FTA:

Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and former Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans' legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the former governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.

Republicans refuse to accept the voters' choice.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an "F" for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making "vaccine harm" a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.

This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority.

I'm upset with his MO of blaming the effects of weather related disasters on state and local officials but only if they are Democrats.

I'm upset with his plans to make across the board federal government policies based on climate change denialism.

Senator Bernie Sanders
@sanders.senate.gov

Yes. We need to deal with excessive federal bureaucracy and waste.

But don't kid yourself.

Musk-Trump's goal is to privatize USPS, the VA, NASA, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and give them to their billionaire friends.

Oligarchy marches on--unless we stop it.

Senator Bernie Sanders
@sanders.senate.gov

Musk is hiring "super high-IQ small government revolutionaries" for DOGE.

What do these super-humans have in store for us mere mortals?

Will they create universal health care, address the housing crisis or climate change?

Or will they just make the rich richer?

Stay tuned.

The discussion is about Trump because the op-ed is about how his policies will govern the next 4 years and affect the future of our country. Denying climate change is real isn't going make climate change go away, no matter how many state and local officials Republicans blame for the devastating consequences their denials and coming policies are going to create. From the op-ed:

but he's [Trump]made it clear that America's second half of the 2020s will be dedicated to tossing the fight against climate change " the root cause of LA's civic nightmare " down the memory hole.

To be clear, it takes a perfect storm to destroy a great metropolis. The fury of the westward Santa Ana winter winds is timeless. But the bottom line is that January wildfires in Southern California were fueled by decades of humans pumping carbon into the skies over LA's jammed freeways.

The last three years--the planet's hottest ever recorded, boosted by man-made global warming--of oven-roaster days have meant a cycle of stronger and moister storms over California that nurtured dense brush, followed by 300 almost completely rain-free days of drought, as Mother Nature crafted the tinderbox that erupted on Tuesday.

"A majority of the largest, deadliest, and most destructive wildfires in state history have all occurred within the past 10 years," meteorologist Eric Holthaus noted in a piece for Fast Company. "The emergence of extreme wintertime wildfires in California presents one of those classic This is climate change' moments: A specific set of weather conditions are now occurring in such a way to produce the potential for rare disasters to become much more common."

This is indeed climate change, and it's appalling that the major TV networks on Tuesday, in their breaking news coverage, gave little or no mention of the climate crisis. The political nightmare that is compounding California's tragedy is that Trump's tilting against windmills and electric stoves has guaranteed the world's second-largest emitter of carbon won't do one darn thing about this for the next four years.

BTW, does 1Lumper2 qualify as a Mumper, and if so, of which variety?

I trust the points I've made are clear enough to any honest reader, despite your repeated attempts to obfiscate, conflate and shift the topic of discussion. Have a nice day, BW.

Logically explain how a bum starting a fire in the hills is due to climate change.
#29 | Posted by Bluewaffles

LOL And here I thought you were smarter than to trot out that logical fallacy reasoning in the midst of this discussion.

The point of this op-ed is that the coming Trump 2.0 policy on climate change is going to exacerbate the effects of climate related natural disasters, which should concern all Americans.

Oh boy, Mumpers going to war with other Mumpers?:

These first six months of the Mump regime will be axial. Musk-Trump will have problems. Incompetence will tell. The mumpers who want fascism in order to get to oligarchy will clash with the mumpers who want oligarchy in order to get to fascism. Those who understand that they should just take credit for the Biden economy will clash with those who want tariffs and deportations. The mump crew will not do some of the things they promised, which is bad for them. They will do some of the things they promised, which is bad for the rest of us. But the things they mean to do are generally difficult, usually unpopular, sometimes in tension with one another, and often much worse in reality than they sound in campaign speeches.

Hmm, Bannon senses the danger for Republicans in the upcoming Mump regime.

An expert on X who claims to have never had an account. Truly Trumpian.

As seen on the internets:

How sad it must be believing scientists, scholars, historians, economists and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality tv star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.

Arsonists may start the fires, but they burn as intensiviely and extensively as they do due to climate change. This is not an either/or option but a both/and reality.

PS I no longer hang out on X.

Trump will continue to blame Newsom because he wants to deflect from any conversation about climate change. Bottom line though is that as the forest fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes increase in intensity, it will be more and more difficult for state and local officials to prepare for and recover from their devastating effects.

@governor.ca.gov just launched a new site to ensure the public has access to fact-based data around the Southern California wildfires.

California Fire Facts

They will be worse off if they lose benefits like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP. They will be worse off if prices don't go down and the wealth inequality increases after the billionaires get their tax breaks. They will be worse off if deregulation increases pollution and unchecked climate change causes more severe natural disasters. They will be worse off if they lose their health insurance, abortion bans keep killing women who don't need to die and anti-vax mandates bring back diseases that were under control. To name just a few things that could get worse under Trump 2.0.

Let's see what Trump and the GOP-backed oligarghy do for the voters in Youngstown and all the other towns like it in the Rust Belt. I fear these voters are in for a rude awakening.

FTA:

It's rarely even mentioned that Trump's 2024 grind toward a second term included his should-have-been-shocking pledge to roll back climate regulations if Big Oil would raise $1 billion to fund his campaign. The target was overly ambitious, but many energy millionaires did open their wallets. And the president-elect has now made clear that more fossil fuels and less clean energy will be his legacy, with or without Greenland.

Lost in the hoopla over Trump's worst and most bat-guano crazy cabinet picks, like weekend TV host Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon, is that the president-elect's less-controversial choices for key energy posts will speed the fiery destruction of our planet.

These include Russell Vought, the Christian nationalist Project 2025 author tapped to head Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who's vowed to weaken and undermine the next mandated National Climate Assessment; the oil field executive Chris Wright, who last year posted to his LinkedIn that "there is no climate crisis," as his energy secretary; and politico Lee Zeldin, who wants a "radical rollback" of regulations, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

We don't yet know if Trump's Marines will be storming Panama, but it's a done deal that his bureaucrats will withdraw from the Paris climate accords, again. Although it's true that market forces have been and may continue to boost clean energy, don't discount the religious fervor among the right that sees fossil-fuel extraction as God's greatest handiwork. With little fanfare, the Republicans who run Oklahoma are actually striving to ban clean energy, in what could be a template for Beltway zealots.

"may just listen"

Sorry, but I don't think Trump will listen to anything Obama has to say. I don't think Trump is inclined to listen to anyone because he thinks he knows more than everyone else, and the Supreme Court ruling pretty much insured he never has to.

Karen Pence would've been happier to see Bin Laden than the-------------.
#45 | Posted by reinheitsgebot

Probably because Trump and his insurrectionists came closer to killing her, her husband and her family than Bin Laden and his terrorists did.

No. We are laughing at Dems/lefties who have been calling him Hitler and worse to then see one of the left's idols talking politely with him.
It's almost as if the terrible rhetoric doesn't match reality.
#25 | Posted by BellRinger

Are you forgetting all the times Trump called Democrats fascists? Sure looks like it. Par for the course.

I'd like to think that Obama has the wisdom to recognize that if he leaves that door of communication open, Trump will pick up the phone when he calls and may just listen to what Barack has to say at some critical moment for America. Fitting to see this at Jimmy Carters funeral.
#41 | Posted by Miranda7

I agree it is fitting that Obama was polite at Carter's funeral, I don't believe there is snowballs chanch in hell that DonOLD will ever call Obama at "a critical moment for America". After repeatedly calling Carter the worst president in history, until Biden came along, why did Trump even bother to show up at his funeral. All he did was fall asleep anyway. And in so many of the photos from that day, one of these was people was not like the others (everyone laughing/smiling except Trump, everyone holding their hand over their hearts except Trump). I think Michael Steele had it right yesterday on Morning Joe:

Morning Joe' Meltdown as Michael Steele Slams Joe & Mika Over Trump

On Friday's Morning Joe, Steele added, "The reality is, no, you are using the term civil. I'm using your term, you put civility on the table ... My main point is, everybody is looking at this from a one-way perspective; how we need to approach Donald Trump. How is he approaching us?"

"The man wants to lock up citizens, the man wants to turn the government against them, how are we supposed to respond to that? Are we supposed to be civil?" Steele stated.

They probably put Barack next to Trump because they knew he would be polite, but politeness can be over-rated:

Politicians past and present gathered in Washington, D.C., on Thursday for the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter. President-elect Trump and his wife, Melania, walked past his former Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, who were sitting alongside another former vice president, Al Gore.