Politics

I hate political lawn signs

|

Few things I despise is mass produced political lawn signs 🚧…

Every year for a good portion of the year ugly plastic lawn signs dot communities across the country. These totally meaningless signs that lack any socially redeeming value or have any first amendment protected speech but are simply the commercial brandishing of a candidate for political office’s name.

There is not a single political professional who thinks political lawn signs move anybody in a particular direction when it comes to voting. People either know who they are going to vote for or aren’t going to vote and the signs are visual clutter to be ignored. Door knocks, phone calls and even political mail and targeted social media advertising are much more effective.

After every election day millions of these lawn signs end up in landfills, incinerators and burn piles . That is the signs that don’t blow away, end up in the woods mixed with the mud and urban debris. All for nothing. Political signs are not effective method of campaigning for political office.

NPR

|

Trump Was Just Impeached On A Party-Line Vote. What Has Fueled Partisanship? : NPR

American politics has arrived at a remarkable place. The country and its leaders are growing more partisan, fewer people are persuadable in elections, and Republicans and Democrats view each other with an increasingly nastier edge. Americans are surrounding themselves with people who look like, agree with and even pray like them — a sorting that's changing the country and ripping at the fabric of what it means to be American. Sign Up For The NPR Politics Newsletter

There are a lot of reasons why America now has this degree of partisanship, from partisan redistricting and a lack of moderate participation in primaries to a lack of leadership and the fracturing and siloing of how and where Americans get their news. Maybe it's no surprise that Democrats and Republicans can't even agree on who started it — and certainly don't agree on the solutions.

NPR

|

Trump Impeached By House In Historic Rebuke : NPR

"No president ever wants to be impeached. And whether Donald Trump leaves in one month, one year or five years, this impeachment is permanent," Lieu said. "It will follow him around for the rest of his life and history books will record it. People will know why we impeached."

Whether or not you stick your penis into the mouth of your intern and lie about it to Congress, or you spin up a deal with a foreign power to get intelligence on your revival, the truth is to be impeached is a let down to the country. Sure, it's a partisan affair and the Democrats were looking for something to impeach the president for but it's no different than the Republicans 21 years ago. But in both cases it was the loyal opposition publicly doing the definition of impeachment "to call into question the integrity or validity of (a practice)."

President Trump's actions have been a let down for the country and the Senate will have the opportunity to decide whether to remove him - but everybody knows they probably won't. But there is no undoing an impeachment, it will be forever recorded and only fully judged by historians in later generations. I am disappointed with the president's actions but I'm willing to keep an open mind towards 2020. They're may or may not be better candidates than, I'll carefully look at the issues and the totality of the impeachment and what is beyond it.

50 Years Ago | The Saturday Evening Post

|

The Rise and Fall of the John Birch Society: 50 Years Ago | The Saturday Evening Post

Barry Goldwater was widely known as a man with extreme views. He is still remembered as the man who said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” But even Goldwater thought Robert Welch went too far.

Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958 to oppose what he saw as the growing communist influence in America. Through his publications, he attacked whomever he thought was furthering the interest of the Soviets. He also promoted the idea of impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren and the withdrawing the U.S. from the United Nations.

He named the John Birch Society after an American military advisor in China who had been killed by communist forces. Welch thought Birch would be a suitable model for the anti-communist cause.

When Welch started his society, the hunt for communist agents and sympathizers was still going strong. Many politicians and journalists were gaining notoriety for their declarations of enmity to communism everywhere. But none were more committed than Welch, who attacked anyone he suspected of colluding with Soviet Russia.

Trump’s EPA is checking off an anti-environment wish list. Here’s who will suffer.

|

Joel Clement: Trump’s EPA is checking off an anti-environment wish list. Here’s who will suffer.

For Americans who value the environment, public land protections and science, the past couple of years have been difficult to take, to say the least. This is no accident, of course, because those values stand in the way of industry profit, and the Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to boost industry profits at the expense of American well-being.

It’s hard to believe that the executive branch would act against the needs and values of everyday Americans and intentionally reduce penalties for those who seek to pollute our air and water. And yet, this is exactly what the current administration is doing. In fact, there has been no effort to hide the anti-environment wish lists behind recent executive actions. To the contrary, federal agencies seem to be competing with one another to be the biggest boosters of big industry.