Watt are you saying?
2 Likes
Watt ever.
2 Likes
If you’re saying the Trump years did not usher in some new grand plan, I might agree. People talk about Kushner or Miller being the mastermind of this or that but, honestly, they did not know enough about government to do the kind of damage that others had done.
And by “others” here, I’m referring again to the era of Gingrich and the administration of Dick Cheney.
14 Likes
Yes, Watt and other Reaganites were pretty bad, but many of their worst ideas were throttled by a Democratic House.
Once Gingrich took over, many safeguards were carefully dismantled.
8 Likes
One Watt, two Watts, Red Watt, Blue Watt.
2 Likes
Exactly!
Truth and facts and objective reality need to be put back into every agency.
And the career experts and employees will be relieved and freed to do their jobs.
Too bad we can’t get Republicans in Congress and elsewhere to base their arguments and actions on some of that truth and facts and reality.
5 Likes
Take all power and influence away from Republicans permanently.
But, that might be asking a lot.
5 Likes
There were too many worst ideas for the House to keep in check. Along with the Southern Racist Strategy Reagan brought the evangelists and their magical thinking into positions of power in his administration so as to efficiently harvest their votes. And to this day “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” is baked into the brains of his followers as the greatest lie ever told. And trickle down. And election theft. And so on.
Not to say that the last 4 years were not a disaster that will take 50 years to recover from, but Reagan, Bush I & II are in line ahead of him.
8 Likes
Rolling back clean air regulations, promoting coal, facilitating Keystone XL, downplaying climate change, etc. are directly pro-fossil fuel and anti-science policies that are targeted to help polluting businesses. Here science was the PRIMARY target; these Trump administration policies were fully intentional and about certain people making $$.
Even the Trump COVID response was an attempt to mitigate economic effects and Trump admin and deflect focus from Russia to China…so even the most anti-science COVID nonsense had a political coherence.to it and was fully intentional.
7 Likes
That’s unlikely, as you indicated. There should be some way to legislate this because we’ve seen that some people’s better angels don’t exactly agree with the science that they’re banking on to make them more money, if they ignore the science.
I just don’t want to see something like this happen again and you know it will. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but even years from now. We shouldn’t allow greed and stupidity to ever override legitimate science, ever.
4 Likes
Here’s one instance where they succeeded:
To prevent the wasting of federal pennies on the most unworthy recipients, and to get past Communist oppression in the form of nutritional requirements, the Reaganites re-classified ketchup so that packets of it could be counted as a vegetable in school lunches.
Democrats in the House read Reagan the Riot Act. He backed down.
The example has been reported before, of course, but it has not always been seen as a skirmish in the War on Science.
8 Likes
I agree. Why go to war with science unless it’s giving results you don’t want? As it has during the AIDS crisis, climate change, Covid, etc.
It’s the same reason they’re at war with good economic policies, (UBI, giving the homeless homes, fixing income inequality) or favor bad policy (supply side economics) because it conflicts with their ideology or religious beliefs.
But, eventually, if you don’t pay attention to logic, empirical evidence, facts, and reasoning, you will be made to pay a price. Which is why Republicans cannot and should not govern.
6 Likes
My plea…get on with the reversion to sound policy…I can only imagine that people accustomed to working with science facts and protocols would welcome a return to facts and rigor.
4 Likes
The adults are back in town!
6 Likes
Nothing like a strong, fresh wind blowing in from the West Wing to dispel the miasma of trump pollution.
4 Likes
I have felt, ever since the Saint Ronnie Administration, that we are in a downward cycle of electing Republicans who destroy everything in sight, and then electing Democrats to clean up the mess. No wonder the rest of the world has given up on us as leader of the free world. If we elect morons like Bush2 and Trump how are they ever going to trust us not to keep on electing evil, stupid Presidents and Congresspersons who are going to try to destroy democracy everywhere their greedy hands can reach?
12 Likes
Yes.
It’s heart-breaking – and exhausting!
7 Likes
I hope this new EPA Admin, Mr Regan, isn’t all alone over at EPA the way Merrick Garland is right now at DoJ. There’s a lotta trump muck to move out.
4 Likes
In addition to the data that was mostly not destroyed and is now being restored, there’s a lot of data that simply wasn’t gathered during the trump regime. Which makes longterm trend analysis more difficult.
This started with reagan, whose people stopped collection of a bunch of economic and social data that might have given embarrassing results, and also changed some of the reporting so that numbers would not be easily comparable. (For example, the reclassification of the military as part of the labor force, so that topline employment numbers would go up.)
9 Likes