Does The GOP Stand For Anything?         #174

By Hank Silverberg 

If you listen at all to the rhetoric coming from Capitol Hill these days, you might be a bit confused. It seems that one of the political parties up there doesn't have any idea what they stand for. 

The Republicans seem to have only one mission: oppose anything, no matter what the Democrats or the President propose. 

With a few exceptions in the Senate, they talk and vote that way. 

To put this into perspective, let's go back to 1980, when Ronald Reagan, a Republican icon, held the White House.

Reagan would tell the country that Republicans stood for "limited government,"  "free enterprise" and "law and order."   

That same year, Democrats would say they  believed in "a government safety net," "equal rights and opportunity" and "social justice."

Today's Democrats would still list those three items as part of their political focus. But the Republicans no longer focus on Reagan's political mantra or Republican issues of the past.  

_______________________________________________________

(34th President) 

This was included in the Republican Party Platform when Dwight Eisenhower was running for re-election in 1956. It would be denounced by today's GOP.  

 The Eisenhower Administration will continue to fight for dynamic and progressive programs which, among other things, will: Stimulate improved job safety of our workers, through assistance to the States, employees and employers;

Continue and further perfect its programs of assistance to the millions of workers with special employment problems, such as older workers, handicapped workers, members of minority groups, and migratory workers;

Strengthen and improve the Federal-State Employment Service and improve the effectiveness of the unemployment insurance system;

Protect by law, the assets of employee welfare and benefit plans so that workers who are the beneficiaries can be assured of their rightful benefits;

Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of Sex;

_________________________________________________________________________________

For today's GOP,  "Limited government" became no government at all under Trump and his clan. For example: we learned  as the pandemic threatened us that Trump had eliminated some of the Obama Administration health plans including a special commission to deal with such a pandemic. Today's Republican party thinks free enterprise applies only for rich corporate donors rather than mom and pop businesses that Reagan often talked about. So that leaves "law and order."

The rhetoric and action on law and order was very overblown during the Black Lives Matter protests last year when some of them turned violent. (The overwhelming majority of the protests were peaceful.) 

But the "law and order" mantra disappeared completely after January 6th when Trump supporters and right-wing extremists stormed the Capitol. Hundreds of Republican lawmakers  and then Vice President Mike Pence's lives were  seriously threatened. But the GOP has been mostly silent about "law and order" since then. 

A Capitol Police officer died and many more officers were injured that day.  The Capitol building itself was vandalized. But the Republicans won't call it what it was--a riot at the least, and an insurrection at its worst. 

This past week those same Republicans defeated an effort to set up a commission to look into the causes and aftermath of January 6th. Their rationale? 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it "a purely political exercise," and called into question how much more the commission would be able to unearth.  

This is the same party that spent $7.8 million over two and a half years with a commission to  investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. That commission, among other things, forced 11 continuous hours of testimony from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she was preparing to run for President.  

 Jan. 6 Commission Fails In Senate Following GOP Opposition : NPR

Political parties do switch course from time to time. Some Republicans are quick to point out that it was southern Democrats who opposed some civil rights measures in the 1950's and early 1960's. That is true. But the Democrats switched course on civil rights during the Kennedy/Johnson era and have been pretty consistent in promoting equal rights and social justice ever since. 

So it is a very legitimate question to ask: now that the GOP has abandoned "Reaganism" and adopted "Trumpism," what does the Republican party really stand for? 

Snail Mail Is Going To Cost More:

Remember Postmaster General Louis Dejoy who put a new meaning to the term "snail mail" right around mail-in election ballot time? Now there's a new move from the Trump appointee that you may have missed while searching for a vaccination site and meeting up again with vaccinated friends. The cost of postage is going up. 

DeJoy's 10-year plan to overhaul the postal service's finances will include raising the cost of a first class stamp from 55 to 58 cents. The USPS says there's been a 47% drop in letters that used postage stamps in the past ten years. That has impacted the bottom line and they need more revenue. Other types of postage will be raised an average of 7%.

The price increase does not mean faster mail. On- time delivery rates have gotten worse in recent months. So far in 2021, one in five pieces of mail delivered in the United States arrived late because  of cutbacks at the post office. 

Part of the argument for raising the rates: the postal service says the U.S. still has "some of the lowest letter mail postage rates in the industrialized world." 

 USPS says stamp prices will rise this summer under DeJoy's 10-year overhaul plan - CBS News

So go ahead and stock up on "Forever" stamps. The price goes up August 29th. 

A sidebar here: why hasn't President Biden fired DeJoy, who got the job because he was a major donor to Trump's campaign?  Biden can't. Only the Postal Service Board of Governor's can do that, and that Board is now dominated by Trump appointees.  There are four Republicans, two Democrats and three vacancies.  Appointees must be approved by the Senate, and filling the empty seats involves time and lots of politics. It should also be noted that President Obama tried to fill all the vacancies during his second term, but his appointees were blocked by the U.S. Senate, which was then controlled by the GOP. It could take a few years to get rid of Dejoy, assuming the Democrats hold on to control of  the Senate in 2022. 

Fake Fish?

Sorry Charlie, but tuna is mislabeled 59% of the time. A study by the nonprofit group "Oceana" says snapper is mislabeled as much as 87%. This is a big issue for consumers, the seafood industry, and the environment. 

(Albacore Tuna, courtesy uscd.edu) 

But now there is a device that can make sure your expensive plate of wild-caught snapper isn't actually mercury-laden tilefish.  

A device called a MasSpec Pen, originally designed to detect cancer tumors in people, can now also detect fish species and where the fish came from. A graduate student named Abby Gatmaitan published her research on the use of this device in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.  

Fraudulent Fish Foiled by Cancer-Catching Pen - Scientific American

She says it only took about 15 seconds for the "pen" to detect the correct information on the type of fish and where it was caught. Apparently, government labs have expressed interest in using the device which Scientific American describes as "affordable." It is also faster than current methods of detecting fish type using DNA. 

This MasSpec Pen could be important in fish inspections to make sure you get what you pay for at the restaurant or the supermarket. It can also be helpful to make sure a particular part of the ocean is not overfished.  

And, here's the best part. It can do the same thing with meat as it does with fish. You can then quickly make sure your Angus beef comes from Texas and not Japan or Argentina, or that your ground beef is not mixed with something else--like that infamous pink slime.  

Cicada Taco Update:

Last week I wrote about a chef in Leesburg, Virginia who had come up with a recipe for Cicada Tacos with plenty of raw materials from Brood X. They were selling quickly until one customer, who apparently didn't like them, complained to the local health department, which then told Chef Tobias Padovano to stop serving them. The Loudoun Times-Mirror says the chef  was told he had to get

(Yummy)

an approved source, like an organic farm, to have them inspected and certified before he could sell them.                  

Cicada tacos crushed by health department — for now | Entertainment | loudountimes.com

Padovano has apparently found such a farm in West Virginia, and he's now waiting for official approval  to serve the Ciada Tacos again.

 

Dumbest Quote of the week:

The dumbest quote this week centers around this tweet from a hat store in Tennessee, which was promoting and selling yellow "Star of David" patches which included the words "Not Vaccinated" in the middle. It produced an immediate negative reaction, for obvious reasons. The woman in the picture, who was promoting her product and whose name I don't care to share, responded with the quote below.      

“People are so outraged by my post? But are you outraged with the tyranny the world is experiencing? If you don’t understand what is happening, that is on you not me. I pay much more respect to history by standing up with the fallen than offering silence and compliance.”

Sorry lady, you don't understand history and you have no clue on what is happening. As I wrote last week, comparing the need to get a vaccination to prevent a deadly disease to the mass murder of six million people shows a complete lack of understanding of the Holocaust and what it means. 

The store owner apologized later for her "insensitivity" after sharp negative reaction from some of her customers and a protest outside her Nashville store. The world-famous hat maker Stetson, was not satisfied with that though, and they shouldn't be. The iconic hat company has now severed its ties with HatWRKS.

Maybe the owner learned something, maybe not.  But with anti-Semitism rising significantly across America in the past two years and spiking dramatically after the latest flare-up in the Mid-East, we can't let this type of incident go without some sharp criticism and rebuke.  

(Your comments and suggestions are welcome) 

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