February 26, 2023
Toluse Olorunnipa, et al., of the Washington Post: "This account of how a train derailment, one of about 1,000 each year in America, morphed into the latest front in the nation's culture wars is based on interviews with administration officials, lawmakers, rail safety experts, local residents, historians and environmental advocates.... Within hours [of the derailment,] officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies arrived on-site.... The next day, [President] Biden called Mike DeWine, Ohio's Republican governor, to say the federal government was prepared to provide any additional assistance he might need. For more than a week, DeWine did not call back with such requests, saying the situation was under control.... [Dan] Tierney, [Gov. DeWine's] spokesman, said in an interview the Biden administration has supplied significant help. 'Did the agencies provide the appropriate response, and was the president and White House in touch with the governor frequently? The answers to those are yes,' Tierney said, adding that the EPA has been 'extremely responsive.' That is not the picture painted by some Republicans.... On Feb. 16, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote a letter to Biden asking him to fire [Transportation Secretary Pete] Buttigieg.... Fox News host Tucker Carlson used his show to bring race into the discussion, decrying an alleged lack of urgency by the government for a blue-collar community with few people of color." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Like "But Her Emails!," this is a crisis manufactured by right-wing demagogues. If there are 1,000 derailments a year, Buttigieg and Biden (and whoever else supposed doesn't care about White people) can't show up for every one. They would be going to three a day. And when would they have time to go to the sites of natural disasters? Or mass shootings? Moreover, the crisis itself -- along with all the other derailments & industrial accidents -- are often in whole or in part the result of Republicans' antipathy toward regulating businesses. As for many of those climate-induced crises and mass shootings, these too are in part the result of Republican malfeasance. Think climate-change deniers & Second Amendment enthusiasts. So-called conservatives are the single greatest drag on our national well-being, resisting every response to natural and societal disasters while they're busy creating new ones. The perps' only response is to try to deflect blame to somebody else. ~~~
~~~ A related Guardian story, by Ed Pilkington & Nina Lakhani, is here. The Guardian's report is more direct than the Post's in blaming the right wing for the controversy: "Three weeks into the disaster, a new set of headlines has started to billow up from right-wing outlets and commentators. Now the tragedy of East Palestine has morphed into a racialized lament for the 'forgotten' people abandoned by the uncaring 'woke' Biden administration. For 'forgotten', read white. Leading the charge, as is so often the case with such white-America nativist fearmongering, is the Fox News star Tucker Carlson. 'East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it's politically conservative,' he said recently. 'That shouldn't be relevant, but it very much is.'... Then Carlson contrasted [the] hardship [of East Palestine white people] with what he called the 'favoured poor' who live in 'favoured cities' such as Detroit and Philadelphia -- a clear euphemism for urban centers, often led by Democratic mayors, with large Black populations.... The idea that the rail disaster should be viewed through a racial lens has spread like a toxin from Fox News, through right-wing news sites and social media, into the political realm. JD Vance, the first-term Republican US senator from Ohio, picked up the clarion call of the 'forgotten' Americans, calling the residents of East Palestine, pointedly, 'our voters'." ~~~
~~~ Carey Gillam of the Guardian: "A Guardian analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and by non-profit groups that track chemical accidents in the US shows that accidental releases -- be they through train derailments, truck crashes, pipeline ruptures or industrial plant leaks and spills -- are happening consistently across the country. By one estimate these incidents are occurring, on average, every two days.... In the first seven weeks of 2023 alone, there were more than 30 incidents recorded by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, roughly one every day and a half. Last year the coalition recorded 188, up from 177 in 2021.... 'What happened in East Palestine, this is a regular occurrence for communities living adjacent to chemical plants,' said [Mathy] Stanislaus[, an EPA administrator during the Obama administration]. 'They live in daily fear of an accident.' In all, roughly 200 million people are at regular risk, with many of them people of color, or otherwise disadvantaged communities, he said."
Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times: "In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote. Of course, we know this isn't true. A large part of the reason that so many Americans hold the framers in such high esteem is precisely that they were farsighted and creative in response to the challenge of building a new political order. They made egregious errors and terrible mistakes -- one of which almost doomed the Republic -- but they also built a Constitution sturdy enough to survive much longer than they thought the union would."
Thomas Floyd & Michael Cavna of the Washington Post: "Newspapers across the United States have pulled Scott Adams's long-running 'Dilbert' comic strip after the cartoonist called Black Americans a 'hate group' and said White people should 'get the hell away from' them. The Washington Post, the USA Today network of hundreds of newspapers, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times and other publications announced they would stop publishing 'Dilbert' after Adams's racist rant on YouTube on Wednesday. Asked on Saturday how many newspapers still carried the strip -- a workplace satire he created in 1989 -- Adams told The Post: 'By Monday, around zero.' The once widely celebrated cartoonist ... has been entertaining extreme-right ideologies and conspiracy theories for several years...." An AP story is here.
Beyond the Beltway
Arizona. Yvonne Sanchez & Isaac Stanley-Becker of the Washington Post: "Arizona's Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, is seeking a review of what her office alleges was 'likely unethical conduct' by the state's former attorney general, Mark Brnovich. A letter sent Friday from the governor's office to the State Bar of Arizona follows the disclosure on Wednesday of records showing that Brnovich, a Republican, withheld findings by his own investigators refuting claims of fraud in the 2020 election and mischaracterized his office's probe of voting in the state's largest county." The Hill's story is here.
Georgia. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times contrasts two Georgia politicians: Jimmy Carter & Marjorie Taylor Greene.... "Carter, a brainiac, is a former nuclear engineer with a soaring I.Q. Greene, a maniac, ranted to Tucker Carlson on Thursday about 'this war against Russia in Ukraine.'"
Way Beyond
Ukraine, et al. The Washington Post's live briefing of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine is here: "Chinese officials were notably silent as most attendees at a gathering of Group of 20 finance ministers in India agreed to a statement strongly condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine. China and Russia refused to sign the document, which meant the two-day summit ended without its usual communique. U.S. officials have told The Washington Post that Beijing is considering providing the Kremlin with artillery shells, a move that could alter the war's trajectory in Moscow's favor.... An American veteran [Andrew Peters] fighting in Ukraine was killed in action on Feb. 16, his family told The Post.... Russian forces are making 'marginal territorial gains' around the front-line cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, in the eastern Donetsk region, according to the latest battleground report by the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank." ~~~
~~~ The Guardian's live updates for Sunday are here. The Guardian's summary report is here.
News Ledes
New York Times: After "snow, freezing rain and wind gusts of 30 to 40 miles per hour ... hammered the Upper Midwest overnight Wednesday..., [knocking out power lines...,] nearly 400,000 customers in Michigan remained without power as of Saturday evening, according to PowerOutage.us.... Michigan is one of the worst states for power reliability.... Michigan is also among the worst for recovery after an outage, usually taking about six hours on average, the report said."
New York Times: "As steady snowfall continued to present hazards in the mountains of Southern California on Saturday..., intense rains and powerful winds ... pounded Los Angeles and surrounding counties on Friday night and early Saturday produced significant flooding in urban areas, downed trees and threatened to cause mudslides. Multiple water rescues were conducted across counties because of rising waters...."
AP: "All five people aboard a medical transport flight, including a patient, were killed in a plane crash Friday night in a mountainous area [near Stagecoach] in northern Nevada.... Care Flight, which provides ambulance service by plane and helicopter, said the dead included the pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic, a patient and a patient's family member.... The crash occurred amid a winter storm warning issued by the National Weather Service in Reno for large swaths of Nevada, including parts of Lyon County [where the crash occurred]."
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Reader Comments (7)
As Marie points out regarding the Ohio crash and all the other train derailments that are the direct result of Republican hatred of any form of regulation (not to mention the rollback by Trump of regulations that could have prevented that disaster), “… The perps' only response is to try to deflect blame to somebody else.”
There could be a different response, of course, but as with immigration, the plague of gun violence, fairer tax laws, economic inequality, voting rights, and you name it, another dozen or more issues, they won’t do a damn thing. Why? Three big reasons.
First, their warped and corrupt ideology. Second, the various industries and individuals that could be affected by better and fairer legislation pay them a shitload every year to do nothing, look the other way, and blame the victims. And third, given the Santos-Greene-Gosar-Gaetz-Jordan-Johnson, et al level of astonishing incompetence, ignorance, cupidity, and indolence, they have neither the patience nor the brains to write fair, effective, and meaningful legislation, ie, what they’re supposed to be doing.
Much easier to “legislate” Don’t Say Gay, Don’t Read Black History, Arrest Guys in Dresses, AR-15s for Everyone, Fuck the Environment, Voting Rights Only for White Republicans, Religious Rights Only for Certain Christians, We Control Women! AND…Hunter Biden’s Dick Pics!
Bomb throwing, spreading lies and chaos, calling for armed insurrection and another civil war…that’s all they’re interested in ‘cause they’re not fit or smart enough for anything else.
Adding to Jamelle Bouie’s critique of the controlling traitors on the Supreme Court’s pinched and parsimonious views concerning the creators of this county’s constitutional order, I would point out, as I do on a regular basis, the fact that the authors of the Constitution included an AMENDMENT PROCESS just so that document could live, breathe, grow with the country, and not be stifled by ORIGINALIST BULLSHIT!!
You can bet if the founders proved to be more liberal than AOC, the ACLU, BLM, Greenpeace, the Me Too movement, and Occupy Wall Street, put together, there’d be not a fucking peep about originalism. R’s would be trotting out amendments faster than Trump can file Justice evading lawsuits.
Perhaps apologies are in order, but it is hard to keep up.
This sermon is on last week's manufactured crisis and contains not a word about train derailments...
"Dear Editor,
On Sunday’s opinion page columnist David Hopkins tried to explain why American schools are becoming more political. But by suggesting schools have changed in some fundamental way, he set himself an impossible task. Our schools have always been political. It’s in their nature.
Teetering as they do on the cusp of past and future, schools are charged with the conflicting tasks of conveying the established culture to the next generation while simultaneously preparing them for life in the changing world they will inhabit. Playing both the conservative and progressive roles our democracy has assigned them, schools can hardly avoid conflict.
Both past and future provide plenty of room for controversy. Just as we argue about the history we should present to the next generation, we contend over how diverse, tolerant, and equitable our society should become. It is in schools that our nation works out history’s disagreements and kinks.
Just a few from the last century.
Should schools be sectarian or secular? Should there be prayer in schools? Is teaching evolution sacrilegious or sound science? Does sex ed belong in schools? If so, at what grades and what kind?
Even math has been a hot-button issue. The best way to teach math has been debated from the “math wars” that began post-Sputnik (wikipedia.org) to the present, and arguments over reading pedagogy long ago took on a distinctly political bent (forbes.com).
Schools and politics have always been tightly linked. Mark Twain explained it this way:
“All schools….have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge."
Today, it’s the Right’s hysterical urge to conceal, with book banning and whitewashing history, that should worry us (pen.org).
Remarkably astute, Twain also said he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
Amid the latest school wars, that remains excellent advice."
@Ken Winkes: You Twain quotes suggest plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. I suspect it was the same kind of faux horror back in the 19th century that caused schools to "conceal ... knowledge." And they did it without any help from TuKKKer! But it does go to show that the wingers are, at their most modern, still stuck in the 19th century. Maybe TuKKKer would have fit well in the Court of Queen Victoria. She could had made him the viceroy of some obscure island in her vast colonial empire, and he could have played king and lorded it over the hapless natives even as he whined about what lucky duckies they were and how those of a darker hue failed to appreciate the privilege of serving him. Ah, for the good old days.
Watched the new "All Quiet on the Western Front" last night. It's a remarkable film–-mostly in German (with subtitles) and I was once again horrified at what war does to the psyche and souls of its soldiers. Today we witness another war and see and hear on our TV screens what war does to the civilians. Humans have invented all sorts of weapons to kill –-to destroy–-in the name of power over their enemies.
For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic,
the US tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. By the time military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of new Mexico, as the allies dropped in all of the second World War. At the height of the bombing it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted-- and look how it ended.
So I was thinking of that war and the second WW and the other wars we dipped our fingers into or started and how now we find ourselves involved in Putin's War in a very different way and we are being careful now–-we have learned some hard lessons about wars and this one we are handling with a fine tuned instrument called lessons learned although many in the Party of Petty Poltroons think otherwise.
Ken: And your "school wars" fit right in here albeit without the bombs and tanks. By the way, your NTY's nemeses Dough=nut wrote about religion today and you know me–-I'm like a dog when hearing the word "squirrel" jumps into action, the word religion does the same for me–––BUT could not finish said piece and wonder if you did.
P. D.
Hadn't dived into Douthat, but you made me.
I skimmed it and responded thusly:
"Only the implication Douthat dances around is correct:
The similarity between religious eruptions and any mob behavior is on the mark.
Whether it's a lynching mob, a peace protest that turns violent or a Great Awakening, the same factors are at work and any difference between the mob's behavior and a cattle stampede disappears.
In all these cases, kids, adults or cattle, we can be sure that all reason has fled.?
Just wondering if anyone is tracking how many papers are dropping Scott Adams "Dilbert" Strip over his racist rants compared to the number that dropped Wiley Millers "Non Sequitur" over his strip that printed "Fuck you, Trump"? And in small letters you had to look for too!
Non Sequitur remains my number one "go to" every morning.