Views from Crestmont Drive

• Items about newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson from the NYT editorial board, Paul Krugman, and the LAT editorial board;
• Specific items about Johnson’s claims that fossil fuels don’t cause climate change, that the US is not a democracy but a “Biblical” republic, and how mass shootings are due to teaching evolution;
• And Johnson’s sympathy with discredited Christian historian David Barton.
• And Philip Glass’s score to Martin Scorsese’s 1997 film Kundun.

Well I can’t let this current event pass without noting the further evidence that Republican party is becoming more and more extreme. And delusional. Really, like so much on my blog, this is all about epistemology. How do these people think they know what they know? Things that the reality-based community dismisses as false?

NY Times, Editorial Board, 26 Oct 2023: Trumpism Is Running the House

The Republicans in the House unanimously voted for a man who made it his mission to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who put the political whims and needs of former President Donald Trump ahead of the interests and will of the American people. A party that once cared deeply about America as the leader of the free world, and believed in the strength, dependability and bipartisan consensus that such a role required, has largely given way to a party now devoted to an extremism that is an active threat to liberal values and American stability.

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