The Hageman speech to the legislature. Deconstruction and Analysis. Part One.

Just yesterday, in our overlong, Lex Anteinternet: The 2023 Wyoming Legislative Session. The Legislat... thread, I posted the following:

Harriet Hageman appeared to address the House.

The early portion of Hageman's address deals with the new rules that the House is operating under, some of which are a restoration of old rules, as is noted.

The back portion is a call for extreme budget cuts.  Without saying as much, it would seem that you can take hints that this would include Social Security, but perhaps I'm just reading that into the speech and it isn't there.

It then goes into the legislative session.

I didn't really do a deep dive into it, but maybe that's worthwhile.  This is the first big public address Hageman has given, and she took a much different approach than Senator Barrasso did, who gave a cheerful, very much at ease speech. Indeed, I've seen Barrasso speak before, but I've actually never seen him speak when he didn't sound stilted.  This is an exception.  He didn't try to talk politics in it.

Hageman did.

Hageman's speech isn't long, and it may be broken down basically into two parts.  What she claims the House has already accomplished, and fiscal concerns.  She was pretty blunt in it.

I'll start by noting that I probably didn't give the speech the due it deserves for a simple reason.  I think that Liz Cheney's claim that Hageman was exhibiting "tragic opportunism" by running is correct.  I find it a bit hard to take anyone seriously who is crying out from the hill they just climbed with the bloody knife of the body they just stabbed in the back in their hands.  

But maybe in the world of politics, metaphorically killing your friends is just the norm.  Well, it isn't, but it does occur.

Okay, the speech.

The first part of it addresses a whole bunch of House procedural changes which do make the Speaker less of a dictator and do force members of the House to show up and do their jobs. Frankly, I think those reversions to prior times are a good thing, and they needed to be done.  I don't like the fact that they came about due to the far right, but I have to note that in lauding these changes Hageman doesn't give credit to where it is due, which is the far right. She is a member of the far right, but the changes or reversions cited were things that were brought about by the Freedom Caucus opponents of McCarthy.  She stuck with McCarthy the entire time.

I'm not sure what to make of that, but there's an element of riding your opponent's horse in that.

Are these good things?

Well, even though I don't like the group that brought them about, they are.

A portion of this speech that seems to relate to fiscal matters, which we'll get to in a second post, dealt with oil and coal.  

It's now become a state mantra that the nation needs Wyoming's oil and coal.

Prior to the U.S. Civil War, a common claim in the South is that the North would never fight the South as it needed its cotton, and indeed the whole world did.

Apparently, Southerners had never heard of sheep.

Or Egyptian cotton.

Just as Wyomingites apparently just won't believe that wind, solar, and ultimately nuclear, are going to, well, as Everett McGill had it in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou; "Yes, sir, the South is gonna change. Everything's gonna be put on electricity and run on a paying basis."

Everything is on a paying basis already, and that statement applies to the whole country in the context of technological evolution.

Windmills and memorial.  Might as well be coal's grave.

We've addressed it before, but coal has been on its way out for well over a century now.  It's so clear, that we've basically gone from the "cool menthol filters make these cigarettes safe for anyone" stage of things to the "I don't care if everyone in my family smokes, and they all have lung cancer, people get lung cancer from other things too. . . " stage of this argument.  Yes, you can still light up a pack of "

Exceedingly creepy, and more than a little unrealistic, Lucky Strike advertisement from 1952.  Yes, cigarettes won't hurt you.  And yes, you can wish the entire nation back into the coal age. And yes, this young woman didn't die of lung cancer by 1972.  Or. . . . ?

To put it mildly, the same group of folks who thought that passing a resolution banning electric cars to be sent to the Governor of California on the basis that, "that'll show them", seems to think we can just hold our breaths and turn blue and it'll be 1973 again, or perhaps we can just force everyone to use coal whether they want to nor not.

Just not going to happen.  It's already not happening, all on its own.

Flat out denial of an economic trend is dangerous.

A lot of tobacco farmers are farming something else now.