Senator Whitehouse Grills EPA Administrator Zeldin - Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
ttps://
EPW Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), questions EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on his purposeful efforts to raise costs for American families. - 04/29/2026.
= new reply since forum marked as read
And I fear that all the damage may take a generation to fix, meanwhile this lawless administration must be held to answer for their crimes against the American people and the Constitution. 
I really want democrats who still remember climate change is an important issue around/
Zeldin is a shifty eyed little..I have stopped swearing (thanks for nothing Coleman Spillde!)
You want to see something funny Rhiannon?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/climate/ed-russo-trump-environment.html
I hope that doesn’t break DU’s TOS. But it is so absurd I wanted to show it to you guys. Can you believe that bs?
I am “lucky” I can appreciate gallows humor…but that is serious misinformation to bombard jaded and broken brains with .
This is also kinda worrying because I know by now how information is processed by brains wearied and alienated by society.
I would never buy into such twaddle but I can see how alienation is manipulated by genuine disinformation and misinformation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/05/john-naughton-networker-spooks
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/27/chris-hayes-salon-talks/
The difficulties of intra left communication alone these days..
At least I can try to explain to you guys here.
There is a book called the Marbury Lens about how you put these lenses on and you see a very different reality underneath the surface of reality. That is a little too dark for me.
But these chaos are helpful for the right and..well I have a corny chestnut about all of us working together.
Helpful huh?
I do feel our overlords are miserable humans. That must be it..is it hoarding syndrome? Certainly untreated mental illness seems to be a thing in that class. Elon Musk being the most prominent example.
But on the plus side, a lot of lefty movements that are underfunded and beleagured manage better than some things swimming in money from those people that still go belly up.
Hang in there Rhiannon..and everyone.
What must it be like to be an overlord and have nothing but chaos and misuse and abuse of info that doesn’t even work well on isolated humans?
It reminds me of Goldstein from 1984:
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
And yet a lot of the right claims Orwell as much as the left because he has stood the test of time.
How can it be that anything requiring thought is off loaded onto already strained humans. Don’t they have to ever do anything?
Funny thing about these times of turmoil is that after the confusion all the surprise fades as anyone sane would have known leaving the left net more impoverished and more broken.
If I never have had much sympathy for any of a certain type of people at the very top who are fairly superficial, I have learnt that communication is impossible on short timescales with any people very different from one as they have to
I once stayed with some Bible bangers and it didn’t work out. Because I never demonized people different from me. But you don’t have to demonize the right to recognize that just because you don’t agree with everyone who slaps on a label left or opportunistically votes left, what you always knew, which is that except superficially it would be hard to comprehend even how nice conservatives or religious people think. And when you are forced to harmonize with such people your compass breaks and in real time, the same old thing that Greens and lefties get disproportionately dashed over (thanks Coleman for ruining the one joy left in life 🙄..I like Coleman. He is the “scold” of my choice. I have worked out a rough formula for behavioral cues that pretty much looks like the left flank of the Democratic party with occasional alarmed and terrifying assays into what having a conversation with the GOP in a hostage negotiation from hell would look like. So far Josh Hawley’s TikTok ban aside, its mostly people who long left the Gop or merely are things like military (William Astore), police (Brian Driscoll) and such people who have no connection to Trump).
What are those creeps paid for beyond exploiting metaphors to relabel the resources of all democratic leaning people with any damn resources left “wealth” or “luxuries”.
Yeah I like “luxuries” like not getting my eardrums shattered deliberately or being groped by creepy men. I am a bit of a hoity-toity princess that way. And the types who depend on venture welfare and attack Lina Khan attack all the resources of public servants. That was so disgraceful last year what Musk did to public servants and federal workers.
I have been reduced to taking comfort in DU and stuff like this forever:
https://www.salon.com/2025/06/07/40-years-later-the-goonies-is-still-a-treasure/
Thanks for listening Rhiannon. I am hoping to exit a trek through hell. But it is definitely not unconnected with America..or India but the parts I like which are leftish to the extent tnat they are reality based but not as loud as the typical Bollywood-Hollywood style left.
This is an extra hellish world for us catladies. That person Vance (thanks Coleman 🙄!) understood that catladies are his natural enemy. Not Taylor Swift who is at the end of the day is a glamorous singer and celebrity who likes cats. But regular catladies who don’t fit in with mobs and we have some resources but not enough for the shit being thrown at us.
This was a good description of the type I understand:
She also shows a deep sensitivity and understanding for her animal liberationists, people who go undercover as farmworkers for years at a time to film the abuses inside egg farms – actions that, thanks to “ag-gag” laws, are often themselves crimes. Unferth does not sentimentalise these characters; she portrays them as the prickly, unsocialised types they often are, while also conveying their quiet heroism. In one passage, she shares their common fear that: “Soon all that will be left of the miracle of our planet will be the monocrops of damaged cows, pigs, dogs, hens, a few other practical species – and humans, horrible, unbeatable, disgusting humans.” In another, she describes the real sacrifices activists make: “When they finally quit and cut out, as almost all did … they had nothing: blank years on their resumes since what they did was strictly secret, no skills other than to perform jobs they’d spent their lives trying to abolish, alienated family, permanent back trouble.”
The one person I have a genuine friendship with though we rarely talk except when I buy vegan sweets from her is another catlady.
It is better than some Si Valley guy going, “Here you! You are Indian and female and don’t seem republican. Here are some random Indian women, random nonwhite men, totally random people who may or may not vote democrat etc. Your new best friends! Go!”
That is kinda not how communities or friendships are. And I came to DU. I came here myself in 2006.
It was truly random and non random. It wasn’t like the guy in the Bizarro Jerry episode of Seinfeld whose opinions turn on a dime. I joined DU because of elad and because I like the format, which I find easier to use than DailyKos or TPM. And after I came back in 2020 I have started trusting EarlG completely. He is human and no human makes perfect decisions. That is not what trust requires. Trust only requires good faith.
And I am difficult but not oblivious or solipsistic. I would never narcissistically hog any community I am a part of with my own sideshow. But I trust EarlG as I trusted my main mentor in that it is never easy-science or grassroots politics that too when everything is increasingly owned by those people and even Indivisible and The Humane League take money from Hoffman or EA. But they are still independent and the work doesn’t suffer.
That’s the bs of the right that pretends to not get the difference between purity and compromise that even the most lefty leftist, Green etc make. Hell Orwell was a police informant at one time, which many of his fans may not know.
Human life cannot be flatland. But where you set compromise or grey areas is the point.
You could not live in society with a ..
I once read about this couple and it looked impossible-I respected it -that is the respectable tail of purity that is not annoying and more real. They had dropped out of society entirely and made their own food, were vegan and educated their own children. Two school teachers in India and they weren’t doing it for show. There was one piece about them in an obscure journal my mom had taken a clipping of and that was it.
I couldn’t do that. I use Amazon and Apple and Microsoft (disabling all the ai I can find).
BirdNet may be my favorite app, but WhatsApp is very useful- my marijuana presc is via that and it is not felonious or sleazy unless a rubberstamp via a Blackstone Inc owned hospital with a mixed reality, VR from Facebook were tacked on with Reefer Madness traffic studies, Portal N.0 or other terrible ideas whatever a “bruh with a podcast” presumably would sign up for. My head runs riot with terrible ideas that probably exist. And must never engulf this space.
I am not snooty. I am plenty trashy but that’s not “rational self interest”.
It is like trying to learn a new and really awful language and terrifying as clearly the “Fawn” part of “Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn” with people of seriously unknown levels of crazy.
It would be so much easier to find a “deep state” catlady whose civilian ally one is over feeling indignant at being offered an Indian girlboss or terrifying male type who constantly has bowel control issues over imaginary “false allegations”.
Why would any sane woman make “false allegations”? When that damages women’s rights?
These are people who caricature the other sidd in ways I don’t. What I do know is that some things are just not gonna work.
They say women know very fast if they would date someone and it is the same with this shit.
Why set yourself up for conflict by getting embroiled in stuff that has no future? Not necessarily because it is corrupt or sleazy but because communication will be impossible.
The best path to non-conflict is avoiding experimental stuff filled with people one would avoid as the ..
Matt Stoller ( who represents pragmatism I can understand) had an interesting piece on the WA anti-trust case.
I don’t understand how people have shallow politics. For me left behaviors outside animal rights and the environment are learned as some could argue possibly not inaccurately that I have some misanthropic tendencies. But it is never personal.
I have been thinking a lot about how the left gets associated with annoying stuff. And now i can see, it is not left at all. Left is like Briahna Joy Gray or Chauncey DeVega.
What is grating is some unknown PMC class people whose only lens to look at the left is liability.
And probably as such people are deeply antagonistic to the real left whom they don’t even know, they deliberately amplify Robin D’Angelo and this like consultant canned claptrap class who make a mess of left wing radicalism and come up with something whose main characteristic is to convince both the left and ..I am not going to pretend that civility with the Rinos aside communication is possible.
Catherine Liu’s piece on unherd had an interesting tidbit about how the uni left was started by an FBI informant.
Blackagendareport, Yasha Levine, Current Affairs etc are not annoying.
You can like them or not, but they are not uncouth and annoying.
I know that it is an entry into hell when someone who is basically antagonistic to the left and Greens like say any Google admin who thinks edtech should replace education sets things up for a redistribution of resources from the real left to the right mediated by computers with an insulting sideshow as well.
If redistribution is not possible, complete destruction.
Chauncey DeVega had a piece about Black Wall Street I should look up again.
It is banal because it is not intentional.
They really think it is “woke capitalism”. That military officer William Astore got it.
Thanks for listening Rhiannon. I know you understand. How do I know it? Because I am on DU not some shady website.
I cannot believe they think all people are this shallow because they are.
Disgraceful.
And it's one of his signature issues. He's extremely dedicated and has made literally over 300 presentations to the committee on the issue. Climate change and Supreme Court corruption are his two main issues and here he's having to deal with both of them in the same week! 
As for education, the current administration has interfered in that, too. If kids are going to a private religious school, they likely have to learn the 10 Commandments (I had to, we were tested on them!) but they do not belong on the walls in public schools. And when I was in school, we were encouraged to read - in the summer my mother took my brother and me to the local library where we took out books to read, the library had a summer reading program. These days, there are books which are banned. Nobody told me what books to read, I chose them myself. 
“Gone with the Wind” and even more so Robert Ruark’s “Uhuru”. And even George Orwell’s “Down and Out in London and Paris” has an early and very cavalier description and his “Burmese Days” is filled with racial slurs.
I do wince at parts of “Uhuru”, “Burmese Days” and “Down and Out in London and Paris”. But you cannot childproof all of reality.
And in fact, that will impact the very people it pretends to protect, while savagely attacking any middleclass left with any resources left to favor a predatory and mercenary overt seizure and redistribution of wealth from the public sector to the private sector, from the more liberal parts of even the private sector to the conservative parts, with collateral damage that cannot be fixed.
A real world model in which female complainants do not exist outside psychiatric institutions (as if thats a joke), is not a real world.
We should not have reinvent the wheel over and over with a lame entertainment angle for ai and data miners. That is exploitation of human life.
Is that what “The revolution will not be televised” means?
It would be inaccurate to say that I am a far left radical rather that a left-liberal catlady, civilian, publicly funded formerly, Green scientist. If you change the properties of an organism or situation etc it won’t work as well.
I wish it was only the GOP one has to contend with and not also this mercenary corporate power.
In the end there is nothing new and no learning, but more explicit reinforcement of why one behaves as one does. I am on DU as DU’s TOS represent pragmatism as I accept it. It is what it is.
But I will do my best by science, the left of centre etc.
I am kinda coming out of what I vaguely hoped was some kind of camouflage to throw off GOPish people probably. I find even decent conservatives confusing.
Except on DU, I don’t really like to be honest. I even got two posts removed recently 
.
It is good for me. I was never very agreeable, but I had gotten into the habit of reflexively trying to..I am not sure anymore..probably regroup..
I was watching this show “Beef” and the funniest part was these two millenials who are trying to talk about “safe spaces” etc as they get increasingly incensed.
This is an angering reality and for many reasons that therapy cannot fix. I am glad I have you guys here on DU.
In a way I suppose it is most like Mastodon. But better. Its format and the admins and grassrootsy.
I don’t know. I could never abide any other site. There used to be a few DUers who no longer post (TSExile, Dennis Donovan..I hope they are okay).
Religious private school must have been hard. Was it also a girl’s school?
Via Current Affairs and Yasha Levine, I got exposed to some literature I had not heard of before:
Abby Hoffman’s “Steal this Book” and even more usefully “The Society of the Spectacle”.
I have generally found it hard to locate the rare Indian female lefties I would group with. Unless someone cares about the environment seriously I don’t really feel any connection and there isn’t even the sense that okay at least one is learning about a new culture.
It is sort of more “okay I get this general collection of human contradictions and insecurities without even a background dissimilar from mine. What else is there?”
My niece is over there now and she and I clicked as soon as we first met. She is definitely left of centre, but meeting her healed a lot of the damage to my self image from my last job in the US where I was left feeling like an overly militant and belligerent feminist who is also somehow a sleazy, conniving manipulative girlboss. Yeah that was fun.
When I met my niece a few years ago, she reminded me so much of myself at that age that I started feeling less shitty about myself-she is already a catlady, loves books and is responsive to seeds I plant a..
It reminded me of a line from Call Me by Your Name about how book readers like to hide.
It seemed confusing that except people who work in espionage or are kinda sleazy, only the paranoid can find scrutiny painful.
I was very friendly with her recognizing a kindred spirit but I could tell she was immediately on guard. Who was this strange friendly aunt? But overtime she has started trusting me and is confiding.
She would probably like DU, but by tacit consent we no longer discuss politics. I would rather her future employers and the state do not know we are related.
She is also a chip of the old block and has inherited the familial curmudgeon gene and was a bit short about her Indian classmates who talk about cultural appropriation.
She is well to the left, but she has little nonsense about her and said “what are these people always going on about their culture for? There is a country of a billion people right there in the south where their culture is there.”
Definitely not easy finding likeminded people. I have seen Hemant Kappana and Tejas Thackeray aside from the vegan lady I mentioned who seem cool. And as if they care about stuff that actually matters much like Madhav Gadgil.
Definitely I feel drowned out by the types of superficial politics that are popular. It sells I suppose.
Nandita Bajaj is the first Indian woman I came across whom I personally found relatable and not as if she were churned out from a Chomsky spouting Yimby factory at the Jacobin or Vox.
And I liked Oindrila Mukherjee. That aside it is the same old same old:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Clear-Orf-Political-Correctness/articleshow/1717438.cms
Whether it is blm or anti-war, when you take politics or anything seriously you have to put thought into the learning and make sure it is never flimsy bumper stickers. It is not the Panopticon or lie detectors. Those things are garbage. Other humans who are honest with and about themselves can pick up a bullshitter or asshole from miles away.
Is every left leaning white guy from the Deep South, Joe Bageant? Or Joel Achenbach? No.
Humans are complicated.
Thanks for the Rogerian Therapy Rhiannon. I feel frustrated a lot.
I am a foul weather friend so we all have to stick together when sane these days. But it ain’t ever easy.
You were the first person I started chatting with when I returned in 2020 and DU has helped me.
From 1879, no less! And DU helps keep me sane as well, I have friends/relatives that feel the same as I do about what's going on in this country and I don't know how they're managing without all the like minded friends that I have here on DU... 
1979 you mean ? Or you must share your health regimen with me.
.
