting? We can’t really know.

Trump, Musk, and Kennedy, Jr., have decimated the National Institutes of Health. We can assume discoveries will not be made that would have been made without the chainsaw, but we don’t know what those discoveries would have been.

Trump is transforming FEMA. Will recoveries from natural disasters be…well, more disastrous? That may be almost impossible to measure.

Sometimes we might be able to assess damage. How have telephone wait times increased after cuts to the IRS? But often the measurable harm will not be known for a while. IRS revenue collection may drop but that will take time to learn. Sometimes the harm will happen only after the Trump presidency ends (and IT WILL END). We won’t know about deaths or illnesses from the vaccine and other health policies of the HHS. Already consequential, the full effects of the decimation of USAID will not be known for a long time.

Sometimes the consequences will be hidden from us. Tariffs are akin to a sales tax, but unlike the sales tax, the consumer will not see the explicit cost of tariffs at checkout. We will only see the new list price of the product. And we won’t see some business practices that tariffs encourage. For example: A friend runs an upscale sportswear company. During Trump’s first term, he made shirts in China for the American market. Trump instituted a fifteen percent duty on such goods. The retailer for the friend’s product had been charging $145 for each shirt. A fifteen percent increase would have been $167. The retailer, however, decided to use the tariff to raise the price to $185. That extra $18 is also a consequence of the tariffs, but its cause is invisible to the consumer.

Sometimes trickery is used for dampening negative consequences. So, for example, Trump’s recent legislation is expected to remove many people from Medicaid. Rural hospitals that depend on Medicaid are expected to close, bringing suffering to many small communities. If the cuts to Medicaid are a good idea, they are a good idea now. Nevertheless, that Big (Beautiful? Bullshit?) Bill delays their implementation. The delay is not for any sensible policy reason. Instead, Trump and the Republicans anticipate a backlash, but they hope it won’t peak until after the midterm elections and will have waned by 2028.

This might make you (even more) cynical about Trump and Republicans, but my cynicism extends deeper. We don’t know whether more staffing at the National Weather Service or a different warning system might possibly have lessened the Texas tragedy, but we should find out. This is a job for Congress. Hearings should be held seeking information about what happened and about possible changes going forward. The goal should be to see whether new legislation is warranted. But Republicans who control Congress will not hold such hearings for fear they may suggest that Trump made mistakes. Moreover, if such hearings were held, the Democrats would not seek information but use them to score partisan points. They would be like Jim Jordan in a clip I recently saw. He was questioning New York Governor Kathy Hochul. He asked if she knew how a local sheriff had responded to an immigration issue. She predictably ducked the question, and he predictably insisted that she answer. It was all a charade. Jordan knew the answer to his question. In a real hearing, our congresspeople would be seeking information by asking questions where they did not already know the answer. When was the last time you saw that?

We should be trying to learn from the Texas tragedy, but that won’t come from Congress, for, unfortunately, this Congress is not there to solve problems.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I stopped at the roadside popup market to buy some vegan chili. It comes frozen. I like it, and I like having it in the freezer for a quick dinner when I don’t have the inclination to do my own cooking. I bought four. They are $8 a piece. Should I have been appalled or surprised when the guy who served me got a calculator to decide what I owed?

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.” Fran Lebowitz.

We are considering selling our house and moving into a condo, but not surprisingly, the ones that seem desirable always cost a little more than we can afford. I am reminded of the wise words: “Thrift is a wonderful virtue—especially in an ancestor.”

The 120-year-old house in the country often needs work, but I have learned that at this time of year, I have to be tolerant of our workmen. They do a good job, but right now they can be hard to get. It is hunting season, or should I say seasons. There is regular deer season, bow-and-arrow deer season, black powder deer season, turkey season, duck season, goose season, bear season. . . . And on the first days of these seasons, as with first day of the trout season in the spring, the workmen are out hunting, or fishing, not working at my house. But a remember what I heard years ago, “If God didn’t want man to hunt, he wouldn’t have given us plaid flannel shirts.”

Did I miss them? I have not heard those who rightfully complain about America’s mass incarceration and long prison sentences deriding the twenty-two-year sentence given the Proud Boys leader.

A wise person said: “An excellent time to win freedom by means of good behavior is before you go to jail.”

I don’t know of any legislative accomplishments of Jim Jordan, Congressman from Ohio and Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, even though legislative accomplishments are supposed to be the reason why people go to Congress in the first place. Instead, Jordan, who as Lillian Hellman said about Norma Shearer, has “a face unclouded by thought,” seeks to block or discredit criminal and other investigations into Donald Trump’s activities. The FBI, the Justice Department, state law enforcement officials are partisan hacks, at least when they do things Jordan does not like. In The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession David Grann describes another Ohio Congressman a generation ago who, from the floor of the House where his statements could not be used in a defamation trial, said, “Mr. Speaker, I have evidence that certain F.B.I. agents in Youngstown, Ohio, have violated the RICO statute and stole large sums of cash.” The speaker was James Traficant who was later convicted of ten felony counts, including racketeering and taking bribes. Also what comes to mind are the words of the FBI agent in charge of the Traficant investigation: “Every time we charge another public official, the media presents it as another black eye for the community. I’d prefer if they portray it to the community as another step in cleansing ourselves.” The agent concluded, “As long as they choose to put people in office who are corrupt, nothing will ever change.”

“Man is the only animal that laughs. He is the only animal that has a House of Representatives.”

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

People refer to a gay or homosexual lifestyle and say we must prevent schoolkids from being groomed for it. I wonder if they also think there is a straight or heterosexual lifestyle that schoolkids are groomed for. And I wonder, is there more gay sex or heterosexual sex between students and teachers?

Concessions were made so that Kevin McCarthy could become Speaker of the House of Representatives. I have not followed this closely, but I know that many of the Kevin cave-ins have been derided and are now fodder for comedians. However, I heard that one of the demands is that Representatives have at least three days to review legislation such as the omnibus budget bill. Isn’t that a good thing?

Some Republicans who claim they want less government spending have said that the defense budget should be examined. I was surprised because I associate Republicans with assertion that our military is weak and is underfunded. Perhaps, however, this is a time for the now seldom-seen bipartisanship. I would think the wing of the Democratic party labeled “progressive” might want lesser defense spending. Shouldn’t they approach Jim Jordan on this project?

The defense budget of the United States is the largest in the world. In fact, it is larger than the defense budgets of the next nine most prolific spenders. But still, according to most in Congress, we should increase our military budget.

Before Kevin McCarthy had groveled sufficiently to get the speakership, Representative Byron Donalds received enough votes to prevent McCarthy’s needed majority. I had never heard of Donalds. My three minutes of online research discovered that he was elected to Congress in 2020 and was reelected in 2022. I guess to some, that two years was enough congressional experience to qualify as Speaker. I assumed, however, that those voting for him did not believe he would win the speakership and were merely grandstanding. However, I thought it would have been amusing if all the Democrats had voted for Donalds and got him elected.

An online source said that Donalds was arrested for marijuana distribution when a teenager, but that those charges were dropped as part of a pre-trial diversion program. This did not seem out of the ordinary, but a source also said that a few years later he had pleaded no contest (which is a conviction) to a felony bribery charge “as part of a scheme to defraud a bank. His record was later sealed and expunged.” This struck me as more out of the ordinary, and I would have liked to learn more about that scheme, plea, and expungement.

However, I was most interested in his initial election to the House. His district is considered a safe one for Republicans so the most important election is the Republican primary. In 2020, in that primary, he was one of eight or nine candidates. He won the Republican nomination with 22.6% of the votes, which was 770 votes more, or O.7% more than his nearest competitor. The average House district has a population of over 700,000 people. Donalds got fewer than 24,000 votes in the election that essentially made him a congressman, the 2020 Republican primary. Ah, American representative democracy is great, or so I have heard.

“It’s as tall as the Empire State Building.” “It’s as big as a football field.” These are familiar phrases for describing something large, but in a Florida parking lot a man used a phrase to describe a capacity I had not heard before. He was pointing to the space in an SUV and told two other men, “There is enough space in there for three dead people.”