First the United Nations voted to remove Russia from its Human Rights Council. Then, as soon as that happened, Russia quit the United Nations Human Rights Council.
“You can’t fire us. We quit!”
Somebody is showing difficulties maintaining his grip on reality. It’s not surprising that Donald Trump admired that somebody so much.
Trump gets more unhinged by the day. He now says he wishes he had joined the march to the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. He says his Secret Service detail wouldn’t let him join the march. But I’m sure they could have taken him in the bulletproof POTUS mobile, like when he was sick with COVID-19 at Walter Reed Medical Center. Well, now he’s sorry he didn’t figure out how to do what he said he’d do, but he’s not blaming himself for it. He’s blaming everything that went wrong that day on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. She was in charge.
That’s right. Now he says the marchers should have been stopped, and he wants to know why Pelosi didn’t stop them. He was the president, sitting in the White House watching the insurrection on TV — which he is now saying was wrong — and wondering the whole time why “the people in charge” weren’t putting a stop to it. Allegedly.
As always, the cognitive dissonance is strong with this one. If only his followers could hear all the contradictions that he puts out. Maybe by the midterms.
By then, Ketanji Brown Jackson will be seated on the Supreme Court, so things are already looking up for the fall.
One Republican talking point about KBJ’s nomination was that it amounted to a packing of the court. I’m having trouble figuring out how that works. She won’t be seated on the court until Stephen Breyer leaves, so there won’t ever be more than nine justices during the transition. Do they really believe people will buy the idea that her nomination means the Supreme Court now has 10 sitting justices?
In local news, Sound Transit is ticked off that riders are not paying fares like they did pre-pandemic. They especially don’t like that people pay major bucks to go to games but won’t send some of that money their way. All you have to do is tap your ORCA card to get to the game and tap it once again when you get there. They know you have the money; they know what your game tickets cost you. So share some of it, they reason.
A big part of the problem is that it’s mostly light rail we’re talking about, and Sound Transit has never been able to clearly explain why light rail passengers have to do the “tap on, tap off” ritual.
Given the amount of money they claim to be losing in unpaid fares, I think it would be worth it for the light rail fares to be set at one low amount for the whole line and skip the tap off routine. Overnight, fare enforcement would start to look sane. As it is, you have to tap off before you can tap on again, and people just don’t get it.
“But officer, I tapped on just before boarding.”
“No you didn’t. When you thought you were tapping on, you were tapping off.”
At which point don’t try to say, “But wait, you just admitted you know I intended that to be a tap on. So why are you telling me I didn’t pay the fare?”
The officer will never care what you intended to do. Nothing will make sense to riders until the tap off is made unnecessary by setting fares the same for all distances ridden.
I’m sure my suggested improvement won’t be accepted. Nobody ever adopts my suggestions. I told people not to build the viaduct replacement tunnel. Just pave Elliott Bay over instead, I said. No one even acknowledged that suggestion. Instead of eliminating the downtown ride free area, Metro should expand it to all of King County, I counseled. Nobody even said no. They all just ignored me.
Some people get more respect. The folks in West Seattle asking for a sky gondola service from there to SODO as an alternative to an added light rail line were heard by Sound Transit and were told no. Not feasible. Technical limitations. Lack of scalability. Lack of funding.
No one has ever said any of that about my ideas. Why couldn’t someone in charge of building the tunnel just say paving Elliott Bay had technical limitations?
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the Apr. 13-19, 2022 issue.