My Letter to Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ)

When the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America became reality with the Interior Department making Trump's whim official, I'd had it.

Even though I no longer have a country, I still have a state - New Jersey, which I wish would secede form the Union.  But since I am a New Jersey resident and so have representation in the United States Senate, I decided to take advantage of that and write a letter to Senator Cory Booker regarding the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.  

That letter is below.  This isn't an open letter to the senator.  This is an actual letter I sent - both postally and online to Senator Booker's office!

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Dear Senator Booker:

noted with interest Donald Trump's desire to annex Canada and to purchase Greenland. I am writing to express my eager support for Mr. Trump's initiatives. I believe that acquiring all of North America north of the border and east of Alaska would strengthen our economy and expand our gross domestic product. Also, I am pleased that the Gulf of Mexico has now been officially renamed the Gulf of America. Having elected a president named "Claudia," Mexico deserves no respect. Also, I am greatly in favor of the efforts of Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA) to help Mr. Trump acquire Greenland and to rename it.

However, I believe more renaming of American geographical points is in order, along with renaming some of the newly acquired Canadian lands. Contrary to popular wisdom, Canada would not become the fifty-first state if we were to annex it; it would actually give us thirteen new states, the ten provinces and the three Arctic territories. One of them is called the Northwest Territories. Not only is it a singular territory, we can't have a state with the word "territories" in it.

Therefore, I propose we rename it "Fred." It's an easy name to remember.

Also, I disagree with Representative Carter's effort to rename Greenland "Red White and Blue Land" once we make the world's largest island the 64th state. I prefer that we rename it "Alan." Why? It's an easy name to remember.

Also, we have to anglicize place names in the United States to unite the country, which means no more Spanish place names and no more French ones, either - especially in Quebec. San Francisco would become St. Francis, Amarillo would become Yellowtown, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin would become Dogland, Des Moines would become "City of the Friars," Terre Haute, Indiana would become High Ground - you get the idea. Since Detroit's name means "strait," we should rename that North Windsor, after Windsor, Ontario across the Windsor River. Windsor is a beautiful English name.

In New Jersey, Montclair should be renamed "Clear Mountain," and Belleville should not be renamed "beautiful village." Not because it's not beautiful; it's because it's not a village. South Orange is a village. Rename Belleville "Jim." It's an easy name to remember.

Also, we have to rename Colorado. It's a Spanish name and it's a word meaning "colored," and that's a pejorative. I propose that we rename it "Bob." It's an easy name to remember. Also, now that we've named the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, we should rename New Mexico "South Bob."

Then there's Los Angeles. Its official name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Dama, La Reina de los Angeles." The name means "The Town of Our Lady, The Queen of the Angels." We should change that name - not because it's in Spanish, but because it clearly violates the separation of church and state. I remember that Pat Buchanan once rhetorically asked why we were more concerned about unrest in Lithuania than unrest in Burundi. Because, he said, Lithuanians "are white people. That's who we are. That's where America comes from." Now, I always thought America came from British settlements, but since we actually evolved from Lithuania, we should honor our real mother country by renaming Los Angeles "New Vilnius." Hopefully we can get that done before the 2028 Olympics. In the meantime, we should definitely abolish the Department of Education, as it has allowed too many Americans to graduate from school thinking we won our independence from Britain when in fact, as Pat Buchanan pointed out, it was Lithuania.

Thank you for your time. -- Sincerely, Steven Maginnis

P.S. There are two more pieces of legislation I'd like to propose. One is that the official language of the United States should be Lithuanian. The other is that everyone under sixteen years old is now . . . sixteen years old.

P.P.S. You realize this letter is sarcasm, right? Now that you have had a taste of my humor, let me be serious now. Please do what you can to stop Donald Trump. He is insane and does not belong in the White House.

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I'm hoping to write Senator Andy Kim on another issue.

Hurricane Season

The 2022 Atlantic Hurricane season begins today, and I'm happy to report that we did not get a storm forming in the Atlantic before today.  So for once, at least, the season beginning when it's supposed to.

Alas, it could be off to a quick start.  Hurricane Agatha from the Pacific is now a tropical depression drifting across Mexico that could very well re-form as a tropical storm over the Gulf of Mexico - in which case it would be an entirely new storm, called Alex. If it does form, as is likely, it would then make landfall over Florida before going out over the Atlantic Ocean itself.

What's more, we can expect numerous storms in the Atlantic basin thanks to a La Niña pattern that helps tropical systems form easily and flat-out refuses to dissipate after dominating the Atlantic Ocean for nearly three years. In short, 2022 is going to be as busy as 2020 and 2021 were, meaning that even if the American Northeast doesn't get a direct hit, it could still get a storm's remnants, which, as the "remnants" of Ida proved this past September, can be as bad as the full storm. 😢

Cleaning Up Some Messes

BP announced that the well in the Gulf of Mexico is killed. I'm very pleased to hear this, but you think maybe they could have killed he well before they killed the Gulf?

Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who oversaw the government's efforts to contain the oil leak, was on the PBS NewsHour tonight, and he admitted that the Coast Guard and BP still have to continue working on cleaning the oil as much as possible. I only hope they keep up the not-so-good work. Many livelihoods have been lost already.

(Correction: Last night I wrote that Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell said she "dabbled in witchcraft" on Bill Maher's show in 1997. The clip is from 1999. October 29, 1999, in fact, two days before Halloween. Maybe that explains her admission. Well, if the [evil] spirit moves you. . . .)

Deepwater Horizon Mark Two?

Not quite, but it was a close call, at least as far as safety is concerned.

A fire on a shallow-water production (not a drill) platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana caused the workers on board to make an emergency evacuation. All thirteen workers were rescued.

There have been unconfirmed reports about an oil sheen emanating from the Mariner Energy-owned platform. There have also been unconfirmed reports about no oil sheen emanating from the platform. If there is any environmental damage, I hope it's nothing serious.

Well, maybe just a little bit serious - some trifle that, I don't know, will cause David Vitter's poll ratings to drop twenty points!

Oil Pan

I tuned in to President Obama's speech about the Gulf of Mexico last night expecting a major address that would join John F. Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis speech of 1962 and Ronald Reagan's Challenger speech of 1986 among the memorable Oval Office addresses in the history of American television. What I got was something that kind of reminded me of that 1989 address by George Bush when he held up a bag of crack to underscore the seriousness of illegal drugs and didn't say much.

President Obama made a strong case for going against BP in getting them to clean up and pay for their oil leak, but when it came to explaining how we as a nation would get through this mess and how we would chart a new course in terms of an energy policy, Obama offered new specifics and plenty of vagaries, re-iterating his commitment to a green economy and evading the question of whether or not he would support carbon taxes and "cap and trade" gas emission regulation in an energy bill that has stalled in the Senate over these two issues.

In short, anyone expecting a bold new energy policy initiative that would take a lot of political will to put across was bitterly disappointed. I was. So were a lot of people; the Republicans accused Obama of platitudinous posturing, and progressives bemoaned the lack of specifics in the speech about how we were going to make the transition to clean energy. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) even expressed disappointment in Obama's failure to mention proposals Republicans can get behind, such as nuclear energy and electric cars.

Pundits and politicians panned this speech as unanimously as popular music critics would pan a Michael Bolton album. The White House said this speech wasn't intended for pundits and politicians, but I can only wonder who was meant for. It was probably meant for religious fishermen, if Obama's reference to the annual blessings of fishing fleets in Louisiana were any indication, and he even invoked God in the hope that we could set things right.

With President Norman Vincent Obama having spoken, it seems our only hope of getting any energy legislation passed this year or any year is letting Congress pass a bill so weak, it will do for energy policy what the health care reform law did for that issue. That is, not much.

And the green economy? We have one already. But it's cold cash, not photosynthesis, that makes our economy green.

Dumb, Baby, Dumb

First of all, let me make a correction regarding a statement I made earlier about the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. I stated that eighteen workers were killed in the blast. The actual number was eleven.

Anyway, it appears that the oil slick is likely to have an impact on more than just the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines, or even the Florida Panhandle. The Gulf Stream, the warm oceanic current that runs up the Atlantic Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico, could carry the oil slick - which is growing exponentially due to the ongoing well leak - to the Atlantic and possibly deposit all that oil on Florida's eastern coast. This oil spill is not a disaster anymore; it's an apocalypse.

I earlier lampooned Sarah Palin for having supported oil drilling in the past. Apparently, she still does. Not even an oil slick the size of Maryland that could destroy ecologically sensitive shorelines and fisheries have moved her from her position. This is what the former governor of Alaska - a state that had its own oil spill in Prince William Sound twenty years and change ago - had to say about the Gulf disaster on her Facebook page:

"No human endeavor is ever without risk – whether it’s sending a man to the moon or extracting the necessary resources to fuel our civilization. I repeat the slogan 'drill here, drill now' not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills – my family and my state and I know firsthand those consequences. How could I still believe in drilling America’s domestic supply of energy after having seen the devastation of the Exxon-Valdez spill? I continue to believe in it because increased domestic oil production will make us a more secure, prosperous, and peaceful nation."

So far, increased domestic oil production has made us more volatile to international petroleum price swings, diverted badly needed investment in alternative energy sources, and has caused unrest among people affected by such disasters.

Oh yeah, and that's not the only idiotic statement made about the BP disaster. Rush Limbaugh has actually opined that the initial explosion may have been caused on purpose by environmentalists to make offshore drilling look bad.

Sarah Palin continues to believe in offshore drilling - and she's not repeating the slogan "drill here, drill now," the original slogan was "drill, baby, drill" - in spite of the Exxon Valdez spill that affected Alaska because she either doesn't care or doesn't want to admit she's wrong. But mostly because she doesn't care, despite her (or her ghostwriter's) protests to the contrary. What's it to her if all of those poor birds end up getting saturated in oil? How would Sarah Palin like being covered in oil?

Hmm, I think I just offered a scenario some tea partiers fantasize about on a regular basis. :-O