August 2018

 
The report by the independent auditors was requested in January by the senior Democrats on the Senate and House tax-writing committees, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts. They asked the GAO to analyze the withholding tables under the new Republican tax law to make sure workers' paychecks weren't being widely under-withheld.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, speaking at a White House press briefing early this year, dismissed that notion as "ridiculous." -- Gordon, AP/US News, July 31, 2018
 
 
 

The Trump administration and every official from the White House down to the US-Mexican border have behaved shamelessly. They have been mean enough to impose the policy of separating parents and children of illegals and now, they are fatuuous and morally dead enough to create an act of brutal and sick perversion of law. And then the Kleptocrat waddles off to one of his own golf clubs and charges the public another several million to stay there a week, redefining the meaning of "working vacation."   -- wmh
 
8-3-18
Washington Post

8-6-18
Los Angeles Times
Mendocino Complex fire now largest in California history, capping destructive year
Joseph Serna , James Queally  And Alene Tchekmedyian

The great Dutch writer and historian Geert Mak once told me that in 1933 the Dutch newspapers were full of stories of the threat of Nazism, yet by 1938 those same papers were all but silent on the subject. Sometimes, it seems, threats to our future become so great that we opt to ignore them. Yet if we fail to act with the utmost urgency to slow climate change, we will invite catastrophe on all humanity. -- Flannery, New York Review of Books, Aug. 16, 2018

 
The fires now touch too many of us to be ignored. People who live in the hills are nervous, while suburbs are devastated by fires unimaginable, therefore not prepared for. Country people are thinking about how to protect their lives and the lives of their neighbors.
And then, as discussed in the articles below, is the question: who should pay for the fires.

Felix Smith, retired US Fish & Wildlife biologist who was one of the original whistleblowers on the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge selenium catastrophe for migrating birds in Merced County,¹ may fail to educate the Trumpologues who run the Department of the Interior, but we learned much from this letter. -- blj
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 Felix E. Smith
 
August 23 , 2018  

Mr. Ryan Zinke - Secretary

Department of the Interior