Life in the Conservative Paradise

Conservatives have had control of the nation's breadbasket -- Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma -- for quite a few years now. And it's a paradise.

In Kansas, Gov. Brownback's massive tax cuts have not brought more jobs or prosperity. But they have destroyed the schools and left a gigantic hole in the state budget. Kansas Republicans are now in open revolt against Brownback.

In Omaha, Nebraska, the city's finances are in such a mess that they've stopped fixing pot holes. Instead, they grind the asphalt into gravel. Upper-class neighborhoods have dirt roads. Kids can't ride their bikes on them and people can't leave their windows open because dirt blows in.

Oklahoma has been inundated by earthquakes caused by injection of fracking wastewater deep into the earth. Magnitude 2, 3 and 4 earthquakes occur constantly, two, three, four times a day -- just today there have been four .

In the past few days 2300 square miles of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Missouri have been scorched by wildfires. This time of year it should be cool and wet -- maybe even still snow on the ground. But instead they're having wildfires because it's so hot and dry.

It's no surprise. It was almost 100 degrees in Magnum, Oklahoma, on February 11th.

This year has been ridiculously warm across much of the country. It was 71 in Boston and Buffalo in February. Massachusetts had a tornado the same month.

In Minnesota, where I live, it was in the 50s and 60s in February and people were outdoors playing volleyball outdoors in the sand. We had a thunderstorm the other day and there were two tornadoes. Spring is coming a month or two early.

Last year set tons of high temperature records, but it was an El Nino year so climate denialists brushed it off. Now El Nino is over, but high temperatures continue to crush previous records by 10, 20 and 30 degrees.

Conservatives from breadbasket states, like Jim Inhofe, continue to insist that climate change is a hoax, even as literally thousands of new record highs are being set:

February marked the 27th month in a row where daily record highs outpaced record lows in a record-setting fashion. Data through Feb. 26 — the last date for which data is available — show there were 6,045 record highs to only 112 record lows. That puts the ratio at 53-to-1, making it the most lopsided month on record. November 2016 previously held the record.

Clearly, the earth is getting hotter faster. And yet Donald Trump just put a climate denialist from Oklahoma in charge of the EPA.  He still pretends global warming is a hoax and that fracking doesn't cause any problems, even though his own state is ground zero for the rolling catastrophe caused by our excessive consumption of fossil fuels.

The lies people will tell for money...