Posted January 24, 2017 06:16 pm
Ron Littlepage: “Alternative facts” is just fancy lingo for “making up stuff that’s wrong”
Mousing around the news of the day … click.
First let’s stop over in the emerging world of “alternative facts.”
This is the world where a presidential adviser can look straight into the cameras and say, without bursting into laughter, that the crowd attending Donald Trump’s inauguration was the biggest ever, record breaking, huge despite hard evidence to the contrary.
Welcome to Trump world.
It was the media that invented his feud with the intelligence community, never mind the Trump tweet that likened that community to the Nazis.
Trump tells congressional leaders he really won the popular vote because 5 million illegal immigrants voted illegally for Hillary Clinton without, of course, even a scintilla of evidence to back that up.
Trump tells business leaders he’s big on protecting the environment.
On the White House website, a section on climate change has been replaced with the “America First Energy Plan.”
With much of the rest of the world moving forward to renewable energy, on the White House website you will find such environmentally friendly practices as tapping shale, oil and gas reserves on federal lands.
There’s also praise for “clean coal” — perhaps the biggest alternative fact of them all.
Trump world operates under the premise that if something is said often enough, it becomes true.
1984 was just a little slow in getting here.
Click.
Those of us living in North Florida need to keep a wary eye on a group that purports to be our ally.
Stand Up North Florida is pushing an agenda to make sure North Florida gets its share of the conservation money resulting from Amendment 1.
Who can be against that?
But the group refuses to say who is financing it, which should start the suspicion bells clanging.
Is the group really trying to stop Senate President Joe Negron’s plan to spend $2.4 billion on an Everglades water storage project?
Big Sugar and other powerful interests aren’t exactly enthralled with Negron’s idea.
But here’s the deal: If Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature would follow through with Amendment 1 funding as the voters intended, there would be enough money for both.
Click.
Mayor Lenny Curry finds himself locked in a fight with the police and fire unions over pensions.
Curry insists that the unions agree to a 401(k) plan for new employees rather than the current defined benefit pensions firefighters and police now have.
The unions argue that putting new employees into the Florida Retirement System would be a better idea.
Lo and behold, manna from heaven.
A Jacksonville representative in the Florida House, Jason Fischer, has filed a bill that would make the FRS option impossible.
Coincidence?
As Times-Union reporters Nate Monroe and Tia Mitchell pointed out in a news story, Curry supported Fischer’s bid for the House and two of Curry’s closest advisers — Brian Hughes of Tallahassee and Tim Baker of Jacksonville — ran Fischer’s campaign.
Did Curry have anything to do with the bill?
Of course not, the freshman lawmaker told the Times-Union.
He said he had “not met with anyone on the staff of the city of Jacksonville.”
Notice that he didn’t rule out a mind meld or a séance.
Click.
As if alternative facts weren’t enough, how about an alternative universe.
The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau reports that Florida’s legal bills since 2001 in the water wars with Georgia have totaled $97.8 million.
In just the last two years, Florida has spent $54.4 million on lawyers in its fight to make sure the Apalachicola River and Apalachicola Bay have enough freshwater to keep them healthy instead of letting Atlanta suck up so much of the water.
Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Make them be doctors and lawyers and such, especially lawyers.
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