The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

For the Outrages, we need to be looking to the future and expecting that, as dangerous as a second term for Tweetie-pie would have been, he still has something around 10 weeks to do as much damage as he can.

And we should expect him to try to punish the nation - or at least the states that voted for Biden.

He said it himself. Writing at Raw Story, journalist David Cay Johnston notes that in Tweetie-pie's book Think Big he summed up his life philosophy in a single word: revenge.

"Then," quoting Johnston now, "he went on for 16 pages about how what gives him pleasure is ruining the lives of anyone who does not do as he asks. His long diatribe was intermingled with observations about his desires to do violence, especially against women."

In Tweetie-pie's own words, "If you don't get even you are just a schmuck!"

So for our Outrages we have four examples of Tweetie-pie trying to deny the truth that he is a thoroughgoing schmuck and a loser.

In chronological order:

On October 27, before the election but with the ultimate outcome clearly in sight, the EPA relinquished its oversight of a number of environmental issues across 38 federally recognized tribes’ lands in Oklahoma. Federal authorities mandated under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, among others, will now be overseen by the state of Oklahoma.

The move means that fossil fuel and agriculture corporations will no longer have to consult with tribal governments about environmental issues related to, among others, fracking, the dumping of hazardous waste, and factory farm pollution runoff.

Those living on tribal lands are now subject to the by no means tender mercies of the state government of Oklahoma, whose fawning over the dirty fuelers and polluters leaves little doubt about the effect on native communities, which will become dumping grounds for toxic waste and a long list of other poisons and pollutants.

Next, for nearly 20 years, the "roadless rule" has protected wilderness by prohibiting timber harvesting and road construction in designated areas.

On October 28, the Tweetie-pie gang announced an intention to strip the protection of the roadless rule from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

Tongass is our largest national forest, covering 26,000 square miles (68,000 square kilometers) of southeast Alaska, and is called the nation’s "crown jewel” by the US Forest Service. It is a pristine and rare temperate zone rainforest whose ecosystems provide critical habitat for grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles all five species of Pacific salmon, and numerous other species.

I picked one picture to show the Tongass, but one picture can't do it justice, not when its ecosystems include ice fields, glaciers, old-growth forests, and islands facing the Pacific Ocean.

As a result of that rule change - done in the face of the fact that 96% of public comment on the change was against it - more than half of the Tongass can be opened to logging and mineral exploration.

Getting in one more kick to the national groin before the election, on November 1, the beginning of the 2021 open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, the Whitest House announced a waiver for the state of Georgia, allowing it to avoid using Healthcare.gov website, the marketplace for plans under the ACA, in the state.

Over a dozen states have gotten such waivers because they had developed either their own state-based exchanges or some other mechanism that provides coverage at least equal to that mandated under the ACS. Georgia - which didn't expand Medicaid - doesn't have its own online marketplace or any similar mechanism, so for practical purposes no one in Georgia will be able to sign up for Obamacare. Instead, people will have to go through brokers or do their own research on private websites. In other words, any Georgian in need of health insurance has just been dumped into the individual market. And good luck to them.

But don't worry, according to Seema Verma, director of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, the waiver will "usher in a groundswell of healthcare innovation that will deliver lower costs, better care, and more choice to Georgians" - just like the individual market always did in the past.

That could have been a good for a Clown Award - but considering that it's estimated that tens of thousands of people in Georgia will lose coverage because of this and so it can be reasonably said that people will die as a result, it's too serious for that.

Finally, one from after the election. It came out on November 9 that Tweetie-pie has removed the director of the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s definitive report on climate change, which is updated every four years. The fifth one is due in 2022.

Michael Kuperberg, a climatologist who has held the post since 2015, was abruptly replaced by David Legates, who was first appointed by Tweetie-pie to a post as a deputy assistant secretary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and is - you won't be surprised - someone who has claimed, among other things, that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in fact are good for the planet and has dismissed his critics in the scientific community as “a bunch of thugs.”

Last month, it was reported that the Trump administration was delaying work on the Fifth National Climate Assessment. It looks now that delaying it has been upgraded to wrecking it.

Remember: Three of these examples are from before the election, when Tweetie-pie was only scared of losing. The tantrums he will throw now that he has lost - and make no mistake, he doesn't believe a word of the crap he's throwing around, he's just trying to avoid admitting that his presidency is as bankrupt as most of his businesses - can be expected to be much worse.

Revenge. It's what the next weeks will all be about. And that is an Outrage.