Tag Archives: coronavirus

environmental news

Happy Earth Day … if only we could cheer it this year

I have been fond of wishing everyone a Happy Earth Day, which I have done repeatedly on this blog.

This year it’s different. It’s vastly different, in fact. We acknowledge the 50th anniversary of Earth Day under a severe, foreboding and ominous cloud brought to our good Earth by the coronavirus pandemic.

Fifty years ago we began setting aside a day to celebrate the only planet we have. Earth is home. That’s it. We have to care for it. President Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, vowing to exert greater emphasis on ways to protect our precious Earth.

Here we are today. Our worldwide economy has effectively been shut down by the viral infection that has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings.

The “good news,” if you want to call it such, is that our air has gotten much cleaner as we have driven far less. We have nowhere to go. Our motor vehicles are parked.

OK, so the air is cleaner. We still have water pollution issues. We have deforestation that leads to global warming and climate change. We’re still throwing too much trash into landfills. We still are using too much fossil fuel that also spews pollution into the air.

Our minds and hearts, at the moment, are directed at fighting the pandemic. I am all for that effort, to be sure. I do not want to rush into a return to “normal living” while the virus is still infecting and killing human beings.

I do want to wish everyone once more a Happy Earth Day, although I understand completely that our attention is being diverted to more immediately urgent matters.

national news

Immigration ban: mostly for show

Donald J. “Xenophobe in Chief” Trump’s temporary ban on all immigration just doesn’t pass the smell test.

He is signing an executive order that bans for 60 days all immigration into the United States, except for those with temporary work visas. Trump says he wants to prevent the spread of the coronavirus that has killed more than 45,000 Americans.

Sure thing, Mr. President, except that the virus is not being “imported” by immigrants. The overwhelming number of new infections is coming from right here at home, which tells me that that the executive order was issued more than just a tad late in the game.

What’s more, the announcement came — as usual — via Twitter. Trump got into a late-night fidgety spell and blasted out the tweet reportedly without consulting immigration officials, the National Security Council, the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. Gosh, isn’t it essential that you notify the appropriate agency heads of such drastic matters before you make the public announcement?

Trump’s anti-immigration stance is well known. It’s not just the folks who are sneaking in here illegally that has drawn his ire. He wants to clamp down as well on legal immigration. You know, he doesn’t like all that inbound traffic from what he calls “sh**hole countries,” meaning countries from, oh, Africa and Latin America.

The temporary immigration ban is nothing more than another example of Trump pandering to his base.

Reprehensible.

local news, Sports news

Minor league baseball falls victim to the pandemic

Oh, brother …

This story saddens me at a level I never thought I would experience. It comes from The Associated Press and it portends a grim short-term future for minor league baseball across a nation that is caught in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic.

Listen up, my friends in Amarillo, you fans of the Sod Poodles who had hoped to be flocking to Hodgetown — the city’s shiny new ballpark —  to cheer on the defending Texas League champions.

AP reports that minor league baseball experienced a 2.6 percent attendance increase in 2019. Minor league ball had more than 40 million fans for the 15th straight season, according to AP.

The 2020 season hasn’t started. There’s no prospect on the horizon when it will start, unlike what’s happening with Major League Baseball, where team owners and the players union are working on a schedule that would commence with no fans present in the stands. The AP reported:

While Major League Baseball tries to figure out a way to play this summer, the prospects for anything resembling a normal minor league season are increasingly bleak.

For minor league communities across the country from Albuquerque to Akron, looking forward to cheap hot dogs, fuzzy mascot hugs and Elvis theme nights, it’s a small slice of a depressing picture.

Yes, you can include Amarillo in that roster of minor league cities. Amarillo fought hard to lure the Sod Poodles from San Antonio. The team’s initial-season success in 2019 was one for the books. It was epic. The fans can’t wait for the first pitch.

Then came the COVID-19 crisis. Every single sporting league is shut down. That includes the plethora of minor leagues scattered.

When will they play ball? When will it be safe to cram fans into ballparks, sitting next to each other, allowing them to high-five and cheer when the home team scores a run or makes a spectacular play in the field?

Uhh, who in the world knows?

At this moment, it doesn’t look good. We might be in for a lost season.

media news

A reporter boycott in the making?

This idea comes from one of my social media contacts; he’s actually a friend who comments on my blog regularly.

Donald Trump’s latest disgraceful dressing down of a broadcast journalist has become far too great of a distraction. His tirade this past weekend against CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond was just the latest example of his intolerance and petulance with journalists who merely are doing their job — which at times requires them to ask difficult questions of the commander in chief.

My friend posted this: They need to stage an organized walkout and not return or broadcast until he behaves decently. They’re enabling his behavior by tolerating it.

The “they” in his message are the reporters assigned to cover the White House for their various organizations.

Diamond asked Trump if it was appropriate of him to boast about the great response he has mounted against the coronavirus when the death toll surpassed 40,000 Americans. Trump was having none of it and lashed out at Diamond, at CNN and at the media in general.

I generally oppose boycotts, but I am starting to come around on this one.

A boycott by the media of the White House “briefings,” which no longer provide any real news is beginning to sound like a sensible response to Trump’s egregiously intemperate behavior.

These daily ramblings by the president of the United States have stopped providing anything useful for Americans to digest. They serve only as a forum for him to rant and roar against those who decline to lick his boots and kiss his backside.

Would such an act produce a change in behavior? Well, that’s the nagging question. The answer is far too elusive to pin down. I tend to believe it wouldn’t … but the notion is starting to appeal to me.

media news

CNN gets skewered for asking a legitimate question of POTUS

Jeremy Diamond is a fine young reporter for CNN, who on Sunday was doing his job while sitting in the White House press briefing room. His job includes asking probing questions of the man standing in front of him, the president of the United States.

Diamond happened to ask Donald John “Stable Genius” Trump why, in the face of a death count from coronavirus that topped 40,000 in the United States, he was congratulating himself for the “great job” he said he is doing. Diamond asked “Is this the time” for such “self-congratulation?”

That sent Trump into orbit. He said CNN delivers “fake news” and said he was speaking on behalf of all the first responders. He said Diamond doesn’t “have the brains you were born with.” Then he compared the treatment he allegedly gets from the press to what President Abraham Lincoln got when he ran for president in 1860. Good ever-lovin’ grief, man!

If you listen to Trump’s campaign rally-style riff at the briefing room, it is clear that he is speaking ofhimself and not of the men and women he purportedly was praising. Thus, Diamond posed a perfectly legitimate question of the individual who signed on to the presidency knowing he would be questioned aggressively by the media whose job is to hold him accountable for his actions.

Despicable.

International news

Crackpots come up with phony conspiracy theories

The right-wing crackpot machine is cranking out conspiracy theories in connection with the coronavirus pandemic.

Yep. They’re out there. I’m guessing they’re going to get even more ramped up the more this health crisis mounts, the more deaths we suffer, the more illness our nation has to endure.

Some demonstrators who have gathered in places like Lansing, Mich., and in Austin have told reporters, for example, that they disbelieve the casualty count being released. They say the numbers of deaths and illness are actually much lower. They tell the world that people are dying of causes unrelated to the COVID-19 unique virus, but that medical authorities are blaming the disease.

Yes, the authorities are making it up! That’s what the nut jobs are saying.

George Soros, the progressive political activist, billionaire philanthropist and all-round bogeyman for damn near every right-wing cause you can imagine, also has been dragged into the conspiracy muck. The right-wingers suggest Soros is feeding false information because he detests Donald Trump so much that he is willing to foment lies about the disease just to ensure that Trump loses the November presidential election.

Same for Bill and Melinda Gates, who earned their fortune through Bill Gates’s founding of Microsoft. They’re liberals who are financing false narratives being told about the virus. Their motive? It’s the same thing that’s driving Soros, the wackos say.

I have long been an anti-conspiracy American. I’ve never bought the conspiracies that suggest, for instance, that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy; or that men didn’t actually walk on the moon; or that President Bush lured the terrorists to attack us on 9/11.

The coronavirus erupted in central China. It came to the United States when infected passengers arrived in Seattle. It has exploded around the world.

Tragedies happen. It has happened in this instance. We are being subjected to unprecedented restrictions. Our nation’s economy has all but been shut down. The restrictions have angered many Americans, too many of whom have been concocting dangerous and hideous conspiracy theories designed to take our eyes off the target and to distract us from examining how we can find ways to repair what has gone so terribly wrong with our response.

These conspiracy nut jobs make me sick.

national news

Idiocy ignores the larger issue

The idiots who are marching on state capitals demanding that governors relax their restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic are missing an essential element.

They decry the restrictions, saying that stay at home, shelter in place and social distancing requirements represent a government overreach into their personal liberties.

Hold the fu**ing phone, folks!

These morons can hide for as long as they want hide behind the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights and proclaim their right to do as they wish. Fine. If they want to put themselves in danger and jeopardize their own health and well-being, then have at it.

However, the Bill of Rights does not grant anyone the right to put others’ health in peril. It does not allow anyone to expose other human beings to deadly viral infections. Just as the First Amendment grants us the right of free speech, it does not — as has been noted since the beginning of our republic — allow someone to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater.

Thus, when protesters march on state capitals, which they have done here in Texas, and proclaim that governors are restricting their rights, they miss the essential need for government to protect the well-being of all the people it serves.

And yet we hear from Donald J. Trump and others at the top of the governmental chain of command heap misguided and misdirected praise on the protesters, cheering them on. Trump, of course, doesn’t understand government’s role in protecting the people he was elected to serve. His primary focus has been all along on his own political future.

Therefore, if the protests suit his needs and call attention to the issues he is raising — which focus far more on the economy than on the science associated with the restrictions — why, that suits him just fine.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are seeing stupidity on full display. What’s worse is that the intellectual failure of the protesters is putting others in jeopardy. That, in my view, is a criminal act.

medical news

Hell freezes over: Trump tells the truth!

I never thought this day would come, but it did … yesterday, during a White House campaign rally-style riff by the president of the United States who supposedly was briefing the nation about the health outbreak that has gripped the world.

A reporter asked Donald Trump whether he declined to appoint U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, to join a task force to reopen the country in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic out of anger at Romney’s criticism of him.

Trump said he is “not a fan of Mitt Romney. I don’t want his advice.”

So, the answer is “yes,” Trump is still angry at Romney because the Republican senator voted to convict the president of abuse of power during the Senate impeachment trial.

See what I mean? Trump actually told the truth that he does hold a grudge against Romney!

This fit of truth-telling isn’t worth any sort of praise, given the smallness and pettiness it represents about what passes for Trump’s thought pattern.

Donald Trump

One of Trump’s ‘best people’?

I want you to ponder the image you see with this blog post.

The fellow on the right is Vince McMahon, the head of World Wrestling Entertainment. He is a friend of Donald John Trump, the current president of the United States.

McMahon has just been named to a task force charged with trying to find solutions to how the nation can reopen for business in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Yes, the guy who is mooning someone in the middle of a wrestling ring is going to be among the so-called “best people” that Donald Trump promised to associate with as he governed the greatest country on Earth.

Just something to consider.

national news

Mail-in voting far better than not voting at all

I offer this recommendation with a hint of trepidation, given my often-stated preference for traditional Election Day voting.

Given the option of facing an election later this year threatened by potentially fatal viral infection, I choose instead to endorse a revolutionary reform in the way we elect our presidents: Let’s go to a mail-in system.

Donald Trump doesn’t want this to occur even under the threat of the coronavirus pandemic. The president says, without a hint of evidence, that mail-in balloting is corrupt, that it invites voter fraud.

We all know what’s going on inside Trump’s thick and vacuous skull: He sees a system that would boost voter turnout and it poses a threat to his re-election.

Five states conduct their elections by mail. One of them is Oregon, the state where I was born and where mail-in voting was first begun. All the states report that their systems are secure. Moreover, they all report that incidents of fraudulent voting constitute a tiny, infinitesimal portion of the total number of ballots cast.

Mail-in voting can be done nationally on a state-by-state basis.

Texas isn’t one of the mail-in election states. A state judge recently issued a ruling that opens the door to more expansive mail-in voting in Texas. State Attorney General Ken “The Indicted One” Paxton has said he plans to appeal the ruling; the AG doesn’t want mail-in voting, either.

Americans are faced with a potentially frightening dilemma this November if they are forced to go to their polling places while the pandemic is still sickening and killing us. How do they venture to the polls and expose themselves to possibly being infected by the COVID-19 virus?

What’s the option? Staying at home and filling out a ballot that comes to them via the Postal Service and then sending the ballot back to the county election office where it will be stored until it’s counted on Election Day.

The turnout among residents who face that threat would increase dramatically. Indeed, states with mail-in voting report voter turnout that far exceeds the national average.

What, I must ask, is wrong with allowing more rather than fewer Americans the chance to cast their ballots? Isn’t a representative democracy built from a framework that encourages greater participation? Of course it is!

My version of The Perfect World would be an election system that allows us to vote on Election Day at the polling place of our choice. Moreover, such a world would produce voter turnouts that outpace the sometimes dismal turnouts we experience.

I cannot achieve electoral perfection. Moreover, I certainly can’t achieve it with the potentially dire threat posed by a killer virus.

A reasonable and workable alternative is to allow American citizens the chance to vote by mail for president of the United States.