Too Fuckin' Typical

Republicans have finally gotten it through their thick skulls that the "entitlements" are sacred to us old folks - we turn out and stomp the fuck outa candidates who threaten our Social Security and Medicare.

But they're still hellbent on fucking us out of it. So don't fall for any of the spin words they're always floating.

• "Revamping"
• "Revisiting"
• "Ensuring The Solvency"
• blah blah blah.

That's all just the basic Frank Luntz focus group bullshit buzzword factory hard at work.

Privatization is the goal - because it's always the goal. They'll tear down our institutions, point innocently at the wreckage, and then puff out their chests like they're going to ride in and save us all from our foolishness, when the foolishness we should be concerned about is our gullibility - our willingness to go on swallowing all the shit they float down to us.

But before we let ourselves think maybe they've changed, and that they intend to back off their fuckery, here they come again. Only this time, they're trying to bribe Seniors into a false sense of security, &/or by playing on the hard-heartedness they've been cultivating in people for decades (I've got mine - it's all good - everybody else should work for theirs or just fuck off and die).

At the same time, it would seem they're counting on the apathy of younger voters who don't see themselves very clearly in the future (so they don't think much about that at all), and who may well believe pretty strongly that nothing good's going to happen anyway, so why bother?

Republicans may be be laboring under a pretty gross misperception though. People who'll be eligible to vote in November 2024, have been going to school with - and making friends with, and getting close with - lots of the people currently being abused, and 'othered', and straight-up shat-upon and bullied by a GOP that can't bring itself to be anything but a collection of rubes, meatheads, and misanthropes.

First, maybe this is finally the election cycle that youngsters get the message, get up off their asses, and go vote.

Second, probably more than half of those new(ish) voters are women, and something like 65% of those are still hoppin' mad about losing on Roe v Wade, which feeds a further outrage at the prospect of being forced backwards into a culture that assumes them to be subjects instead of citizens. 

So anyway...

Trump’s GOP rivals open door to cutting Social Security for younger people

Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley propose curbing spending on the program without affecting seniors

Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program.

In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement.

Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program.

“When people say that we’re gonna somehow cut seniors, that is totally not true,” DeSantis said on Fox News. “Talking about making changes for people in their thirties and their forties so the program’s viable — that’s a much different thing, and something I think there’s going to need to be discussion on.”

On Monday, Pence told Fox Business: “I’m glad to see another candidate in this primary has been willing to step up and talk about that.”

The positions the three Trump rivals are taking suggest that even the fiscally conservative candidates in the GOP presidential primary are reluctant to endorse cutting Social Security for seniors, highlighting just how much the party has shifted on the issue. Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the party’s 2012 vice-presidential candidate, had led the party in championing budget blueprints that would have entailed significant cuts to both Social Security and Medicare.

As the Republican Party becomes increasingly reliant on older voters for support and as Trump continues to exert heavy influence over the party’s beliefs, GOP policymakers have followed the former president’s lead in steering clear of proposals to cut the program, with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ruling that out in debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year with the White House.

But concentrating potential cuts on the young, as the Trump challengers have proposed, has its downsides as well. The candidates’ posture risks alienating young voters that have already become increasingly alienated from the Republican Party. And cutting benefits for younger people leaves the bulk of the problem unresolved, experts say, given that the Social Security funding crisis is projected to arrive decades before millennials receive their first checks.

“It clearly would not address the shortfall, or the short- to medium-term problem we’re going to have in 10 years or less,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Economists of both parties agree that Social Security and Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly, face funding crises if Congress does not act to shore up their finances somehow, either by reducing benefits or raising taxes. If no reforms are enacted, Social Security benefits for an estimated 60 million people will be cut by 20 percent starting in 2033, according to according to the most recent report of the Boards of Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Medicare also faces an automatic benefit cuts as soon as 2031, the report says.

President Biden has proposed increasing taxes on the rich and businesses to prevent Medicare from running out of funds. But the latest White House budget does not propose a solution for extending Social Security. Numerous congressional Democrats have called for trillions in new taxes to avoid the Social Security shortfall, as well.

Policy experts have long said it will likely take a mixture of reduced spending and higher taxes to address the looming funding shortage facing Social Security and Medicare. Social Security’s old age and survivors insurance trust fund is expected to only be able to pay 77 percent of benefits in 2033, which would likely lead to automatic reductions in payments. People in their forties are still more than two decades away from receiving Social Security benefits.

The comments from DeSantis and Pence suggest that some Republicans have “not updated their talking points from the 1990s,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. Thirty years ago, Riedl said, it would have been possible to argue for resolving the funding shortfall only by limiting benefits for future recipients. But given that the enormous baby boomer generation is now at retirement age, exempting them from cuts would still leave the program in crisis.

“I get the politics of not wanting to lead with, ‘We will cut seniors,’” Riedl said. “But it might be better to say nothing than to offer an unpopular approach that doesn’t even avoid a debt crisis because it would be implemented far too late.”

DeSantis’s message will likely soon be tested. Trump has released video messages tying DeSantis to House Republicans who wanted to cut Social Security and for pushing to raise the retirement age when the Florida governor served in Congress, although Trump has also expressed support in the past for raising the retirement age.

“Donald Trump ruled Social Security and other benefits out of bounds politically” for Republican politicians, said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. “But there are still Republicans, including some leading Republicans, who understand we wont make serious progress on our fiscal problems until everything’s on the table. They’re trying to open that discussion, without it immediately being shut down.”

The Planet

A coupla degrees warmer than 'normal' during the winter, and more pine beetles survive, which means more trees are killed by the beetles, which means a greater negative impact on businesses that depend on the health of the land - which, BTW, includes every fucking business you care to mention.

• Timber
• Tourism
• Shipping
• Real Estate
• Manufacturing
• Consumer Goods
• and and and - everything

If you're not concerned about environmental issues, then you're a shitty businessman.

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A post shared by The Colorado Sun (@thecoloradosun)

From two years ago

Monarch Pass could serve as a new model for wildfire mitigation in treacherous areas

About 90% of the tall spruce on Monarch Pass have been killed by beetles. If a fire were to spark there, the repercussions would be devastating.

MONARCH PASS — Sergio Bernal casually flicks his wrist and the towering spruce falls. The Oregon forester presses a button and buzzing saws de-limb the beetle-killed tree and slice it into 33-foot logs. A giant claw swings the tree to the side and the slash falls to the forest floor. The eight-wheeled Finnish machine — called a harvester — captained by Bernal crawls down the leafy slope and grabs another tree.

In a matter of minutes, Bernal has stacked hundreds of dead spruce trees on the steep slope. Behind him, another forester in yet another massive machine called a forwarder gathers the freshly felled trees for transport to nearby lumber mills or local firewood sellers.

“These machines, this approach, opens up a lot of opportunity for us to get into areas where we haven’t been able to get in and treat before,” says Andy Lerch, shouting above the growling diesel engine and churning saw.

In it, he covers the industry from the inside out, plus the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Lerch is the lead forester for the Arkansas River Watershed Collaborative, a unique coalition of communities, water managers and agencies stretching from Leadville to Kansas that has partnered with the Forest Service in a first-of-its-kind project on the steep slopes flanking Monarch Pass.

About 90% of the tall spruce on Monarch Pass have been killed by beetles. If a fire were to spark there, the repercussions would be devastating. Power lines would fall. The Monarch ski area would be threatened. U.S. 50 would close. Recreation would slow and downstream economies would falter. And, perhaps most importantly, thousands of residents in the 23,000-square-mile Arkansas River Basin would for years see their watershed churning with sediment flowing from the burn scar.

The threat of a devastating wildfire and post-fire impacts — evidenced this summer by rockfall and mudslides from burn scars impacting communities like Glenwood Springs — led a wide collaboration of municipalities, water-guardians and land managers in the Upper Arkansas River Basin to fund the pilot logging project on Monarch Pass that will likely become a model for communities across the West. As the budget-strapped U.S. Forest Service grapples with increasingly large and destructive wildfires, local communities are acknowledging the need to support forest management projects themselves.

And those projects need to be economically viable.

Oregon-based Miller Timber Services, which contracted with the Forest Service to harvest dead spruce on Monarch Pass, is able to sell timber to lumber mills in Montrose and the San Luis Valley. Smaller trees are sold for local firewood. And Monarch ski area hired the company to remove dead trees this summer.

“If we didn’t have that forest industry and those mills to be able to send this stuff, it would be impossible to do this kind of work,” Lerch said, repeating a mantra among foresters that nearby timber mills are essential for most logging and wildfire mitigation projects.

It’s taken two summers to thin about 466 acres of forest on Monarch Pass. The Miller Timber loggers left last week. Lerch is still tallying final numbers but he estimated his crews have pulled 9,000 tons of timber, or 2.3 million board feet of beetle-killed spruce, off the pass in the past two years. That’s about 53,500 trees.

A Ponsse Bear 8-wheeler cut-to-length harvester machine navigates through the freshly cut forest on Sept. 24, 2021, at Monarch Pass near Poncha Springs. The harvester head is equipped with saws and measuring tools to cut trees one at a time before leaving them on a mat of slash piles as it clears the beetle-kill forest. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

The new technology — computerized cut-to-length logging machines that are prevalent everywhere but the U.S. — allows foresters to reach dead timber on steep slopes while protecting the ground to prevent erosion. Each of the eight massive tires on the articulating Ponsse harvester and forwarder machines has a pounds-per-square-inch impact on the ground that is less than that of a mountain bike tire, Lerch said. A winch on the back of the machine keeps them tethered to ridgelines, allowing them to access slopes as steep as 35 degrees.

The light touch of the machines, with slash piled on the forest floor, has limited the amount of debris that flows down the slopes during rain storms and spring runoff. Typical logging operations leave scars that can become rivers of sediment when soaked. That’s not happening on Monarch Pass.

Chuck Rhoades, a research scientist with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, has been studying erosion below the logging operation on Monarch Pass. So far, he said, “we’ve not seen anything widespread or alarming.”

Hydrologists and soil scientists in the U.S. do not have a lot of experience with these mechanized, Nordic logging machines, so the results of Rhoades’ erosion studies, as well as how the logging might reduce the impacts of catastrophic wildfire, could enable more future mitigation in steep terrain, he said.

“If we only treat fuels on flat ground, we are not going to be able to treat many spaces, especially in Colorado,” Rhoades said. “This could allow the Forest Service to think about how this new tool can help the agency be more flexible when it comes to working with steep terrain.”

But the technology and on-the-ground impacts of the logging on Monarch Pass — pioneered in the U.S. by Miller Timber Services — are just one way that the project is a model for future forestry management in Colorado’s drought-and-beetle-impacted high country. The community support for the project also is a first.

“It’s a convergence of values,” Lerch said. “We are seeing that investment from so many different groups and communities, because it does affect so many people.”

The Monarch Pass project is actually a tiny step in a much larger plan to reduce wildfire risk on more than 20,000 public acres and 10,000 private acres in the Upper Arkansas River watershed. The Chaffee County Community Wildfire Protection Plan traces back to a valley-wide planning effort called Envision Chaffee County and a voter-approved sales tax in 2018. That tax revenue fills three buckets for investment in forest health and wildfire mitigation, preserving agricultural land and mitigating the impacts of outdoor recreation.

The forest health funding is helping Chaffee County attract a flood of federal money. There’s an alphabet soup of acronyms involved in the now 4-year-old wildfire mitigation effort, which blends local, regional, state and federal agencies, utilities, communities and advocacy groups. The watershed-wide effort to reduce fire risk worked with Colorado State University’s Colorado Forest Restoration Institute to create a map of where mitigation work should focus.

Chaffee County Commissioner Greg Felt called it “our bang-for-your-buck map.”

“If you treat the right 5% of your acreage, we can reduce our risk of catastrophic wildfire by 50%,” he said. “That was a huge realization and really validated by the science.”

Forest stripped of beetle-kill spruce trees with younger trees remaining seen on September 24, 2021 near Monarch Pass. In effort to reduce wildfire fuels, the Arkansas River Watershed Collaborative worked with Miller Timber Services to remove the dead trees using the CTL logging equipment. Early studies show the light-touch logging machines are not creating significant erosion in the headwaters of the Arkansas River. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

The community wildfire protection plan, which by 2030 could see $40 million spent to treat more than 30,000 acres, last year started chipping slash that homeowners piled at the end of their driveways. That program was called Chaffee Chips. The county also started carving fire breaks between forested public lands and neighborhoods, part of the Chaffee Treats program.

Then the National Forest Foundation created the Upper Arkansas Forest Fund to serve as a clearing house of grants and federal dollars for wildfire mitigation work. That fund, directed in part by the county’s 35-partner Envision Forest Health Council, has already built fire breaks on Methodist Mountain above Salida, and above the Arkansas River above and below Browns Canyon National Monument.

Last week the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program announced it was investing $5.7 million in the Chaffee County Community Wildfire Protection Plan, using the Upper Arkansas Forest Fund created by the National Forest Foundation.

And don’t forget to add the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to the mix, as federal land managers overseeing all forestry work on federal land. There’s also umbrella groups, like the Rocky Mountain Restoration Initiative and the Arkansas River Watershed Collaborative adding their letters to the acronym stew as they gather partners to protect water and forests and work beyond all kinds of local and regional boundaries in the headwaters of the Arkansas River

For fans of acronyms and math problems, that recent grant looks like this: USDA + USFS + BLM+ NRCS + RCPP = $5.7 million for CWPP + ARWC + RMRI + NFF + UAFF.

This summer Felt flew out to Washington, D.C., to share the border-dissolving wildfire mitigation plan at the National Association of Counties’ annual meeting. He titled his talk “Building community through wildfire resilience.”

“In a time of, you know, really polarizing politics and difficulty in talking about almost anything without setting people off, when you find something that really resonates across all the partisanship and political lines and can just be viewed as a community challenge we all need to address, that’s the kind of success we need to have right now if we have any hope of returning to a more functional society,” Felt said. “Yeah it costs a lot of money, but it speaks to our role as stewards. We are surrounded by 80% public lands. That’s an incredible asset but also an incredible responsibility and we need to do our part.”

The effort through large groups like the Rocky Mountain Restoration Initiative is stirring more communities to look beyond borders for statewide solutions to forests withering with declining precipitation and spiking temperatures.

“Chaffee County is creating the model and a lot of other communities are looking at that,” said Marcus Selig, the vice president of field programs for the National Forest Foundation and a longtime Salida resident.

The $5.7 million grant will be matched one-to-one, so at least $11 million will be invested in wildfire mitigation on public and private land above the Arkansas River in the next several years, Selig noted.

“If we can’t make it work here in Chaffee County, with all these things lined up and all these partners at the table and the community support and the different funding sources and a fantastic execution plan,” he said, “we may not stand a chance.”

Today's Pix

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The Dirtiest Lakes

Today's Unfettered Free Market Paradise. Be business will regulate itself - the market will fix any problem that comes along because the owners always put the health of people and their living space first. Right?

Florida lakes are not clean - they're too polluted for swimming or healthy aquatic life. Because of course.

The study by the Environmental Integrity Project analyzed biennial pollution reports sent by states to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Florida has climbed to the top of another ignominious list, thanks to its hundreds of thousands of acres of dirty lakes.

The state's waters have long been fouled by dirty stormwater and algae blooms fed by fertilizer run off from farms. Now a new study examining water quality across the U.S. shows Florida ranking first for the highest total acres of lakes too polluted for swimming or healthy aquatic life. That means water can have high levels of fecal matter and other bacteria that can sicken people , or have low levels of oxygen or other pollution that can harm fish and other aquatic life. The state ranked second for polluted estuaries.

The Environmental Integrity Project launched the project to track the progress of the Clean Water Act as it nears its 50th anniversary.

“Fifty years ago, we had the imagination and political will to face big problems and try to do something about them,” said Eric Schaeffer, the project's executive director and former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulatory office . “We're hoping at this half-century mark that we can find the courage to recommit.”

The group based the findings on Florida’s 2020 water quality report filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The same reporting from other states was used to compile the rankings. Ohio and the Great Lakes were excluded because they compile data on lakes differently.

The 1972 law made it a federal crime to directly discharge pollution into waters, but remained vague about runoff that drains into waters. That’s created decades of problems for states like Florida, where farms and dense urban areas line waterways.

Across the U.S., it’s also allowed industrialized agricultural operations to largely bypass pollution limits, Schaeffer said.

“A failure to confront agriculture is probably the biggest program failure in the Clean Water Act,” said Schaeffer, who resigned from his EPA post in 2002 after criticizing the Bush administration for gutting the Clean Air Act. “We have to confront the fact that agricultural runoff is really the leading cause of water pollution in the U.S. today. I don't think that was true so much 50 years ago.”

In Florida, nearly 900,000 acres of lakes are classified as impaired for swimming or healthy aquatic life. About 2,500 acres of estuaries are polluted, accounting for 99% of the total assessed.

A big driver of that is Lake Okeechobee, which covers about 450,000 square acres and has been polluted by decades of agricultural and stormwater runoff. The $23 billion Everglades restoration plan is intended to undo much of the damage caused by polluted water flowing out of the lake. But Florida has not yet been able to slow the amount of phosphorus flowing into the lake, which can feed algae blooms.

The amount remains about three to five times higher than the 140 metric ton limit set by the state. And even more legacy phosphorus sits in about four inches of muck at the bottom of the lake.

The state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are now in the midst of revising restoration work planned for Lake Okeechobee . Plans originally included about 46,000 acres of storage but will now include about 50 deep aquifer storage and recovery wells at 10 locations around the lake.

The Clean Water Act was created in 1972 after decades of industrialization had left the nation’s waters a foul, stinky, poisonous mess. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River set the stage after routinely catching fire , finally drawing national attention and a renewed concern over polluted rivers across the U.S. The law set goals for reaching healthy targets for recreation and aquatic life by 1983 and stopping the discharge of pollution into navigable waters by 1985.

"Things have changed for the better since then, there's no doubt," Schaeffer said. "The Potomac River is now a major bass fishery. You can actually canoe down the Cuyahoga River. But we don't have the fishable, swimmable waters we were promised, and we have more work to do before we get them. "

The law made it a federal crime to discharge any pollution from “a pipe” or point source into waters and required states to regularly monitor water for impairments. That meant industrial facilities or sewer plants, like those in South Florida, could no longer dump waste directly into canals or the ocean. The EPA used the law to force Florida Power & Light to create cooling canals for Turkey Point rather than dump water used to cool the plant directly into Biscayne Bay.

But what it failed to address, the study notes, was the runoff that drains from cities and neighborhoods , and especially the tons of fertilizer used in agriculture that flow off of fields and in to water ways every year. While there are pollution limits , enforcing the limits is largely voluntary. Florida uses Best Management Practices, or BMPs, for its farms.

The Florida Department of Agriculture has been chronically understaffed and the Department of Environmental Protection has slashed its staff over the years.

A 2020 review of DEP enforcement by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility found that despite promises of reform, enforcement under Gov. Ron DeSantis continued to drop. While the number of inspections increased, finding more cases of noncompliance, the rate of enforcement fell.

DeSantis also formed a task force aimed at tackling the toxic algae increasingly spreading in state waters. But so far, state lawmakers have failed to adopt the task force's recommendations.

In order to achieve the goals set out in the Clean Water Act , the report recommends Congress:

• Require pollution standards be updated more frequently to keep pace with changing industry
• Close the loophole for urban and agricultural runoff
• End the patchwork of guidelines across states and set universal standards
• Make it easier to enforce clean-ups

Karma Takes A Hand

Or maybe it was just too damned hot - 'specially when you're kinda overdressed in jeans and boots and big hat on your small head, trying to stay cool under those lights, in a relatively confined space.

I hope he's OK. I'm not pulling for somebody to get sick or be hurt.

Do you suppose he's vaccinated?

What's Jason Aldean's position on Climate Change?

Today's Beau

Trump can rant and rave, and stomp and stumble around the jungle. And don't think some of those robotic meatbags won't come runnin' when he says go.

Fuck 'em. Let 'em bring it. There's more than enough honorable people here, waiting for the chance to kick his ass and his little minion gang's ass too.

Small Town

This is only about half-baked, so feel free to skip over the holes, or fill the holes with something that makes sense to you, or ignore it all, or whatever.

Yeehaw and away we go

The GOP has been flacking "small town values" forever. It used to be "traditional family values", and "Real Values Of Real America", and "the uncomplicated ways of the country folk".

But it needed to be "updated" - I guess.

One thing about that "small town" message is that it's code for "Don't let people gather in large groups - keep them separated into small groups so they don't get the chance to figure out how we're fucking them all with their pants on. We can't hold on to power if we can't hold sway over the rabble, and if the groups are small enough, we only need a few aggressively loud-mouthed jerks to keep everybody in line."

• Pol Pot emptied out the cities.
• Mao emptied out the cities.
• Kim Jong Un emptied out the cities.

When a guy like Trump gets up and yells Make America Great Again, he's invoking an image of a mostly agrarian economy (from a good hundred years ago), when the populous was just well-enough divided between rural and urban to keep fresh food in the markets, and to make sure the bankers and robber barons had ready supplies of mansions, private rail cars and liveried servants.

But most of all, it's a good way for middle class Boomer slobs to soothe their own egos, and to rationalize having a monumentally shitty attitude towards "others" who "don't want to work any more", while pretending they're living a kinder gentler lifestyle that they remember Grandma & Grandpa talking about.

In the standard narcissistic narrative, you can be the Hero or the Victim, but you're never the Culprit or the Accomplice.

So I got off on this little rant because of the Jason Aldean thing (Try That In A Small Town), but I won't put that piece of crap on here. I'm sure it'll be played at every redneck rally, and NASCAR event, and on 4th of July, and the company picnic, and and and. They're not going to miss you with it.

I'm looking forward to the time when even the rubes don't want to hear it anymore - like "Boot In Your Ass" and "Proud To Be An American".

Me, I prefer a song that gives us a truer look at those small town values.

Jeannie C Riley - Harper Valley PTA

Today's Today

With a special shout-out to Stanley Kubrick for making it all look so real.

Today's Tweet

Don't worry about forgetting what a total skank Marjorie Taylor Greene is - she'll remind you pretty much every day.

.@RepMTG has always been utterly disgusting. She groped a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump at a fundraising event, FFS. pic.twitter.com/9rVLUrcgqM

— Andrew Wortman 🟧 (@AmoneyResists) July 20, 2023

Today's Tweet

*slow blink* pic.twitter.com/wQXHvcDiFX

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) July 19, 2023