It's not just about Obamacare, folks.

Note to self: this is the 200th episode of The Wifely Person Speaks. Somehow it feels longer than that. 

Sunday, when he stopped by the house, the junior son filled my bicycle tires. Now, one might think I could fill my own bicycle tires, but noooooo. Not in the Ziggy household where we are are proud owners of a full sized air compressor. I have no idea why we even have a full size air compressor, and I'm not even sure I want to know. It’s right next to the freezer in the garage and unlike some people who unplug the freezer in order to plug in the giant air compressor and then forget to plug the freezer back in, I remembered to flip back the plugs.

There is nothing like peddling through the neighborhood at a leisurely pace while your bum is trying to get used to the bike saddle again. All those lovely calluses you built up last year are barely there. Your knees are screaming, "MURDERER!" with each push of the pedal...not that their whining is going to stop you from at least once around the pond. What almost did stop me, however, was a Prius. Damn thing is silent. Never heard it sneak up behind me. I think I'll invest in a rear-view mirror. 

Speaking of how fragile life can be...did you happen to hear that part of the West Antarctic ice sheet has collapsed? Scientists have known it was coming for a while, based on site measurements and real data collection...not computer generated modeling speculation. This is not one of these, "Oh, we can fix this later" kinda things. This is a serious game changer. 

In response, a number of our fine Congressclowns have launched yet another series of attacks on science. Now, I'm not talking about rocket science here; I'm talking about basic environmental science. If you passed the third grade, most of this stuff should be decipherable for you. You can grasp simple concepts like melting ice caps and increased sea level. No one is asking you to diagram the difference between nuclear fission and fusion. 

Marco Rubio, poster boy for the GOP these days, explained his position rather eloquently in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Sunday:

“Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to man-made activities…I don't know of any era in world history where the climate has been stable. Climate is always evolving, and natural disasters have always existed… I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That's what I—and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.”

Really? You really think that, Senator-from-pretty-much-sea-level-Florida Rubio? You were absent the day they taught ozone layer and ice caps in science class? Oh! Wait! You probably didn't go to one of those liberal, progressive schools where they taught actual science as opposed to just mythology! 

Yeah, sure, it's going to take several centuries for the full impact of the loss of the ice sheet to be felt. But if ocean levels are already rising at a perilous rate, a few centuries aren't all that long. Put a guy like Rubio in the White House and you can bet your bottom dollar...but certainly not his.... the Delray Beach contingent will be moving in with me in pretty short order because I'm all the way up north and in-land. 

Out of the current crop of GOP contenders, only Chris Christie admits climate change is real. The rest, and this includes Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee are pretty much all deniers. 

Now, one would think We, the People would want the best and the smartest guys running this country. Sticking one's head in the sand or denouncing science in favor of profit are not desirable qualifications. 

West Antarctica, . 

Photograph: EJ Steig/Nasa

If you extrapolate, there's a bit of an issue if your elected representatives don't get the science part. How can they write bills to allocate funding for stuff we need....like health research, agricultural development, land management, animal health, environmental protection....all that other stuff if they can't converse intelligently on science? These right-wing-pseudo-religious-wacko candidates go on and on about God's gifts to mankind and how we are all the recipients of divine bounty ad nauseum, yet they shit all over the biggest gift of all: Earth. They refuse to own up to their responsibility as leaders (and I use the term loosely) to speak up on behalf of the planet. Every single one of these assholes is letting greed and profiteering overtake protection of our world. 

If the collapse of the Western Antarctic ice sheet is a warning shot, there are things that can and should be done now to impede further collapse. We can begin by insisting our elected representatives have at least a working knowledge of global warming. Have differing theories, sure, but come to a unified decision that this is real science, not some kind of commie plot. 

Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING was prescient when it was published in 1962, and her understanding of the impact of our existence in this world is as true now as it was then. 

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.” 

Our roads are diverging not at that yellow wood, but at a white sheet glacier. Where we go from here will be our decision and a big part of that decision will happen in the voting booth. 

It's not just about Obamacare, folks. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

It's time for the GOP to consider changing their mascot to an ostrich. 

So-Far-Right-It's-Wrong Kinda Thinking

A couple of really scary things happened this week. They’re not Freddie Krueger scary, more like Michele Bachmann scary in the worst sense of her Tea Party mentality. It’s the kind of scary that results in people talking about slippery slopes and other metaphors for the undermining of the Constitution.

Justice Moore and his monument

Let begin with Judge Roy Moore, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, of the big, giant Ten Commandments fame. Now, here’s a guy who is supposed to be sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States while meting out fair and impartial justice to those who would approach the bench.  One might think a guy like that would be temperate in his official views and cautious about what he says and does in public. But you would be wrong.

Back in January, Judge Moore, speaking at a luncheon sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, was videotaped saying:

“Everybody, to include the U.S. Supreme Court, has been deceived as to one little word in the First Amendment called ‘religion.' They can't define it They can't define it the way Mason, Madison and even the United State Supreme Court defined it, 'the duties we owe to the creator and the manner of discharging it.' They don’t want to do that, because that acknowledges a creator god. Buddha didn't create us. Mohammed didn't create us. It's the god of the Holy Scriptures...They didn't bring a Koran over on the pilgrim ship, Mayflower. Let's get real. Let's go back and learn our history."

If one were of a mind to diagram that quote for elements of stupidity, one would be at it for quite a while.  The man is a bigot, to say the least, and no better than the Taliban or al-Qaeda . His lack of knowledge about other religions screams volumes and makes one wonder how anyone with so little fundamental knowledge made it to being Chief Justice. If it wasn't so chilling a remark it would be comic. But it was and it is. 

This might be a tempest in a teapot were it not for good ol’ SCOTUS.  The Supremes, by a 5-to-4 majority, struck down a lower court’s ruling about prayers being offered at a town council meeting. Now, despite what Faux News and other mentally masturbatory news organs say, the suit was NOT about removing prayer completely, but about just how religious a public prayer can be. Now that we have that clear…

On PBS NewsHour, Marcia Colye explained it well:

…these two residents claimed that the prayers were almost exclusively Christian in nature, and that violated the First Amendment’s prohibition on government establishing a religion.

The lower federal appellate court here agreed with them. They said the overwhelming Christian nature of the prayers for nearly a decade gave the appearance of government endorsing religion, which violates the First Amendment. So the town brought the appeal to the Supreme Court.

Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority said the court could not comment on the religiosity of the prayers, that to do so would be skirting religious censorship. It would put the courts in the position of having to analyze prayer and that was out of its scope. Of course, Justice Sotomayor sided with the three Jews, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. Justice Kagan, in writing for the minority, said that there was no apparent attempt to open the delivery of the convocation to other faiths or points of view, and this came close to presenting a clear bias in favor of Christianity. None of that is particularly scary.

Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber

Here comes the really scary part: it's what came out of Justices Scalia and his cohort in so-far-right-it’s-wrong thinking, Clownence Thomas. In their view, the Constitution is solely a Federal document. They take the  very first line literally:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The operative word in that sentence is CONGRESS, folks. Both of these fine fellas are of the opinion that the Constitution prohibits CONGRESS from establishing a preferred religion on the federal level, but it does NOT prevent the states themselves from doing it.

Ms. Coyle, in reporting the story, added….and this is the real important part:

PBS's Marcia Coyle

Justice Thomas, first of all, repeated a longstanding belief of his that the First Amendment’s establishment clause doesn’t apply to the states, to states or local government, because the prohibition, he says, in the First Amendment’s text is on Congress. Congress shall make no law establishing or regarding the establishment of religion.

And he said that probably prevents Congress from establishing a national [religion] … But the text suggests that Congress cannot interfere with state establishments of religion. 

Probably was the word he used. Probably prevent.....Really? 

Michele B. and her little rightwing nut friends are gonna run with that one. What if states like Texas or Alabama or Mississippi suddenly found themselves with the ability to establish a state sponsored religion?

If one can conclude that SCOTUS has been bought and paid for by PACs and other deep pocketed groups, can one not, by extension see where the Roberts Court might stand aside in the establishment of state sponsored religion because they have deemed it a states’ rights issue? This is possibly the most slippery slope one can imagine. If you strip away the separation between church and state, and leave it up to the states to determine local religion, where does it stop? If your state is Lutheran, can Jewish kids stay home from school on the High Holy Days, or is that now prohibited? Can Catholic kids come to school with ashes on the foreheads on Ash Wednesday….or is that verboten, too?

Can you say Shi’ite and Sunni, boys and girls?

The Wifely Person's Tip of the Week

Next Sunday is Mother's Day. If you have a mother, call her. 

If you no longer have a mother to call, tell someone about her, 

and for those few minutes, it will be like she's still alive.