Yesterday, we received some unsurprising results from the Iowa Republican caucus (which they held on MLK Day, I presume because they don’t recognize it.) Of course the weather was not suchas to encourage participation … but those who think making Election Day a federal holiday will solve all ourtuenout problems might want to rethink that. Otherwise, the news today has for some reason given me this song (introduced by the Kingston Trio) as an earworm:
They’re rioting in Africa, they’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don’t like anybody very much!
Now here’s something to save and share. Blue Voters Guide is a non-profit which analyzes elections all over the country for you, so that if there’s some candidate you haven’t heard of – or for your friends who are wellintentioned but don’t follow politics – you will always be able to find out who is blue. 41 states have primaries scheduled between now and about June. Right now the guide for Colorado’s March 5 Presidential primary is pretty simple – though you’d be amazed by the length of the list of rag-tag nobodies who are running against Joe Biden. But later in the year we’ll have primaries for candidates for the House of Representatives and possibly for the Colorado House and the Colorado Senate, and who knows what. It probably won’t cover school board elections, which is IMO what we need the most at this time, but with enough support, it might be able to get there. In any case, I’m sure we all know someone (or someones) who could benefit from it. This information is courtesy of Robert Hubbell on Substack, whom I occasionally quote.
Joyce Vance’s “tomorrow” is now “today.” So it’s happening now. And it’s important enough that Robert Reich also addresses it, possibly even more starkly. So I’m providing both links, you can read or skim one or both. I expect eveeryone here can put their mind back to the days when we had rivers burning – and lakes full of dead fish – and that just scratches the surface. I don’t know whether this is accurate, but someone in a comment over at Crooks & Liars said that ancient Sumeria lasted for 3000 years. From the beginning, they had a legal system which protected the poor and weak and there were strict legal punishments for breaking those laws. But, every 300 years or so, the laws had been strayed from, but they had a king who brought the country into line with “the old laws.” We will be celebrating 250 years in just two years. (If it were up to me I would date our existence as a country from April 30, 1789, when George Washington took office and set the Constitution in motion, but no one asked me. And maybe I’m being unfair to the Articles fof Confederation which were the stopgap – but I don’t think so.)
