The Turtle Chronicles

I'm late to the party in posting this. Jon Stewart and the 9/11 responders emotional testimony before the House subcommittee . Stewart's epic takedown of Mitch McConnell following McConnell's appearance on Fox News belittling the cause. I support ArtAID and their support of 9/11 of responders.

I'm beginning to think of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as the true American villain of the early 21st century. NPR's Tom Driesbach details McConnell's support of the tobacco industry that goes way beyond his Kentucky farmers in Tobacco's Special Friend .

Interesting comments from Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and NPR's Tamara Keith on today's edition of Politics Monday on the PBS Newshour . Keith was reporting from The Villages, a retirement community near Orlando that is the fastest growing part of Florida. Some say it is the fastest growing community in the United States, however I think the Austin - San Antonio area would give it a run for its money. Many of those new residents are moving to Florida from places like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. While that bodes well for Trump's chances of winning Florida in 2020, there will be a corresponding weakening in those midwestern states. I have been wondering how many of the previous election's independent voters who broke for Trump just before the 2016 election, especially those that went from Bernie to Trump instead of Hillary, will stick with the President the next time around. Has Trump delivered on his promises of new jobs and p...

There's been a lot of comment in the blogosphere about NBC News piece on the Trump campaign cutting ties with pollsters after recent internal numbers leaked . Near the end of his blog post today on the NBC article, Digby refers to a March 4th, 2019 piece in the Daily Beast by Gideon Resnick , in which Resnick quotes the Trump campaign's top pollster: “When you really drill down on this election, if you change the vote in five counties, four in Florida, one in Michigan, we’d be having a totally opposite conversation right now,” Fabrizio said of the race. “For all the money that was spent, for the all the effort that was made, literally four counties in Florida, one county in Michigan puts us at 261 [electoral] votes and makes Hillary Clinton the president. So, remember that.” In Michigan, Fabrizio is likely referring to Macomb County, which neighbors Detroit, where Trump beat Clinton by nearly 50,000 votes. The county voted for President Obama twice and was the bi...

I'm a bookworm. Always have been. When I was a kid you'd often find my nose stuck in some adventure paperback or thriller. In March of 1979, the year I graduated high school, I saw the almost nuclear meltdown thriller  The China Syndrome  directed by James Bridges and starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas. Totally captivated I followed my natural pattern of going to the library to check out one fiction and one non-fiction book on the subject of nuclear catastrophe. The closest thing I could find to a novelization of the movie was  The Prometheus Crisis  by Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson. Scortia and Robinson had previously co-written "The Glass Inferno," one of the two books that Irwin Allen's production of "The Towering Inferno" was based on. The other non-fiction book I checked out was  We Almost Lost Detroit  by John G. Fuller. This is an account of an incident that occurred at Detroit Edison's (Enrico) Fermi-1 n...