Dear Charlie:

Sorry. I've spent the past couple of weeks just trying to tread water, like everyone else. There's too much happening at the same time hitting us from all sides.

President Obama and the US Army Corps of Engineers denied Dakota Access's permits and refused to grant the easement for the pipeline. On the surface, that looks like an amazing development, and it is. That said, DA has already suggested they'll build there anyway and just pay the fines.

A few hundred miles away, a pipeline leak of unknown duration -- ie., they dunno how long it's been leaking -- has been dumping crude into people's drinking water. Which is why Standing Rock and all their allies were fighting. Because those happen. A LOT.

Flint, Michigan, finally has a glimmer of hope. $170 million has been approved to clean out and fix their water supply. I will refrain from shouting "it's about goddamn time" from the rooftops. Unfortunately, I don't see anything saying when that will start, and as of right now, they're still living out of plastic bottles and unable to so much as wash their hands with the local water supply. Who knows how much permanent damage was done to how many people?

Trumperdink has continued to appoint irredeemable assholes to his cabinet. I can't even begin to list the reasons they are all the worst people. The list grows every day.

People who really should know better are still denying climate change, leading to lots of talk about pulling out of the Paris agreement. The fossil fuel industry is trying to keep its filthy lucre rolling in while Elon Musk and Tesla and individual scientists and developers all over the world remind people that clean energy tech is right here waiting for everyone to get their heads out of their wallets.

Entire islands can be powered by the sun and wind. They can make solar panels clear now, so entire buildings can become giant batteries without either confusing the local birds (who sometimes think big panel displays are ponds or lakes) or blinding air traffic (because the dark solar panels are kinda like big mirrors from a certain angle).

But no. We totally shouldn't do that because climate change isn't a real thing, and there's money to be made in pollution and ever-increasing consumption of dwindling resources. And fracking! Because who cares if it pollutes ground water!

A conspiracy theorist's worst fever dream has happened, too: Russia deliberately and effectively swayed this travesty of an election, and Putin had a direct hand in it. Cries for the popular vote -- which HRC won by nearly three million votes and still counting, what with the recounts showing so many irregularities despite opposition to the recounts -- to be upheld increase and Trumperdink supporters are already whinging about buyer's remorse because he's happily crapping all over whatever bullshit campaign promise he made them and proving that, as we tried to tell them, he doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself.

I don't feel even a little sorry for them. They were warned.

I deeply pity and pray for the innocent people who are already suffering and who will continue to suffer. Who voted and were denied or who were unable to vote because of bullshit "voter fraud" restrictions designed to deny them their right to a political voice.

Aleppo. I just... how can we even hope to help them when the bastard ordering their cold-blooded murder just installed an easily-led, spoiled, tiny-fingered bully as our freakin president? They are dying, pleading for their lives, for help, for escape, and our wheezing, orange, sack-of-shit, would-be despot is too busy skipping intelligence briefings to have conflict-of-interest parties at his goddamn hotels to care.

And the electoral college votes today. Petitions to halt the final vote until the electors can be briefed on Russia's interference and all the count irregularities already discovered in the few states we could get to recount seem to have been useless. As was the popular vote. As, apparently, is any attempt to turn this particular blood tide.

So yeah. I've been treading water. Hoping for anything to stop this from happening. Hoping that each new travesty, each new miscarriage of the constitution, each new and obvious conflict of interest would be the thing to keep that buffoon out of office or, worse, installing him just to impeach him and leave his much-more-dangerous VP in charge. Because as bad as Trumperdink is, at least he's an easily-led idiot who's incapable of paying attention long enough to pick a method of destruction and stick with it.

Forget the Lady or the Tiger. If the electors vote as their bullshit, gerrymandered divisions say they have to, our choices are the belt-fed mini-gun with no safety and a hair trigger... or a volley of laser-targeted so-called Patriot missiles.

So, what'll it be, America?

Where do we even go from here?