BIZZ OMG2

SEE main

MERRI OK

i will use this more liberally as a sort of bookmark

7/18 neglected in rolling shitstorm, 7/20 true dat, 9/20 slapped awake

in trumplandia, hard to know what makes the cut: al gore how to daily download outrage

see loss doom tip pt matthew effect amplifying fdbk

see new jumped the shark

see hypocrisy

see FASCISM 920

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AN 7 25

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest attack on public health is drawing fierce backlash from medical and scientific experts after he canceled or altered nearly two dozen mRNA-related contracts—the very technology that enabled the rapid development of COVID shots credited with saving millions of lives since late 2020.

Among those projects affected are ones “creating an H5N1 bird flu vaccine and developing respiratory virus therapeutics,” The Washington Post reported. About $500 million in contracts are affected. The Post referred to Secretary Kennedy as “the founder of a prominent anti-vaccine group who once falsely called coronavirus shots the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made.'”

“The cancellations dismayed scientists who believe mRNA shots offer the best protection for Americans in a pandemic,” reported The New York Times.

“Kennedy’s decision to terminate the projects is the latest in a string of decisions that have put the longtime vaccine critic’s doubts about shots into full effect at the nation’s health department,” the Associated Press reported. “Kennedy has pulled back recommendations around the COVID-19 shots, fired the panel that makes vaccine recommendations, and refused to offer a vigorous endorsement of vaccinations as a measles outbreak worsened.”

IFrame Content

“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” Secretary Kennedy said in a statement. “We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”

Experts strongly disagree, and the Washington Post reported that large-scale studies have shown that mRNA vaccines are “safe and effective.”

“Completely horrifying,” commented Timothy Caulfield, a Professor of Law at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health and a Research Director at the Health Law Institute. He appeared to call the HHS Secretary an “Anti-science monster.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business,” Mike Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases and pandemic preparations told the AP.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine is a former CDC Medical Officer.

Responding to video of RFK Jr.’s remarks, Dr. Klausner wrote that the HHS Secretary “is increasingly positioning himself as the most corrupt and ill-informed Secretary of Health in US history. His legacy will be one of foolish decisions that destroyed medicine and public health.”

Dr. Simon Maechling, who has a PhD in organic chemistry, remarked that the mRNA contracts were cut not because the vaccines “failed” or were “unsafe,” but “because of ideology.”

“Twenty-two projects – gone overnight. These weren’t fringe efforts. They included next-gen vaccines for COVID-19, influenza, RSV, and even H5N1 bird flu,” he wrote. “Pulling support for them isn’t a safety move – it’s an anti-vaccine statement dressed in bureaucratic language.”

“RFK Jr. isn’t making America safer,” Maechling added. “He’s dismantling the infrastructure we’ll need for the next crisis – in the name of belief over biology. It’s not principled. It’s reckless.”

Dr. Catharine Young, a senior fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, noted, “mRNA technology didn’t appear overnight. it is the result of DECADES of research – now driving some of the most promising advances in cancer, HIV, and rare disease. It is precise, fast, and adaptable – and yes – revolutionary. And it is now very much being dismantled.”

Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious diseases specialist and clinical associate professor at Stanford blasted RFK Jr.’s claimed reason for cutting the contracts as “naive,” and wrote that it “reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of vaccinology. It conflates the unrealistic goal of blocking all infections with the real, achievable goal: reducing serious illness and death.”

Infectious Diseases doctor and clinician scientist Dr. Neil Stone also slammed Kennedy:

“RFK Jr’s attack on mRNA vaccines is not based on science. As a life long anti vaxxer he disproportionately listens to those who expouse anti vaccine views And he believes them. It’s outrageous.”

Dr. Michael White, an Associate Professor of Genetics at Washington University in the St. Louis School of Medicine declared it a “Completely insane decision to walk away from one of the most promising medical technologies, allowing the US to get smoked in this area of biotech by other countries with more foresight.”

“A bad day for science, and huge blow to our national security,” declared immunologist and virologist Rick White. “This decision will have dangerous repercussions.”

---

color blind means racism does not exist, esp systemic, CRT dog whistle ~ affirmative action

https://www.mediamatters.org/five/foxs-jesse-watters-praises-glenn-youngkin-claiming-hes-bringing-back-martin-luther-kings

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aha omg vax is everywhere basically = neg?!

radicalization, polarization --> civil war

fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) ; koch gop anti-gubmint erode norms,

fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate thrrat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play

---

omfg

cf al gore Inc truth

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/gulf-stream-collapse/

no lnx pix twt

'Unimaginably catastrophic': Researchers fear Gulf Stream system could collapse

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams August 05, 2021

While heatwaves, fires, and floods produce warnings that "we are living in a climate emergency, here and now," a scientific study suggested Thursday that a crucial Atlantic Ocean current system could collapse, which "would have severe impacts on the global climate system."

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, focuses on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream. As the United Kingdom's Met Office explains, it is "a large system of ocean currents that carry warm water from the tropics northwards into the North Atlantic," like a conveyor belt.

Previous research has shown AMOC weakening in recent centuries. The author of the new study, Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK), found that this is likely related to a loss of stability.

"The Atlantic Meridional Overturning is one of our planet's key circulation systems," Boers, who is also affiliated with universities in the U.K. and Germany, said in a statement.

"We already know from some computer simulations and from data from Earth's past, so-called paleoclimate proxy records, that the AMOC can exhibit—in addition to the currently attained strong mode—an alternative, substantially weaker mode of operation," he continued."This bi-stability implies that abrupt transitions between the two circulation modes are in principle possible."

In the absence of long-term data on the current system's strength, Boers looked at its "fingerprints," sea-surface temperature and salinity patterns. He said that "a detailed analysis of these fingerprints in eight independent indices now suggests that the AMOC weakening during the last century is indeed likely to be associated with a loss of stability."

"The findings support the assessment that the AMOC decline is not just a fluctuation or a linear response to increasing temperatures," he continued, "but likely means the approaching of a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse."

As The Guardian's Damian Carrington reports, the collapse of "one of the planet's main potential tipping points"would be devastating on a global scale:

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America, and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern U.S. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said.

"The signs of destabilization being visible already is something that I wouldn't have expected and that I find scary," Boers told the newspaper. "It's something you just can't [allow to] happen."

It is unclear what level of global heating would cause a collapse, "so the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible," he added. "The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere."

Some climate action advocates responded to the study by highlighting a science fiction movie that, as famed film critic Roger Ebert wrote nearly two decades ago, "is ridiculous, yes, but sublimely ridiculous—and the special effects are stupendous."

"We all laughed at The Day After Tomorrow, back in 2004," said Guy Shrubsole, policy and campaigns coordinator at Rewilding Britain. "Turned out it was a documentary."

The environmental advocacy group 350 Tacoma responded to the findings with a call to action.

"There are warning signs that the Gulf Stream could collapse, an unimaginably catastrophic (and irreversible) impact of fossil fuel-caused climate breakdown," the group tweeted. "Scientists say we cannot allow this to happen. People in power stand in our way."

The study comes ahead of a United Nations climate summit in Glasgow set to begin October 31. Last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres noted the upcoming event and reminded leaders of wealthy countries that "the world urgently needs a clear and unambiguous commitment to the 1.5-degree goal of the Paris agreement," and "we are way off track."

The Day After Tomorrow - Official® Trailer [HD]

www.youtube.com

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

The Gulf Stream is slowing to a 'tipping point' and could disappear ... ›

Slowing Gulf Stream current to boost warming for 20 years - BBC ... ›

Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse ... ›

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omfg

msnbc? calls it rommney exxn bill, not the bipart infra

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/senior-exxonmobil-lobbyist/

raw story

Channel 4 in the U.K. published a startling expose on ExxonMobil's lobbyists who revealed the top most important U.S. Senators who are the ones behind any legislation that might hurt the oil industry.

While many oil companies are diversifying with natural gas, it appears ExxonMobil is going all-in battling to keep "big oil" alive and well.

"Keith McCoy is a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hill and has represented the company in its liaison with the U.S. Congress for the last eight years," explained the report.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not," said McCoy on camera. "Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing, there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

McCoy compared his work with elected officials to fishing with ExxonMobil who supplies the "bait" before it "reels in" the official on issues like a carbon tax, electric cars, taxation and infrastructure.

"When you have an opportunity to talk to a member of Congress, I liken it to fishing, right? You know you have bait, you throw that bait out. And they say: 'Oh, you want to talk about infrastructure, yeah,'" McCoy continued. "And then you start to reel them in and you start to have these conversations about federal leasing programs, you start to have these conversations about a carbon tax.You know, it's all these opportunities that you use and to use the fishing analogy again just to kind of reel them in."

"I make sure I get them the right information that they need so they look good. And then they help me out. They're a captive audience. They know they need you. And I need them," McCoy also said.

He went on to explain that lobbyists aim to have close relationships with officials.

"You want to be able to go to the chief… and say we need congressman so and so to be able to either introduce this bill, we need him to make a floor statement, we need him to send a letter. You name it, we've asked for everything," he said.

But it was the shocking revelation that he has 11 U.S. Senators on the hook.

"Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly and Senator Marco Rubio," were all cited.

He went on to explain that the last thing they want is to appear in a public hearing before Congress where the American people can see.

"We don't want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing. It's getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be for, the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of congress," McCoy confessed.

"There was something we were working on earlier this week where we, where our CEO was invited to a hearing from a member of congress who we know is just going to rip him to shreds when he goes there. So, we look at it and we say: well, why us?" he asked.

See the video below and read the full story at Channel 4:

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holy oligarch batman! (plus Az fraudit) AHA not 1/6 but ~ blm AA and border latinos

omg

Unbelievably dangerous': Top Democrat slams Gov. Noem for using the National Guard as a 'private militia'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 01, 2021

The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee is blasting South Dakota Republican Governor Kristi Noem for fulfilling the request of a wealthy GOP donor who asked her to deploy....nat'l gd in texas abbott border

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ABBOTT PVT $ FOR wALL 621, ALSO TAX $?

we must keep the homeland pure, immaculate, virginal vs dark invasion/infection; we need strict fr and wALL TO REPELL THEM/OTHER/ENEMY

critics denounce Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick's 'invasion' rhetoric on immigration

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dan-patrick/

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omfg:

aha

univ is an institution (// "gov't schools") that does science, is rational , teaches critical thinking, questioning; but AM values Story 1 sacred, sacrosanct so evil to attack them.

trad DTricks is used in election to get pwr, now used to hold onto power, using tools of state = fascism [tho nixon]

aha: // mlk on switch out modifier: good trouble, gang of 5 we are the new/true radicals; appropriation/inversion/perversion of lefty god term[at the same time attacking woke, new PC]; for left/reality racial diversity does being intellecti\ial diversity dofferent POV; builds on Lichter? Horo BS of how lefty commie profs discriminate ~ conservatives; gop is in death spiral, at least demographically so must cheat to preserve minority power[states rights BS ~ HR1 ~ voter suppress, gerry, dark corp $); GOP can't win in mktplace of ideas[libtard bankrunpted by covid fail; must explain away fail by saying media, soc media and univ ~ them

msnbc moral panic: you raise kids w/ right values/american and univ makes them into liberals[and/or gay?]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/

Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys

Raw Story June 23, 2021

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.

Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning....

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OMFG this is post insurr

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-supporters-2650525904/

Former President Donald Trump's base may remember his legacy as one to be honored and praised in the history books but news outlets and historians likely will not agree.

Although Democratic lawmakers have presented a solid case to prove that Trump did, indeed, incite the deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, it does not appear enough Senate Republicans will hold him accountable for his actions which could lead to an upsetting acquittal.

Now, a new report published by The New York Times poses a serious question: "Does this unprecedented moment in American history mark the beginning of the end of a particularly violent era? Or the end of the beginning?"

Despite arguments that could be made by Trump's Republican loyalists, the NY Times argues: "Whether or not Mr. Trump is convicted, the extremism that flourished under his administration has embedded itself in our politics."

Outlining a number of previous violent incidents connected to Trump's legacy, the publication noted House Democrats' remarks about the disturbing unrest that erupted in Charlottesville, Va., back in 2017. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) noted how the Charlottesville incident served as a precursor to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol and how both will forever be associated with Trump's presidency.

"In 2017, it was unfathomable to many of us to think that Charlottesville could happen," DeGette said, adding, remnants of Trump's rhetoric and influence. "Frankly, what unfathomable horrors could await us if we do not stand up and say, 'No, this is not America'?"

Robert Pape, a specialist at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, explained how the Capitol riots shed light on the disturbing side of American politics. In an op-ed published by The Atlantic, Pape explained why and how Capitol rioters are different from other extremists.

"The Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics — not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority," he wrote in the piece.

The NYTimes argues that the force Pape speaks of shows "little sign of backing down." It also highlighted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's latest terrorism alert which warned that "violent extremists were emboldened by the attack and motivated by 'the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.'"

There is some indication that such violent acts have support among some Americans, particularly within the Republican Party. A survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute this week found that 55 percent of Republicans back the use of force as a way to "arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life," as compared with 35 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats.

If the Senate does not hold Trump accountable for his actions, the type of extremist violence his base has adopted will likely continue for years to come.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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insurrection was done in the name of saving america, the constituton, freedumb (chanted): when in fact soc media bubble thru the looking glass to overturn const mandated certification of free and fair election no evidence kraken JOK

aha rhet morph from civil war (proslavery) to 1776, no one says so, but builds on Tea Party tobacco koch BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/infowars-alex-jones-funded-and-fomented-mob

no vid

great banner pix saved jnzmegaphone

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and coordinated with the White House in the organizing of a January 6 event that culminated in a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In comments made on Infowars broadcasts and during speeches delivered in Washington, D.C., in the days before January 6, Jones and his fellow Infowars host Owen Shroyer frequently used violent and revolutionary rhetoric in calling for the overturning of legitimate election results.

Five people lost their lives during the violent incursion in the Capitol that immediately followed an inciting speech given by the president on January 6. Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer as she attempted to breach the Speaker’s Lobby, which is close to the U.S. House of Representatives floor. U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher by Trump supporters. Three other Trump supporters died after experiencing medical emergencies, including one who was trampled to death by the mob.

Some Trump supporters made it clear their purpose in the Capitol was to hunt down and kill lawmakers. The quick thinking of [AA] Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, who faced down the mob alone, diverted rioters away from the Senate floor, as captured in a stunning video taken by HuffPo reporter Igor Bobic.

Jones’ Infowars outlet was promoting a January 6 event as early as December 31. In a video posted to Infowars’ streaming platform Banned.video, a man ranted about the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election, saying, “These liberals think they can just do whatever the fuck they want. You know why that is? It’s because we sit there and we say we want to talk it out.” The video transitioned to promotional material for Infowars’ January 6 event and included a voiceover of Jones saying “It’s 1776 time,” a reference to the Revolutionary War. vid]

on January 2, Jones said during a broadcast that “it takes money to put my crew and security in D.C., and it takes money to organize this, and we put a lot of money -- myself -- into paying for the event Trump is going to be at and the other event.” He then encouraged viewers tobuy nutritional supplements from the Infowars Store and told them they “are funding the second American Revolution.” AHA ITS TEA PARTY DERIVATIVE]

The next day, Jones again discussed his involvement in planning and paying for the event. During his broadcast, he excoriated Trump supporters who were hesitant to travel to Washington, D.C., claiming, “I’ve seen people making a lot of excuses. ‘Oh, antifa is dangerous.’ It’s a lot more dangerous walking across the street.There’s hardly no antifa. They are a bunch of cowards.” (After mayhem unfolded at the Capitol, Jones and his outlet falsely blamed antifa supporters for the violence that took place.) He added, “It’s not about Infowars getting the credit for this, it’s about the fact that no one would step up and put the money in. ... I stepped up and put the money in for the 5th and for the 6th and then a donor came along, a great patriot, and paid $400,000-plus for the rest of it. I’m in over $130,000, and I'm not complaining about that. I had to do it when no one else was two weeks ago.”

Jones, Infowars host Owen Shroyer, and other Infowars employees then traveled to Washington, D.C. During a January 5 speech in downtown Washington, Shroyer said, “Americans are ready to fight. We’re not exactly sure what that is going to look like, perhaps, in a couple of weeks if we can’t stop this certification of the fraudulent election of Joe Biden.” He went on to “salute” Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) for their efforts to overturn the election and said of the people gathered there, “We are the new revolution.”

Meanwhile, Jones was at an event outside the Supreme Court, where he told a crowd, “We are facing Satan, and the answer to Satan’s 1984 is George Washington’s 1776.”

That evening, Jones and Shroyer regrouped to give more speeches in downtown Washington. Shroyer told a crowd, “Thomas Jefferson once said when the government fears the people, there is freedom. But for too long now the people have feared the government. … I can tell you that thecrooked politicians that occupy our Capitol are in fear right now. Do you know how I know this? Because they are scurrying around in secret tunnels to avoid ‘we the people.’ Right now as we speak they’re scurrying around like the little rats that they are to try to avoid you.”

When Jones took over the lectern, he told a cheering crowd that“we have only begun to resist the globalists” and that “they have tried to steal this election in front of everyone.” Jones also said,“I don’t know how all this is going to end, but if they want a fight, they better believe they’ve got one.”

He went on to say, “This will be their Waterloo. This will be their destruction.” (Waterloo refers to the pivotal battlefield defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte that ended the Seventh Coalition.) Jones also said that Winston Churchill “gave a famous speech where he said all I can promise you is blood, and pain, and war, and suffering. But the alternative is even worse:total slavery.” He then led the crowd in a “1776” chant.

The violent rhetoric continued the next day at Infowars’ event, which immediately preceded the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. During a January 6 speech in downtown Washington, Jones again told a crowd, “We declare 1776 against the New World Order.” Shroyer spoke from his own bullhorn while standing beside Jones, saying, “They said you lost this election in a landslide to [Joe] Biden. We said, ‘No, we don’t buy your bullshit.’ But, guess what? You want to feed us bullshit? We’re going to bring it right to your front door and you can eat it yourselves.” (Some Trump insurrectionists at the Capitol did in fact smear their own feces throughout the building’s hallways during the attack.)

At one point, Jones told the crowd to head to the Capitol “peacefully,” in contradiction to much of what he had said about what should happen on January 6. He also attempted to rile up the crowd by falsely telling them that Biden’s win in Arizona had been reversed and that “we have only begun to fight. This is 1776.” As people began to make their way to the Capitol, Shroyer yelled from a bullhorn that Democrats are “tyrants” and led the crowd in a “death to tyrants” chant. Jones then can be then heard attempting to privately confer with his crew, saying, “Let’s take it to the Capitol.”

While Jones and Shroyer did not enter the Capitol building and instead retreated to a “secure location” during the insurrection, an Infowars cameraperson, who identified himself only as “your boy Sam with Infowars.com,” did go inside as both a mob participant and a recorder of the events. Shortly before entering the building, he said, “We have had enough,” and “I got to be honest, this is not a peaceful protest.” Once he crossed the threshold, he yelled, “Guess what? We are in the Capitol, baby!” From a video uploaded to Banned.video with the title “Patriots Storm Congress Raw Footage Includes Execution of Ashli Babbitt,” it is apparent that “Sam” was just feet away from Babbitt when she was fatally shot near the Speaker’s Lobby. Although recent Infowars videos identify him only as “Sam,” older videos posted to Banned.video reveal that he appears to go by the name Sam Montoya.

As the attempted insurrection unfolded, Infowars’ Harrison Smith, who was guest-hosting The Alex Jones Show because Jones and Shroyer were in Washington, praised the “patriots” who were storming the Capitol, at least one of whom participated in beating officer Sicknick to death. The following day, Jones again claimed to have spent “close to a half a million dollars” organizing the gathering in Washington and also said that he organized the event in coordination with the White House.

Following the 2020 presidential election, Jones called on his supporters to “surround” the Georgia governor’s mansion and “rise up” because officials in that state refused to overturn Biden’s legitimate victory. In December, Shroyer praised the efforts of Trump supporters to violently disrupt the Oregon state legislature’s consideration of a COVID-19 relief bill.

Throughout the Trump presidency, Jones has often hyped the prospect of a second American Civil War that would pit conservatives against liberals, including saying that he would personally participate in violence and help execute supposed traitors. In recent months, Jones has hosted Oath Keepers militia founder Stewart Rhodes, who said during his Infowars appearances that his followers were on alert for a command from Trump to start carrying out mass violence against Democrats in Washington, D.C., and at other locations.

For his part, Shroyer said during a November 18 broadcast that prominent Democrats and members of the mainstream media “deserve” to be the victims of mass violence if Trump is not allowed to continue to be president, despite his defeat. He added, “I know I won’t have to be the one to get my hands dirty. I can sit right here in studio and just broadcast the whole thing.”

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covid increases isolation filter bubble, so if algo finds your 1st, or no corrrective --> qanon?

watershed tip pt FAIL?!

aha see when i called it party of trump; now qanon // darwin herd immunity, death cult?

10/20/20 an rats from ship, ram thru dereg]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/half-of-trump-supporters-believe-qanons-unhinged-conspiracy-theories-poll/

alex h

As outlandish as QAnon's beliefs are, the conspiracy cult has been gaining ground in the Republican Party. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds that roughly 50% of President Donald Trump's supporters now embrace at least some of QAnon's claims.

QAnon believes that the United States' federal government has been infiltrated by an international cabal of pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was put in the White House to lead the fight against the cabal. According to the fictional belief set, an anonymous figure named Q is providing updates on Trump's battle. And one of QAnon's beliefs is that R&B superstar Beyoncé isn't really African-American but rather, is really an Italian woman named Ann Marie Latrassi who is passing herself off as Black as part of the conspiracy.

The Yahoo/YouGov poll, conducted October 16-18, asked participants, "Do you believe that top Democrats are involved in elite child sex trafficking rings?" — and 50% of Trump supporters said "yes" compared to only 5% of former Vice President Joe Biden's supporters.

The poll also asked, "Do you believe that President Trump is working to dismantle an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats?" — to which 52% of Trump supporters responded "yes," while only 4% of Biden supporters said "yes."

Yahoo News reporters Andrew Romano and Caitlin Dickson note that only 16% of Trump supporters who were familiar were QAnon were willing to dismiss the entire movement as conspiracy nonsense that has no basis in fact.

The inroads that QAnon has made in the GOP were evident when, in August, QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia. Because her district is overwhelmingly Republican, Greene will likely win the general election on November 3 and be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021.

Well-known Republicans who have made donations to Green's campaign include Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. And after her primary win, Trump congratulated Greene on Twitter and exalted her as a "future Republican star."

Nina Jankowicz of the nonpartisan Wilson Center told Yahoo News that it's "really crazy" that "such a high number" of Trump supporters embrace QAnon's conspiracy theory.

Jankowicz explained, "It seems, increasingly, like we're dealing with two different sets of facts in this country, sometimes more. The fact is that QAnon is a movement, a conspiracy that has been cited by the FBI as potentially inciting terrorist and other violent extremist acts in this country. It shouldn't be something that we're this split (on) along partisan lines."

During a recent town hall event hosted by NBC News, moderator Savannah Guthrie grilled Trump about QAnon — and he maintained, "I know nothing about QAnon." But Trump added that from what he has heard, "They are very strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that."

Jankowicz told Yahoo News, "The fact that we have so many political candidates who are public adherents of QAnon and a president who himself has refused to disavow the theory (amounts to) a tacit endorsement of a different set of facts. That's what's really worrisome about it."

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aha yikes: two robots meld: LLC corp and algorithm / AI: // danny h

https://mainebeacon.com/anonymous-maine-news-site-tied-to-conservative-pac-funded-network/

at first glance, Maine Business Daily seems like some kind of local corporate newsletter, combining niche industry reports, localized data summaries, and press releases from regional Maine Chambers of Commerce. The earliest articles on the site date back to spring 2018 and the vast majority of the articles are attributed to anonymous bylines “Maine Business Daily reports” or “Local Labs News Service.”

However, nestled amid the banal business reporting are two recent stories on the allegations that Democratic Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who is mounting a challenge to U.S. Senator Susan Collins, violated campaign finance rules. Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine GOP, is quoted heavily in the posts, which are attributed to West Virginia-based freelance journalist Kyla Asbury (and are the only stories on Maine Business Daily that have an actual name as a byline).

The publication and promotion of these pieces raised some flags for Maine readers, with one Reddit user writing “I’ve never heard of Maine Business Daily, but two of the top three articles in their ‘public policy’ section right now are political articles about Sara Gideon that have nothing to do with policy.”

Screenshot of a portion of the Maine Business Daily website featuring stories on House Speaker Sara Gideon.

Maine Business Daily’s “About” section also provides scant information about who is operating the site, though it does note that part of its mission is to “inspire productive discussion among policy makers, business leaders and the public.”

The Maine State Chamber of Commerce told Beacon that, despite the reposting of local chamber releases, it is not affiliated with the website.

The homepage of Maine Business Daily includes a link to theMetro Business Network, which lists 30 other state-based sites as part of its organization. According to its website, the Metro Business Network “provides a fresh take on business news. Launching in all 50 states plus DC, we aim to cover news from Fortune 500’s to SMB’s on Main Steet [sic].”

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow with Media Matters for America who specializes in conservative media infrastructure, says that these kinds of networks have flourished amid the decline of local news.

“As local newspapers get wiped out or bought out by big chains and reporters get laid off and chains try to seek efficiencies, you see a void around local news and these news networks try to fill that void,” Gertz said. “A lot of sites are providing information about local events that previously you would get from local newspaper, so you come for information about a local event and if you end up with some sort of ideological screed about the terrors of government, it’s a win for them.”

The Metro Business web

The Metro Business Network sites are uniform in appearance and content. The same stories appear across the entire network, with each “Education” page filled with versions of this story: “Graduates earn 91 degrees, certificates from the University of Maine at Machias” and each “Public Policy” section has a regional version of this one: “Maine ranks 3rd for rental car tax rates, study finds.”

Gertz said the content is likely being generated by an algorithm, which provides “a way to mass produce seemingly local content almost with no overhead, because you are paying no reporters to write stories but you can pump out a huge amount of stuff.”

Buried amid the posts, however, are partisan landmines such as this op-ed that appeared on numerous publications in the network, “Next Step in Dismantling Obamacare: Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB),” that concludes: “This is America. Rationing is for commies. Repeal IPAB now!” The column is written by notorious fake pollster and right wing conspiracy theorist Dean Chambers.

Other articles are more subtle, such as this Illinois news story arguing against the local minimum wage increase.

Anonymous news with a worldview

The website’s privacy policy states that Maine Business Daily and these other business news sites are operated by theDelaware-based Locality Labs, LLC, which, according to an April 2018 investigation by the Chicago Tribune, is owned by the conservative Chicago-based media entrepreneur Brian Timpone.

“A firm of Timpone’s called Journatic once used database mining and low-cost freelance writers to create hyperlocal news stories for the Tribune until complaints emergedof plagiarism and faked bylines,” the Tribune reported. That firm is “now known as Locality Labs.”

An earlier piece published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2016 revealed that Locality Labs, or Local Labs as it is often called, is part of a web of content creators, online and print publications run by Timpone and his cohorts that were accused of electioneering due to their coverage of and connection to candidates and political action committees. Some of Timpone’s news ventures received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from theLiberty Principles PAC, whose objective is to “support candidates for state and local offices who are committed to the economic liberty policy agenda.”

Ashbury, who authored the two stories on Gideon, has bylines published on other Locality Labs-owned sites, including the Cook County Record, West Virginia Record, and Legal Newsline — the website of which explains that its coverage is focused on how state court rulings impact the “legal landscape for corporate executives.”

Asbury’s LinkedIn profile says that for the past year she has worked as a freelance writer for a company called Interactive Content Services. The 2018 Tribune article said that another Trimpone-owned firm Newsinator “has a history of doing paid political work and offers marketing services to companies under the name Interactive Content Services.”...

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omfg

[[[ declares vote void in advance, camp look at electors, will not pledge peaceful trans

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/get-rid-of-the-ballots-trump-badly-bungles-a-question-on-whether-hell-accept-a-peaceful-transfer-of-power/

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trump Praises “Good Genes” of White Audience, Cites Eugenics Theory

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trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

AlterNet Staff September 23, 2020

John Heilemann, the national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, explained how President Donald Trump has already laid out his “roadmap” to cheat in plain sight for the upcoming…

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The precipice is here’: Conservative explains why Trump’s love for dictators is only getting worse

Alex Henderson September 24, 2020

When the United States allied itself with fascist dictators during the Cold War — from Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile to Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay — the rationale for supporting…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/this-is-exactly-how-it-happens-foreign-reporters-warn-us-is-sliding-into-totalitarianism-and-could-be-sleepwalking-towards-a-kind-of-cold-civil-war/ ]]]

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9/20 aha, fash-y, strong man acting alone: trump loves signing things foto op with fawning followers (he leaches gravitas, assent/ applause from them) maybe experts who look like they know what they're doing, but congress deadlocked/polarysys (in pocket of corps that want to continue extract $ HMO] and does not want to ACT, just make it look like he HAS many eg neglected but typical: gop beat up bad 2018 blue wave on pre-existing conds, to trump pretends to defend AT THE SAME TIME still trying to kill ACA that actually provides

trump mocked for finally releasing ‘health care plan’ — which is really a ‘toothless’ executive order

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 25, 2020

For at least four years President Donald Trump has been promising the American people a health care plan. He famously sat for the “60 Minutes” cameras just days after the…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-climate-denial-will-gains-strength-is-americans-are-in-denial-about-his-neo-fascism/

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-administration-plans-250-million-ad-buy-telling-voters-not-to-worry-so-much-about-the/

Trump administration has given up on any serious attempts to curb the nation’s ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S. deaths inch towards the 200,000 mark, outside experts are now warning Americans to ignore the “dysfunctional” Centers of Disease Control and Prevention after the agency issued new, Trump-favored guidelines to reduce testing, rather than expand it. There is no federal contract tracing effort. There is no standard, expert-based pandemic policy—each state has been left to its own devices, with federal officials ignoring even the most serious state outbreaks.

Don’t worry, though. It’s not like the Trump-led federal government is entirely asleep at the wheel. The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking bids for a new quarter-*billion* dollar communications contract, reports Politico. No, not to encourage Americans to social distance, wear masks, or get tested—don’t be stupid. The new publicity campaign will instead “defeat despair and inspire hope,” advising businesses how to operate “in the new normal” and instilling “confidence to return to work and restart the economy.”

Yeah, we’re all going to die.

You will note, dear tired reader, that this language sounds very much like Trump’s own anti-pandemic anti-policy. Rather than taking more aggressive steps to curtail the pandemic—as nearly every other nation on the planet has—the new publicity campaign will presume we live in a “new normal.” It will be based, says “a senior HHS official” who for some reason would not go on the record to say these embarrassing things, on “defeating the mental health challenges of the coronavirus,” which sounds explicitly like Trump’s own insistence that it’s depression over social distancing that’s killing people, not the deadly disease marked on the death certificates.

so instead of a new testing program or, say, mailing out masks to every American household, we’re getting an advertising campaign meant to “defeat despair.” Oh, and Politico reports thecontract will be managed by Trump ex-campaign guy Michael Caputo.

Odds that Trump loyalist Michael Caputo is going to sign off on a $250 million ad campaign telling Americans to “defeat despair” through the remarkably effective practice of wearing masks, against Donald Trump’s personal wishes? Zero. Less than zero. Zero minus the square root of Ivanka.

Anyhoo, the idea that the Trump-led federal government is, immediately before the (cough) November elections, going to be combatting the COVID-19 pandemic via an ad campaign telling Americans to maybe just stop being sad about it is … well, let’s be honest. It’s so on-brand it hurts.

It’s the “Be Best” of infectious disease campaigns. Sorry, we still need to limit testing—but here’s some tips on how you can restart the economy, fellow patriots. Nothing inspires “hope” like getting your unmasked face back to work, unless it’s getting legislation passed immunizing your employer from consequences if you die afterword. Now that’s inspiring.

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what fresh hell?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-epa-chiefs-vision-would-create-an-apocalyptic-devastated-planet-critics-warn/

environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler is under fire for a Thursday speech laying out a vision for the agency that critics warn would unleash untold environmental devastation should it come to pass.

Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, delivered the remarks at the Nixon Library in southern California to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the EPA. The agency was established under the Nixon administration.

Wheeler also framed as positive steps the administration’s environmental protection rollbacks and attacks on science. The EPA chief said that “members of former administrations and progressives in Congress have elevated single issue advocacy—in many cases focused just on climate change—to virtue-signal to foreign capitals, over the interests of communities within their own country.”

“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by expertsas a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice.

wheeler declared it “very disappointing to see governors on the East Coast, such as [New York] Governor Cuomo, unilaterally block pipelines that would take natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York and New England.”

“We helped President Trump successfully implement the new NEPA regulations with the goal of reviewing federal permits within two years,” Wheeler said of the administration’s attack on the bedrock environmental law.

He also touted “a proposed rule that would remove onerous and expensive regulation of gene-edited plant protectants” and the administration’s “science transparency rules,” referring to what its critics call a “secret science rule” to limit scientific evidence the EPA will consider in its work.

Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former EPA official who helped found the agency’s environmental justice office, took issue with Wheeler’s plans for environmental justice.

“Every one of the actions the Trump administration has taken, either by weakening or rolling back basic air and water protections, has put #environmentaljustice communities in greater harm,” he tweeted Thursday. “No one believes a Trump second term would value Black and Brown lives!” he added.

Brett Hartl, government affairs director at conservation group Center for Biological Diversity, rebuffed Wheeler’s claimthat the Trump administration has been a champion of EPA’s mission.

“Wheeler and the Trump administration have done grave and lasting damage to the EPA by elevating polluters and their profits above all else, and no slick speech can change that fact,” said Hartl. He further accused Wheeler of being “ignorant of the immense environmental progress made over the last 50 years because Congress and President Nixon recognized when they established the EPA that no one has a right to pollute our air, water, or land.”

“If Wheeler’s vision becomes real in the decades ahead,” warned Hartl, “our children and grandchildren would inherit nothing less than an apocalyptic, devastated planet.”

Hartl continued: “Instead of following the proud bipartisan traditions of the EPA, Wheeler has decimated protections for our nations wetlands and rivers, rolled back protections for toxic pollutants spewed into the air, rubberstamped pesticides that cause brain damage in children, and utterly ignored the climate crisis. He is a horror-show, through and through.”

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hard to know what to call this:

https://www.corporateaccountability.org/2020-corporate-hall-of-shame/

British American Tobacco

Big Tobacco wrote the playbook on modern corporate abuse. Literally. From spreading junk science to dividing and undermining opponents, to getting politicians to do their bidding, the tobacco industry was at the leading edge of it all.

And they’re still up to these dirty tricks. This year, British American Tobacco (BAT) has exploited the global COVID-19 pandemic to market its harmful and addictive new products by co-opting hashtags meant to spread public health information and using influencers to push its brand.BAT also helped fund a junk science study that claims tobacco consumption (which leads among other things to respiratory disease) might reduce the danger of the novel coronavirus (a respiratory disease). And cynically using a global pandemic as a marketing ploy, BATannounced it had begun researching a COVID-19 vaccine.

We nominate British American Tobacco for exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to peddle its harmful and addictive products on social media and make unproven, dangerous health claims that further undermine public health policies.

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aha omg: koch, mercer, kushner, trump all inherited money! klepto- kakistocracy

omfg koch and mercer support Const convention?!

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-could-add-3-metres-sea-level-rise

Antarctic ice sheet collapse could add 3 meters to sea-level rise

By Charlotte HartleyJul. 23, 2020 , 11:30 AM

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet could be in more danger of collapsing than previously thought, National Geographic reports. The ice sheet is the world’s largest, holding 80% of the planet’s ice. But some 400,000 years ago, a large chunk about the size of Arizona collapsed into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise by more than 3 meters. The worrying thing is that this happened during a period of relatively mild warmth, according to a study published yesterday in Nature. And it could happen again.

At the time of the previous collapse, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached about 300 parts per million (ppm). It now stands at 400 ppm. The researchers say this has caused them to re-evaluate the perceived “invincibility” of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and seriously consider the possibility of it shrinking. These findings are consistent with estimates of sea-level rise caused by glacial melting elsewhere on the continent and around the world.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/new-methane-leak-found-in-antarctica-raises-alarm-as-planet-edges-closer-to-climate-tipping-points/

Scientists have for the first time identified an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica, increasing the possibility that the planet is close to one of the “tipping points” that would put the impacts of global heating out of humans’ control.

According to The Guardian,GUK researchers led by Andrew Thurber at Oregon State University foundguk the methane leak in a region known as Cinder Cones in McMurdo Sound, within the Ross Sea. The site is 30 feet below the surface of the ocean.

In addition to finding methane dissolved in the water there, the scientists found that microbes which usually consume the gas before it reaches the atmosphere had only formed in small numbers five years after they first began to study the site.

Thurber called the findings “incredibly concerning.”

“It is not good news. It took more than five years for the microbes to begin to show up and even then there was still methane rapidly escaping from the sea floor,” he told The Guardian. “The methane cycle is absolutely something that we as a society need to be concerned about.”

Scientists have warned for years that the climate crisis could lead to the “tipping point” of methane leaks in the sea floor and the thawing of permafrost regions.

“At some point in a warming world, greenhouse gas emissions from nature will go way beyond anything we can control,” tweeted Australian immunologist Peter Doherty.[twt guk]

the Ross Sea has not yet warmed significantly from the climate crisis, so the research did not directly link the methane leak to global heating.

But climate models have not yet accounted for significant delays in the development of microbes, which help to keep methane from leaking into the atmosphere.

“The big question is: how large is the lag [in microbe development] compared with the speed at which new leaks of methane might potentially form in the wake of retreating ice?” Prof. Jemma Wadham of the University of Bristol in the UK, who reviewed the study, told The Guardian.

Thurber called the discovery of the methane leak and the delayed microbe growth “a significant discovery that can help fill a large hole in our understanding of the methane cycle.”

“Methane is the second-most effective gas at warming our atmosphere and the Antarctic has vast reservoirs that are likely to open up as ice sheets retreat due to climate change,” he said in astatement.

Other tipping points identified by climate scientists include the disintegration of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, “dieback” in the Amazon which would transform the rainforest into a dry ecosystem, and the dying off of the coral reefs.

Scientists raised alarm earlier this year aboutunusually warm water beneath a massive glacier in West Antarctica, and researcherswarned in February that the third major bleaching event in five years at the Great Barrier Reef would put the reef “on a knife edge.”

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/mitch-mcconnells-patriot-act-expansion-would-give-bill-barr-unprecedented-spy-powers/

no lnx

julia Conley / Common Dreams May 14, 2020

Sen. Ron Wyden was joined by privacy advocates Wednesday in forcefully condemning a new proposed amendment to the PATRIOT Act put forward by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that would greatly expand the U.S. attorney general’s surveillance powers under FISA.

McConnell’s amendment, which the Senate began debating Wednesday as lawmakers took up thereauthorization of the 2001 PATRIOT Act, would explicitly permit the FBI to collect records of Americans’ internet search and browsing histories without a warrant. It would also mandate that Attorney General William Barr, and his successors, conduct an annual review of the FBI’s submissions into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.

Barr would be permitted to review for “accuracy and completeness” evidence presented to the FISA Court by the FBI regarding potential surveillance targets.

“Under the McConnell amendment, Barr gets to look through the web browsing history of any American—including journalists, politicians, and political rivals—without a warrant, just by saying it is relevant to an investigation,” Wyden told the Daily Beast this week, before speaking out against the amendment on the Senate floor.

Mitch McConnell is forcing a Senate vote on his amendment to give Bill Barr warrantless access to Americans’ browsing history. I’ve heard a lot of bad ideas in my lifetime, but this is one of the worst. Tune in as I explain why: https://t.co/r53nm2HxzA

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) May 13, 2020...

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bizzaro-world mirroring? Plandemic conspiracy recycling stew

conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”

serendipity:

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icn 5/20

50 Years From Now, Many Densely Populated Parts of the World Could be Too Hot for Humans

BY: BOB BERWYN

Unless steps are taken to check global warming, up to 3 billion people will find themselves in areas too warm for human comfort, a new study finds.

// record arctic melt?! ew 420

https://www.ecowatch.com/southwest-drought-climate-crisis-2645742986.html

A severe drought that has engulfed the American Southwest since the year 2000 is likely to soon be the most severe drought since the 800s, according to a new study published in Science.

"This appears to be just the beginning of a more extreme trend toward megadrought as global warming continues," the authors wrote in the study.

A team of researchers from Columbia University conducted the study. They described the ongoing dry spell, which has helped intensify wildfire seasons and threatened water supplies for people and agriculture, as an "emerging megadrought," according to The New York Times.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed. By comparison to the previous 19 years, 2019 was actually a fairly wet year. Unpredictable climate variability may also bring enough rain to the region to end the drought, but global warming boosts the chances that the drought will endure.

"We know that this drought has been encouraged by the global warming process," said lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, as The New York Times reported. "As we go forward in time it's going to take more and more good luck to pull us out of this."

Scientists have suspected for a while that that the dryness is evolving into a megadrought. The new research not only confirms their suspicion, but also concludes this megadrought may be as bad or worse than anything known before.

"We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we're on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts," said Williams, in a statement, as USA Today reported. This is "a drought bigger than what modern society has seen."

The researchers say that man-made global warming caused about half of this drought. Changes in the climate have contributed to dwindling reservoirs and harsher wildfire seasons.

It all could get much worse.

"Anthropogenic global warming and its drying influence in (southwestern North America) are likely still in their infancy," the study warns, as CNN reported. "Themagnitude of future droughts in North America and elsewhere will depend greatly on future rates of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions globally."

...

Without a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, these droughts are just the beginning.

"The effects of future droughts on humans will be further dependent on sustainable resource use because buffering mechanisms such as ground water and reservoir storage are at risk of being depleted during dry times," the study continues, according to CNN....

gilead orphan drug scam

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TEA PARTY LEGACY CLIMATE ZOMBIES AND COVID PANDEMIC?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-tea-party-budget-battles-left-the-national-emergency-medical-stockpile-unprepared/

no lnx

How Tea Party budget battles left the National Emergency Medical Stockpile unprepared

Written by ProPublica April 4, 2020

Dire shortages of vital medical equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile that are now hampering the coronavirus response trace back to the budget wars of the Obama years, when congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending.

Among the victims of those partisan fights was the effort to keep adequate supplies of masks, ventilators, pharmaceuticals and other medical equipment on hand to respond to a public health crisis. Lawmakers in both parties raised the specter of shortchanging future disaster response even as they voted to approve the cuts.

“There are always more needs for financial support from our hardworking taxpayers than we have the ability to pay,” said Denny Rehberg, a retired Republican congressman from Montana who chaired the appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing the stockpile in 2011. Rehberg said it would have been impossible to predict a public health crisis requiring a more robust stockpile, just as it would have been to predict the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“It’s really easy to second-guess and suggest we didn’t do as much,” he said. “Why didn’t we have a protocol to protect the Twin Towers? Whoever thought that was going to happen? Whoever thought Hurricane Katrina was going to occur? You tell me what’s going to happen in 2030, and I will communicate that to congressmen and senators.”

There were, in fact, warnings at the time: [FOR ALL THE ABOVE ?!] A 2010 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded report by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials urged the federal government to treat public health preparedness “on par with federal and state funding for other national security response capabilities,” and said that its store of N95 masks should be “replenished for future events.”

But efforts to bulk up the stockpile fell apart in tense standoffs between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans, according to administration and congressional officials involved in the negotiations. Had Congress kept funding at the 2010 level through the end of the Obama administration, the stockpile would have benefited from $321 million more than it ended up getting, according to budget documents reviewed by ProPublica. During the Trump administration, Congress started giving the stockpile more than the White House requested.

By late February, the stockpile held just 12 million N95 respirator masks, a small fraction of what government officials say is needed for a severe pandemic. Now the emergency stash is running out of critical supplies and governors are struggling to understand the unclear procedures for how the administration is distributing the equipment.

The stockpile received a $17 billion influx in the first and third coronavirus stimulus bills that Congress passed in March. But there had not been a big boost in stockpile funding since 2009, in response to the H1N1 pandemic, commonly called swine flu.

After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

“We recognized the need for replenishment of the stockpile and budgeted about a 10% increase,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. “That was rejected by the Republican House.”

Republicans took over the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms on theTea Party wave of opposition to the landmark 2010 health care reform law,the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The new House majority was intent on curbing government spending, especially at HHS, which administered Obamacare.

Congressional Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell in the Senate and House Speaker John Boehner, leveraged the debt ceiling — a limit on the government’s borrowing ability that had to be raised — to insist that the Obama administration accept federal spending curbs. The compromise, codified in the 2011 Budget Control Act, required a bipartisan “super committee” to find additional ways to reduce the deficit, or else it would trigger automatic across-the-board cuts known as “sequestration.”

Even in the aftermath of the swine flu pandemic, the stockpile wasn’t a priority then. Without a full committee markup, Rehberg introduced a bill that provided $522.5 million to the stockpile, about 12% less than the previous year and $132 million less than the administration wanted. “Nobody got everything they wanted,” Rehberg said.

The Senate version of the funding bill offered $561 million for stockpile funding. Senators said they regretted the cuts even as they voted for the bill.

“In this bill we’re now getting into the bone marrow,” Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa who then chaired the Senate appropriations committee, said at the markup. “Some of these cuts will be painful and unpopular.”

In the bill’s final version, Congress allocated a compromise $534 million for the 2012 fiscal year, a 10% budget cut from the prior year and $121 million less than the Obama administration had requested.

The next year, the “super committee” failed to secure additional savings demanded by the Budget Control Act, triggering the automatic, across-the-board cuts. This “sequestration” was an outcome that the leaders of both parties disliked — and blamed one another for.

“Did either party ever indicate sequestration was welcome, positive or desirable?” Dave Schnittger, Boehner’s deputy chief of staff at the time, told ProPublica. “Sequestration was conceived — not by Republicans, but by a Democratic White House — as a crude mechanism to compel the super committee to do its job. Republicans consistently advocated for reductions in mandatory spending programs that would have prevented sequestration from ever happening.” (Mandatory spending refers to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.)

McConnell’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Katie Hill, a spokeswoman for Obama, pointed to numerous statements he made in 2013 urging Republicans to compromise, warning that the sequester would weaken economic recovery, military readiness and basic public services.

Gene Sperling, then a top Obama economic adviser, said Republicans focused attacks on the HHS budget, along with the Departments of Labor and Education, which are grouped under the same appropriations subcommittee.

“The Labor/HHS budget is where a significant number of progressive priorities are, from Head Start to (the National Institutes of Health) to the Education Department,” Sperling said. “There’s just so much in there, so it is often the hot spot for where conservative budget hawks who don’t believe in public investment go hardest.”

Under sequestration, the CDC, which managed the stockpile at the time, faced a 5% budget cut. In its 2013 budget submission, HHS decreased its stockpile funding request from the previous year, asking for $486 million, a cut of nearly $48 million. “The SNS is a key resource in maintaining public health preparedness and response,” the administration said. “However, the current fiscal climate necessitates scaling back.”

The decrease caught Rehberg’s attention at a budget hearing to review the request.

“Disaster preparedness is something that has been very important to me,” he said at the hearing. “I just would like to have you explain how such a large reduction can possibly not impact the national preparedness posture.”

Then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebeliusanswered that the CDC would prioritize replacing expiring drugs such as smallpox vaccines and anthrax treatments.

The next year, the administration again proposed cutting the stockpile’s funding from the 2012 funding level, but it warned that reduced funding could result in “fewer people receiving treatment during an influenza pandemic.”

Congress did grant extra funding in response to emergencies, but even then, the stockpile was a small-ticket item. In 2014, the Obama administration asked for and received billions of dollars to respond to the Ebola outbreak, but only $165 million went to the CDC’s public health emergency preparedness programs, including the stockpile. And in 2016, Congress granted emergency funding to respond to the Zika virus, but it gave the CDC less than half of what the Obama administration requested.

“It’s clear that the administration prioritized the SNS in this (Zika) request and in the Ebola supplemental,” said Ned Price, who was a spokesman for the National Security Council in the Obama White House. “In the case of Zika, congressional Republicans sat on the request for the better part of a year.”

The stockpile’s mission has steadily expanded as it confronts new public health emergencies. With limited resources, officials in charge of the stockpile tend to focus on buying lifesaving drugs from small biotechnology firms that would, in the absence of a government buyer, have no other market for their products, experts said. Masks and other protective equipment are in normal times widely available and thus may not have been prioritized for purchase, they said.

“It just was never funded at the level that was needed to purchase new products, to replace expiring products and to invest in what we now know are the really necessary ancillary products,” said Dara Lieberman, director of government relations at the Trust for America’s Health, a nonpartisan public health advocacy and research group.

The sequestration and strict budget caps ended with budget deals in 2018 and 2019 — a bipartisan rebuke to the earlier restraints. “It’s a burden off our shoulders,” Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told reporters at the time. “In a troubled world, I think that was the wrong message.”

Yet non-defense spending still hasn’t fully recovered.

“One of the things that happened to public health preparedness was just the result of the general budget stringency we had,” said David Reich, a consultant working on federal appropriations issues for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “We’re still seeing the results of that.”

During the Trump administration, the White House has consistently proposed cutting the CDC and the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, which took over stockpile management from the CDC. Congress approved more stockpile funding than Trump’s budget requested in every year of his administration, for a combined $1.93 billion instead of $1.77 billion, according to budget documents.

The White House budget request for 2021, delivered in February as officials were already warning about the dangerous new coronavirus, proposed holding the stockpile’s funding flat at $705 million and cutting resources for the office that oversees it.

Lydia DePillis contributed reporting.

Filed under:

Health Care

Politics

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OMFG WAG THE DOG IRAN VENEZ

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/journalist-mehdi-hasan-on-trumps-iran-warmongering-what-kind-of-maniac-risks-such-a-war-in-the-middle-of-a-global-pandemic/

no lnx

Journalist Mehdi Hasan on Trump’s Iran warmongering: ‘What kind of maniac risks such a war in the middle of a global pandemic?’

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams April 2, 2020

The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday called for an immediate halt to “warmongering during the coronavirus outbreak” as U.S. forces reportedly deployed Patriot missiles to Iraq and President Donald Trump warned—without presenting a shred of evidence—that Tehran is planning a “sneak attack” on American troops in the region.

Warning that heightened U.S. military activity in Iraq could lead to further “instability and disaster” in the Middle East, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the Trump administration should “respect the wishes of the Iraqi people and government and leave the country.” The Pentagon insisted in a statement that the Patriot missiles were mobilized for purely defensive purposes.

As Common Dreams reported, Trump on Wednesday threatened Iran with a “very heavy price” if it attacks “U.S. troops and/or assets” in the region, ignoring pleas from advocacy groups and the United Nations for a global ceasefire and international cooperation against the novel coronavirus, which has devastated the U.S. and Iran and is spreading quickly in Iraq.

Trump’s tweet came just over an hour after he attended an intelligence briefing with U.S. national security officials.

In a tweet of his own late Wednesday, Iran’s top diplomat Javad Zarif urged Trump “not to be misled by usual warmongers.”

“Unlike the U.S.—which surreptitiously lies, cheats, assassinates—Iran only acts in self-defense,” said Zarif. “Iran starts no wars, but teaches lessons to those who do.”

The New York Times reported last week that the Pentagon has issued a directive ordering “military commanders to plan for an escalation of American combat in Iraq” and “prepare a campaign to destroy an Iranian-backed militia group that has threatened more attacks against American troops.”

“Some top officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, have been pushing for aggressive new action against Iran and its proxy forces—and see an opportunity to try to destroy Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq as leaders in Iran are distracted by the pandemic crisis in their country,” according to the Times.

In response to the Times report, The Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan urged the U.S. public to “beware of Trump using the coronavirus as a cover for war with Iran.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/twitter-deletes-right-wing-outlets-post-suggesting-americans-get-intentionally-infected-with-covid-19

no lnx

Twitter deletes right-wing outlet’s post suggesting Americans get intentionally infected with Covid-19

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement March 25, 2020

Twitter has finally stepped in and deleted a post from The Federalist that links to their article suggesting a program intentionally infecting healthy Americans with the coronavirus. The highly-controversial article which runs counter to medical experts’ advice effectively suggests coronavirus parties as a “social activity,” a database of every person in the U.S. and their COVID-19 infection status, and wonders: “Will we allow parents to make these sorts of infection decisions for both themselves and their children?”

“This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules,” is the message social media users trying to access The Federalist’s tweet now receive.

Facebook has not deleted The Federalist’s post promoting its article. NCRM will not link to it but our original reporting on the article is here.

The article itself, penned by an Oregon dermatologist, has not been taken down, but it has been removed from the front page and does not appear in the website’s list of most popular stories, which given the controversy surrounding it, likely is.

“Twitter initially added a warning to the link stating that the post might be ‘unsafe,’” Mediaite reports. Twitter then “temporarily locked” The Federalist’s account, but it is once again active, sans the offensive and dangerous tweet, which read: “It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.”

“Twitter has taken aggressive measures to crack down on misinformation surrounding the coronavirus,” but there is still a tremendous amount of user-generated bad information on the platform.

As NCRM reported earlier, aside from the obvious problems with the article itself, the author ignores the fact that there is no proof re-infection would not happen after the coronavirus parties. There is sufficient anecdotal information to suggest at least some can “catch” the virus after recovery.

:{:{}:

The Federalist is a right wing website whose secret finding has been the source of much online speculation. It advocates increasingly extremist viewpoints, and was co-founded by Ben Domenech, who is a regular on NBC’s and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bill-moyers-and-dahlia-lithwick-break-down-how-the-courts-have-proven-they-have-trumps-back/

Bill Moyers and Dahlia Lithwick break down how the courts have proven they have Trump’s back

President Donald J. Trump, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and Anthony M. Kennedy, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, walk together Monday, Oct. 8, 2018, to the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Bill Moyers / BillMoyers.Com March 24, 2020

Dahlia Lithwick: Hi there.

...

Bill Moyers: I guess you won’t be hanging out at the Supreme Court anytime soon, right?

Dahlia Lithwick: No. No, they’re not hanging out there either, so. It’s really unprecedented to just scuttle arguments. Justice Ginsberg is 87, so I think it is for the best. But it is really extraordinary times that we are living through.

Bill Moyers: Yeah, I remember something you said, “If ever there was a time for the American legal profession to put down its yellow pads and stand up for the rule of law, it’s today—”

Dahlia Lithwick: Yeah, after Donald Trump was elected, I felt so strongly that lawyers were gonna be the bulwark, that it was clear that he was gonna be assailing the rule of law, and then I really believed that lawyers were going to find lines that couldn’t be crossed.

And that the United States was a country that was built on the proposition that there is no king, and that you have nothing if you don’t have the rule of law. I mean, I think I really believed all that. And who are the gladiators in that fight if not the lawyers?

I did expect that lawyers would be on the front lines. And I watched the day of the travel ban a week after the inauguration — it was the lawyers who ran out to the airports. It was the lawyers who parked themselves at the baggage claims [and] held up signs that said, “I’m just a tax attorney, but I’m here to help you get into the country–” I mean, I really thought that was setting a precedent wherein the lawyers were always gonna be the first ones out. And I’m not sure that materialized the way I expected.

Bill Moyers: If lawyers are failing us, where are we?

Dahlia Lithwick: I think there are so many component pieces of that. I think that you can look at the Mueller Report and the ways in which the findings of that report were distorted by Donald Trump’s own attorney general to imply that nothing had gone wrong.

I think you can look at declarations of emergency at the border last year, where no emergency existed, just to get funding that Congress had already said they were declining to offer. The travel ban itself. One after another, actions taken that really pushed the boundaries of what the executive branch can do.

And just the sort of dispiriting ways in which the Justice Department has doubled down on pressing some of those truly lawless actions, and so we saw Bill Barr at the highest levels of the Justice Department interfere with the Roger Stone sentencing.

This was unprecedented. Nobody had ever seen the president by tweet say, “Maybe we should change the sentence,” and have Bill Barr and very, very senior members of the Justice Department intervene — where line prosecutors had been working on this case for years. And I think we saw on that day, we saw four DOJ (Department of Justice) lawyers walk away from the case, one from the Justice Department, rather than be involved in that prosecution anymore.

But I think it can’t be these tiny little acts of resistance. It really does require the kinda thing that I think we saw in the days following, where we had thousands of prosecutors signing memos and immense numbers of former Justice Department officials saying, “We can’t proceed this way.”

But I think maybe the answer to your question is that so much of the rule of law, as it turns out, was built on soft norms, not on regulations and statutes and constitutional directives. And I think that we all think that this machinery is more robust than it really is. It turns out it’s tissue thin if we don’t fight for it.

Bill Moyers: I used to think that norms were sort of the unwritten Constitution like English procedures and propriety. But that doesn’t seem to hold up anymore.

:{:{}:

Dahlia Lithwick: I remember when Merrick Garland was denied a hearing or a vote or even courtesy meetings in the Senate. And I thought, at the time, this is a norm. It is a norm that the president gets to put up a nominee, and that person gets a hearing and a vote. And I think that, time and time and time again in the last few years, I’ve found myself answering these questions about how can this be happening? How can Bill Barr personally intercede in the Roger Stone sentencing?

I think the answer is those were a bunch of norms that were put together post-Watergate. They never had the force of law. It was a set of decisions that this is how the polity would thrive post-Watergate. And I think it’s just such a chilling lesson for all of us that this is a series of gentlemen’s agreements about how we conduct ourselves; it’s not the law.

Bill Moyers: In the meantime, as you’ve written,Trump has weaponized the law in several ways. Talk about that for a moment.

Dahlia Lithwick: Well, I think the most chilling [thing] that we are seeing now is certainly the use of his own Justice Department to go after anybody who’s been disloyal. And also, as we just mentioned, using the Justice Department to exculpate, whether it’s through a lighter sentence for Roger Stone, or using his pardon power to pardon people like Joe Arpaio right at the very beginning.

Trump: I stand by my pardon of Sheriff Joe and I think the people of Arizona who really know him best would agree with me.

Bill Moyers: Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio who took a hard-line against immigrants.

Dahlia Lithwick: Who had people in camps dying on his watch, who had this hard-line, anti-immigrant worldview that was so brutal — that there was no question that what he was accused of doing, he had done. And I think that time and time and time again, we’re seeing Donald Trump use the pardon power to say, “There’s really no such thing as white collar crime. There’s no such thing as being too hard on illegal immigrants. There’s no such thing as being — whatever it is that he himself — sometimes — engages in.”

And I think that, in addition to really kind of rejiggering the entire Justice Department so that it seems as though it answers to him personally, I mean, that’s always been his worldview. He wanted an attorney general and he complained about Jeff Sessions, that Jeff Sessions wasn’t loyal, and he wanted Jim Comey to be loyal. Even Don McGahn, his White House counsel, who ended up leaving, was not sufficiently loyal.

And I think he’s really got a notion that he’s like a Nero character — an emperor — and that the law works for him and responds to him. And in so many different configurations, we’ve seen him rescinding DACA by tweet. Making decisions about the dreamers thousands and thousands of dreamers on a whim. Making decisions about “don’t ask, don’t tell” on a whim.

And then we have the entire apparatus of government scurrying to effectuate that, to make it happen for him. But I guess the paradox is not just that he’s weaponized the rule of law, but that the rule of law has rushed to meet him, and to bolster his notions that he is above the law.

Bill Moyers: How do you battle with someone who thinks the law is just a win-or-lose game? And a commodity you can buy and sell? How do you deal with that? How do we fight back?

Dahlia Lithwick: One of the most revelatory books I’ve read this year is by an attorney whose name is Jim Zirin. He has a book out that talks about all the ways in which Donald Trump as president is behaving exactly the way Donald Trump as quote/unquote real estate mogul behaved.

There was a playbook, and it long predates the presidency. This was, believe it or not, the Roy Cohn playbook that goes all the way back to Donald Trump and his dad when they were accused of racist practices in rentals long ago. And it’s a really useful sort of road map to know what the behaviors are. And the behaviors are pretty typical if you are a real estate, very, very wealthy real estate mogul because it’s the same things over and over: It’s sue everybody, chill people from coming forward by terrorizing them. Make sure that your plaintiffs are subject to heinous, horrific abuse, repeated abuse, until they can’t [fight back] anymore.

Bill Moyers: And at the right time, to your advantage, you walk away from the mess you’ve created, declare bankruptcy, and leave the laborers, the contractors, the everyday workers, the creditors to bear the costs, right?

Dahlia Lithwick: Just bury them in litigation, bury them in discovery so that they don’t wanna go forward with the lawsuits. File all sorts of frivolous, frivolous claims, knowing that at some point, you’re just exhausting the other side. I mean, these are just the ways that this person who in his capacity as Donald Trump before he was president just used the levers of the legal system constantly.

He would be sued. He would have people who did work on his properties that he never paid. Trump University, the casino bankruptcies, every one of these lawsuits — he just fought back by hiring armies of lawyers who did what he said. And you’re quite right. The cost of picking up the debris afterwards, whether it’s Trump University or Trump steaks or whatever the detritus is, that’s not on the rich guy. That’s not on his lawyers. They profit either way.

That is exactly how he uses his private attorneys. That’s how he was using Rudy Giuliani, to go and stir up dirt and all sorts of false claims about Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine. So he has a very myopic kind of transactional view of lawyers are his — they’re his plumbers. They get the job done.

Bill Moyers: And they’re well paid for it.

Dahlia Lithwick: We’re learning there are many fundamental flaws in the system of capitalism that we have tethered ourselves to. But one of the flaws is that, for a very, very long time, rich men — whether it was Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump — very, very rich men were able to surround their selves with armies of loyal attorneys who would do whatever they were asked to do. And that’s exactly how he’s trying to use his Justice Department today.

Bill Moyers: When a president takes his playbook from a crooked lawyer like Roy Cohn in the 1970s and uses it to run the United States government today, what are we supposed to do?

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s such a different paradigm because every president, whether or not you agreed with George Bush, used his White House counsel in certain ways, [and] used the Justice Department and his attorney general in certain ways. But [now] we have a president who simply just indefatigably using his lawyers to beat up the weak and to protect his own usually financial interests. And so there’s not a model on a big constitutional scale for what you do when the president wanted a Roy Cohn, got a Roy Cohn in Bill Barr, and is proceeding to just break stuff.

Bill Moyers: Has it occurred to you that the president prefers to govern by chaos, I mean, it detracts journalists from covering other things he’s doing. I’m reaching right now on my desk for a story I read just this morning inCounterPunch. The headline is, “The Supreme Court is set to strike a major blow against social and environmental protections.” It would amount to the evisceration of regulations that protect our health and safety as citizens. Did you know about this? Are you aware of this?

Dahlia Lithwick: Yeah. This is part of a really — and you’re so right. This is happening almost in the dark of night. It’s happening on page A12, if there at all, because page A1 is the chaos. And way, way back, under the fold in the middle of the paper, there is this stealth attack on government agencies and their ability to regulate themselves. And you’re also quite right, it is happening, at the U.S. Supreme Court under our noses. And, what you’re describing is the sort of ascendancy of what was once a kind of fringe theory that Justice Antonin Scalia put forth about agencies and the limits on their power.And this idea of the unitary executive, that every single thing in the executive branch is subordinate to the president.

That was a crackpot idea once upon a time. And you are quite right, it is pushing its way into the very epicenter of several arguments that the Court is hearing this year. And this idea that — it’s called technically the nondelegation doctrine, and it essentially says that we can gut agency authority, for instance the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. We can gut agencies’ ability to have kind of ongoing oversight of problems.

It was once seen as a really fringe idea that is now being used. I think Justice Elena Kagan has described it as it is going to be used to end government as we know it.

Bill Moyers: She’s actually said that the conservative majority will eventually essentially rule that, quote, “Most of the government is unconstitutional.” And it makes me think, and I wonder if it does you, that the right wingers on the Court were put there to enact the Republican platform into law.

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s such a good question and it’s funny because it gets ignored. We get very, very focused, I think, on Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and questions of abortion, and maybe to a lesser degree questions of religious liberty, right? The Hobby Lobby questions about whether religious dissenters can be forced to do things they don’t want to do.

But I think you’re exactly right, that simmering under those issues both Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were quite openly kind of auditioning to be on the Supreme Court with their writings, very explicit writings in the vein that you’re describing. Writings that would seek to do away with the administrative state, do away with the power of government regulatory agencies, whether it’s the (CFPB Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) or the EPA. Efforts to essentially say all of those agencies answer to the president and he can hire and fire at whim. And he can constrain their authority at whim.

That was not a stealth campaign. They were doing that, both justices — Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — were doing that very, very openly, talking about those things. And I think you’re quite right, we got very, very hyper-focused in both of their confirmation hearings on other issues, equally important issues. But I think we looked away from their records on hobbling federal government as we know it. And you’re quite right, I think they were put on the Court to do just that. And we’re seeing, in two short years, they are doing just that.

Bill Moyers: Brett Kavanaugh wrote last year in favor of forbidding Congress from allowing federal agencies, quote, “To exercise regulatory authority over a major policy question of great economic and political importance.” But I thought Congress was supposed to deal with questions like that. What do you make of this?

Dahlia Lithwick: What I make of it is exactly the words you just said, which is this would give the Supreme Court itself authority to say, “Yeah, we just don’t like these regulations. These ones are not good. This agency isn’t right.” And to really eviscerate the regulatory state as we know it. And this goes way beyond the 2020 election. If you have a 5-4 majority on the Court that really believes that using these kinds of doctrines to chip away at agency power, this is going to be kind of sealed into the mix for decades.

Bill Moyers: So you’ve written, Dahlia, about how, in recent years, the Supreme Court has issued ruling after ruling awarding more power to large corporations. This would be the biggest payoff ever to the big businesses, wouldn’t it? I mean, the Republican-controlled Court would have a veto power over all federal regulations?

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s unbelievable. And again, I think it is a pincer when you look at it — twinned with — the issues you’re talking about where, the Chambers of Commerce and big, big corporations have never won the way they’re winning now. Their win rate in the John Roberts court is like nothing we have seen since before the New Deal.

And so I think what you’re seeing is, on the one hand,gutting of unionswhich this Court has been involved in. Giving huge rights to corporations, whether it’s Citizens United or Hobby Lobby. This slow progression of doing away with workers’ rights and protections for the little guy, protections in all sorts of contexts.

And, at the same time, as you say, the cherry on top is doing away with agency regulations that regulates big businesses. And these big business cases, whether they’re affording huge new rights to businesses, or big wins to businesses that are trying to fight back any attempt to cabin corporate power and union power.

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the CFPB — any of these agencies — can be just tossed away at the whim of the Court.Those two things together are a huge, huge boon for business, and they are massively costly, not just for workers, but for the environment, and for women’s rights, and for the rights of the elderly. So many entities that are not afforded protections when the Court is only looking out for corporations...

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matt efx?

https://www.ecowatch.com/biophobia-2645487848.html

omg

John R. Platt

What do we lose when natural spaces and species disappear?

Increasingly, research has shown that as species and ecosystems vanish, it also chips away at our ability to preserve what remains — because we no longer understand what we're losing.

You probably see it all the time. The neighbor who puts pesticides on his lawn rather than deal with pesky bees. The kid who squirms and runs at the sight of a harmless garter snake slithering through the grass. The politician who votes against wildlife protection because she's never seen a wolf in the wild. The corporation that wants to bulldoze the habitat of a rare frog, but frogs are gross, so who cares, right?

At best this can be termed "the extinction of experience," where our cultural and natural histories fade from our memories and therefore our reality.

At its worst it becomes something even more concerning: "biophobia," the fear of living things and a complete aversion to nature.

This isn't the fiction of living in a cold, empty dystopia. Sadly it's becoming a way of life for too many people — especially children.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/erik-prince-recruited-ex-spies-to-help-infiltrate-activist-groups-hostile-to-trump-agenda-report/

OMFG

no lnx

Erik Prince recruited ex-spies to help infiltrate activist groups ‘hostile’ to Trump agenda: report

Written by Common Dreams March 8, 2020

An explosive New York Times report revealed Saturday thatnotorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations “considered hostile” to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

—Derek Martin, Allied Progress

Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. Through a spokesperson, he declined the Times‘ request for comment on the piece, which is based on interviews and documents obtained by the newspaper, including internal Project Veritas emails.

“Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family,” the Times noted. “Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.”

The results of the Times‘ investigation were described by readers on social media as “chilling,” “stunning,” and “insane.” Jacobin magazine assistant editor Alex Press declared, “My paranoid fantasies are all true!” In response to a tweet about the reporting, author and activist Naomi Klein simply wrote, “Read.”

The consumer watchdog group Allied Progressresponded with a statement Saturday night, calling on the House Oversight Committee to conduct an immediate investigation into what DeVos knew about Prince’s activities.

“There’s not a lot of dots to connect here,” said Allied Progress director Derek Martin. “Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

“We already know Secretary DeVos is no friend of public education, but if she gave the go-ahead to enlist former intelligence officers to steal documents from public education advocates that she disagrees with, it steps well beyond policy disagreement and into criminal territory,” Martin added. “If Secretary DeVos was in any way involved, it will confirm that she stops at nothing to undermine public schools.”

According to the Times:

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former CIA officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians, and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation—detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union—has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

The Times reported that it is unclear whether Seddon was involved in the Spanberger operation and the former British intelligence officer—who is married to American diplomat Alice Seddon—did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.

James O’Keefe of Project Veritas told the Times that his group is a “proud independent news organization” and “no one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate.” Although he declined to discuss the details of the report, he also claimed that various sources are “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes, and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

Past targets of Project Veritas have included the nonprofit healthcare organization Planned Parenthood, the political group Disrupt J20, and recently, David Wright, a 20-year veteran political correspondent at ABC News. Project Veritas has also recorded undercover video of a Times editor and approached the Washington Post with a false story about Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama.

The Project Veritas operative inside AFT Michigan was Liberty University graduate Marisa Jorge, according to the Times. O’Keefe and Seddon used the code name “LibertyU” for Jorge when discussing the operation over email. Jorge, who also reportedly infiltrated the Spanberger campaign by posing as a volunteer, did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment. The federal lawsuit that AFT Michigan brought against Project Veritas is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

In a statement to the Times, AFT president Randi Weingartensaid: “Let’s be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy—and they got caught. We’re just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage.”

Weingarten added on Twitter Saturday, “They didn’t succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers’ voice.”

The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill—who released the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army in 2007—wrote on Twitter Saturday that with this piece, the Times “pushes the 2017 story from [The Intercept‘s Matthew Cole]? forward about Erik Prince attempts to infiltrate liberal groups via Project Veritas.”

Last year, Cole published an article for The Intercept titled “The Complete Mercenary: How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback.”

Noting that Trump gave Project Veritas thousands of dollars through his foundation and met with O’Keefe shortly after announcing his run for president, Cole reported:

It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

Cole acknowledged the Times reporting on Twitter Saturday and highlighted a summary of it tweeted by The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer:

Currently, the Times noted, “Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws.”

Former FBI assistant director and current NBC News national security contributor Frank Figliuzzi shared the Times report on Twitter Saturday and commented that “there are likely numerous criminal violations here.”

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omg geo-fencing

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/the-real-reason-trump-holds-so-many-rallies-is-deeply-disturbing-and-could-be-weaponized-against-him/

no lnx

The real reason Trump holds so many rallies is deeply disturbing — and could be weaponized against him

Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly January 29, 2020

Donald Trump’s digital advantage may be freaking out Democratic strategists, but what should worry everyone is the technology itself. What makes Trump’s operation so formidable is not so much his investment in digital or any particular architecture that he’s built. It’s more that he’s able to take advantage of monitoring people through their cell phones.

To be clear, the Democrats can and will do the exact same thing. The problem isn’t the candidate, but the capability.

Thomas Edsall discusses this in a piece for the New York Times. It begins with geofencing, a practice that involves tracking every cell phone that enters a predefined area, like a church or MAGA rally. Armed with these phone numbers, identities can be sussed out from other commercial databases, and then people can be sorted by how frequently they vote, their party registration (if any), and all manner of personal information:

If you attend an evangelical or a Catholic Church, a women’s rights march or a political rally of any kind, especially in a seriously contested state, the odds are that your cellphone ID number, home address, partisan affiliation and the identifying information of the people around you will be provided by geofencing marketers to campaigns, lobbyists and other interest groups…

…The data generally provides information about individual users’ day-to-day activities and preferences: Where they shop; What they do for fun; What other apps they use, for how long, and what they do in those apps; Where they live; Where they work; With whom they associate.

You might think that Donald Trump holds political rallies simply because he enjoys the adulation, but that’s not the real purpose. His campaign manager Brad Pascale recently boasted about the information he harvests from MAGA rallies:

Out of more than 20,000 identified voters who came to a recent Trump rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 57.9 percent did not have a history of voting for Republicans. Remarkably, 4,413 attendees didn’t even vote in the last election — a clear indication that President Trump is energizing Americans who were previously not engaged in politics…

… Nearly 22 percent of identified supporters at President Trump’s rally in Toledo, Ohio, were Democrats, and another 21 percent were independents. An astounding 15 percent of identified voters who saw the president speak in Battle Creek, Michigan, has not voted in any of the last four elections. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, just over 20 percent of identified voters at the rally were Democrats, and 18 percent were nonwhite.

It’s astonishing that the Trump campaign can so easily get this level of insight about the people who attend their rallies. But Democratic candidates can do the same thing, and they really ought to be doing it if they want to compete on an even playing field.

You might think that you can just anonymously attend a church service or political rally, but that’s no longer true if you bring your cell phone. There are some steps you can take to make it more difficult to track your online activities or what apps you use, but they’re probably insufficient to fully safeguard your privacy.The campaigns will know where you’ve been, and they’ll be able to target you with political advertising designed just for you.

Trump has been aggressively using this capability throughout his whole first term, which may help explain, in part, why he’s able to maintain such a high floor in his approval numbers. More importantly, he now has a big advantage over whoever winds up running against him in the general election.

The American people never meaningfully consented to this invasion of their privacy and I don’t think they like the idea of being tracked or manipulated through targeted advertising. Perhaps in the future, this could become a potent political issue, with voters rewarding candidates who promise to regulate this industry so that folks can go to church without the government watching.

---

OMG

https://theconversation.com/how-ceos-experts-and-philosophers-see-the-worlds-biggest-risks-differently-128382

We live in a world threatened by numerous existential risks that no country or organization can resolve alone, such as climate change, extreme weather and the coronavirus.

But in order to adequately address them, we need agreement on which are priorities – and which aren’t.

As it happens, the policymakers and business leaders who largely determine which risks become global priorities spent a week in January mingling in the mountainous resort of Davos for an annual meeting of the world’s elite.

I participated in a global risk assessment survey that informed those at the Davos summiton what they should be paying the most attention to. The results, drawn from experts in a broad range of disciplines including business, happen to be very different from what company CEOs specifically see as the biggest threats they face.

As a philosopher, I found the differences curious. They highlight two contrasting ways of seeing the world – with significant consequences for our ability to address societal risks.

Two perspectives on the biggest risks

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report consolidates the perceptions of about 800 experts in business, government and civil society to rank “the world’s most pressing challenges” for the coming year by likelihood and impact.

In 2020, extreme weather, a failure to act on climate change and natural disasters topped the list of risks in terms of likelihood of occurrence. In terms of impact, the top three were climate action failure, weapons of mass destruction and a loss of biodiversity.

The specific perspective of corporate leaders, however, is captured in another survey that highlights what they perceive as the biggest risks to their own businesses’ growth prospects. Conducted by consultancy PwC since 1998, it also holds sway in Davos. I’ve been involved in that report as well when I used to work for the organization.

In sharp contrast to the World Economic Forum’s risk report, the CEO survey found that the top three risks to business this year are overregulation, trade conflicts and uncertain economic growth.

Economic or ethical

What explains such a big difference in how these groups see the greatest threats?

I wanted to look at this question more deeply, beyond one year’s assessment, so I did a simple analysis of 14 years of data generated by the two reports. My findings are only inferences from publicly available data, and it should be noted that the two surveys have different methodologies and ask different questions that may shape respondents’ answers.

A key difference I observed is that business leaders tend to think in economic terms first and ethical terms second. That is, businesses, as you’d expect, tend to focus on their short-term economic situation, while civil society and other experts in the Global Risk Report focus on longer-term social and environmental consequences.

For example, year after year, CEOs have named a comparatively stable set of narrow concerns. Overregulation is among the main three threats in all but one of the years – and is frequently at the top of the list. Availability of talent, government fiscal concerns and the economy were also frequently mentioned over the past 14 years.

In contrast, the Global Risk Report tends to reflect a greater evolution in the types of risks the world faces, with concerns about the environment and existential threats growing increasingly prominent over the past five years, while economic and geopolitical risks have faded after dominating in the late 2000s.

A philosophical perspective

Risk surveys are useful tools for understanding what matters to CEOs and civil society. Philosophy is useful for considering why their priorities differ, and whose are likelier to be right.

Fundamentally, risks are about interests. Businesses want a minimum of regulations so they can make more money today. Experts representing constituencies beyond just business place a greater emphasis on the common good, now and in the future.

When interests are in tension, philosophy can help us sort between them. And while I’m sympathetic to CEOs’ desire to run their businesses without regulatory interference, I’m concerned that these short-term economic considerations often impede long-term ethical goals, such as looking after the well-being of the environment.

An uncertain world

Experts agree on at least one thing: The world faces dire risks....

AHA OMG interaction matthew

https://yyy.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jan/22/wealth-gap-widening-for-more-than-70-per-cent-of-global-population-researchers-find

guk

Inequality and development

Wealth gap widening for more than 70% of global population, researchers find

Policymakers urged to act on climate and bridge digital divide as study shows soaring inequality is affecting millions

Sam Phan

Wed 22 Jan 2020 07.46 EST

Social and economic disparities have soared even in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, where inequality had been falling in recent decades, found the World Social Report.

If nothing is done to address the problem, the prosperity and development of millions of people could be damaged.

“If we don’t act now, the entrenched inequalities that are already there will worsen,” said Elliott Harris, chief economist and assistant secretary general for economic development in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

But he added: “What is changing now is that there is a greater awareness that this inequality is having consequences and [causing] social upheavals. It’s something we’ve known for some time, but it hasn’t gotten the recognition.”

The report said that while international inequality has declined in relative terms, the absolute gap between the average incomes of people living in high- and low-income countries has doubled since 1990.

Rising inequalities are benefiting the wealthiest. Top income tax rates have fallen in all countries, which have made tax systems less progressive. In wealthier countries, the top income-tax rates have dropped from 66% in 1981 to 43% in 2018.

The income gap has been exacerbated by the climate crisis. The report estimates that the gap between the richest and poorest 10% of the global population is 25% larger than it would be in a world without global warming.

The UN said better use of technology, tackling the climate crisis and improved management of migration and urbanisation could help reduce the inequalities, a target of the UN global goals.

Climate, inequality, hunger: which global problems would you fix first?

Almost 87% of people living in wealthy countries have internet access compared with 19% in the least developed countries, creating a digital divide that will increasingly marginalise low-skilled workers, said the report.

It added that the impact of the climate crisis threatened to reverse progress on reducing inequality, as the communities most affected by the impact of global heating will find it increasingly hard to escape poverty.

A transition towards greener economies could help combat inequality, said the researchers. Although millions of lower-skilled jobs in carbon-intensive industries will be lost, carefully designed adaptation strategies could create 24m new jobs, they predicted.

Meanwhile, better urban planning and city management could improve the lives of more than 1 billion people who currently live in slums, often with little access to decent sanitation, clean water or energy.

Better migration policies and lower transaction costs for family remittances would also allow millions of people to pursue better opportunities and improve their lives, added the report.

“It is difficult to address inequality, but it can be successfully reduced. We need to agree on the need and the policy, and then address it,” said Harris.

“This is not [our] destiny. If we act now through policy, we can deliver better outcomes.”

---

omg

130 intercept

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/ozone-layer-epa-united-states-pollution/

OZONE LAYER RECOVERY IS BEING UNDERMINED BY POLLUTION FROM U.S. COMPANIES

Sharon Lerner

The EPA has declined to consider the ozone-depleting potential of chemicals released by U.S. companies.

also brought back acid rain?!

ref 1

The Christianization of U.S. Foreign Policy

Behind President Trump's Twitter theatrics, there's a growing theme to American diplomacy.

By KATHRYN JOYCE

March 25, 2019

https://newrepublic.com/article/153387/christianization-us-foreign-policy

Last Thursday, Donald Trump announced, via Twitter, a radical shift in foreign policy, saying it was time to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied territory of Golan Heights, seized from Syria in 1981. As international headlines quickly pointed out, the tweet contradicted both international law and a UN resolution; seemed a transparent gift to embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, just weeks before he faces re-election amid a corruption scandal; and cheered Israeli conservatives hoping to have Israeli control of the West Bank recognized as well. Upon hearing the news, NBC reported, Netanyahu hugged U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was visiting Israel as part of a five-day tour of the Middle East. Less discussed was the way in which the tweet capped off a week showcasing the Trump administration’s favored relationship with American evangelicals.

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The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), among Pompeo’s traveling press team, sat down with the secretary in Jerusalem, and breathlessly reported something quite different from the mainstream press’s legalistic coverage: that Trump might just be “a modern-day Esther, poised to defend Israel and save the Jewish people.”

To convince U.S. evangelicals to overlook Trump’s personal failings, the president has previously been compared to Persian King Cyrus, a nonbeliever in the Bible who nonetheless became an instrument for fulfilling God’s will, conquering Babylon and allowing Jews to return to Israel. The comparison has also resonated elsewhere: Last March, an Israeli organization minted a coin pairing images of Cyrus and Trump, while Netanyahu underscored the comparison in a Washington, D.C., speech thanking Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

Pompeo’s statement elevated the stakes, referring to the biblical story of Queen Esther, who used her beauty and wiles to prevent a massacre of Persian Jews—a feat commemorated in the annual Jewish holiday of Purim, also celebrated last Thursday. Netanyahu, too, declared Trump’s tweet “a miracle of Purim.”

Republicans have ventured the comparison before, with both Sarah Palin and George W. Bush. The story of Esther, journalist Sarah Posner has observed, has long been used by Christian Zionists—evangelicals who believe the return of Christ depends on an apocalyptic scenario in which Jews return to Israel, and convert to Christianity—to argue for an invasion of Iran.

For Trump, it’s a particularly audacious comparison. “Esther’s story is that of a young Jewish woman in the ‘harem’ of the Persian king, and through her wit, grace, and charm ends up as queen—and able to avert the bloodlust of an antisemitic minister,” Steven Gardiner, an anthropologist and senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, wrote to me via email. “In other words, Esther was a woman placed in the terrifying and untenable position of sexual servitude, but nonetheless managed to save her people. No one less resembles that position than Donald Trump.

Much ink has already been spilled over the bargain Christian leaders in the United States made regarding Trump, backing a candidate with a highly questionable personal life in exchange for Supreme Court seats. Less noticed is how the Trump administration, particularly when it comes to foreign policy under the deeply religious supervision of Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, continually pitches itself to the Christian Right.

Last Monday, just before his departure to the Middle East, Secretary Pompeo held a press call about international religious freedom. Domestically, the Trump administration has chiefly interpreted religious freedom as a matter of exemptions to laws protecting LGBTQ people and women’s healthcare, or efforts to lift restrictions on churches’ political campaigning. Internationally, religious freedom has meant a laser-like focus on Christian persecution, with scant attention to the plight of any other religious minorities: The October release of North Carolina pastor Andrew Brunson, detained for two years in Turkey on terrorism charges, was one high-profile victory.

Monday’s call excluded the entire State Department press corps, restricting participation to a small group of “faith-based” media outlets. When an invitation was accidentally sent to a member of the mainstream press and then rescinded, bringing the exclusive briefing to light, the department doubled down, refusing to provide a transcript of the call or a list of its participants, and arguing that, as a roundtable discussion targeted at “audience-specific media,” it wasn’t subject to normal transparency practices.

Journalists as well as former State Department spokesperson John Kirby were appalled. “These officials are public servants,” Kirby told CNN. “What they say—in its entirety—is inherently of public interest.” Particularly, he added, on a topic as “universally relevant as religious freedom in the Middle East.”

One of the media organizations on the call, Religion News Service (not itself a faith-based publication, but a secular outlet that covers the religion beat), reported a partial list of other participants, including the Jewish wire service Jewish Telegraphic Agency; the center-right Jewish magazine Algemeiner; the evangelical World Magazine; and two Catholic publications, Americamagazine and the newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City.

Notably missing from this line-up were any Muslim media organizations, remarkable given the call’s reported inclusion of the administration’s soon-to-be-released Israel-Palestine peace plan.

---

Monday’s call wasn’t the first time that Pompeo’s department has privileged faith-based media over mainstream reporters. Last July, just ahead of the department’s first-ever “ministerial for international religious freedom,” as New York Times religion reporter Elizabeth Dias noted on Twitter, Pompeo had sit-down interviews with four evangelical news outlets, including the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN),before a press conference call where evangelical publications World Magazine and Christianity Today were picked first for questions, and mainstream newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, were only invited to pose questions at the end of the call. And evangelical figures have also had enhanced access to policy decisions. In early March, the administration hosted a meeting with evangelical leaders—including prominent (and deeply controversial) Christian Zionist leaders like Pastor John Hagee—to “hear any concerns and red lines” they might have on a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, according to an Axios source, and to reassure them that any plan would protect Israeli interests.

CBN’s sit-down with Mike Pompeo was only the latest episode in the network’s close relationship with the Trump administration—one that, as Al Jazeera argued last fall, is just as mutually beneficial as the better-known link to Fox & Friends, but is often overlooked as a part of the administration’s effective state media because of the niche audience it targets. CBN’s audience, and its interests, both help explain the administration’s policy moves and may exert influence on them, appealing to a president known for being easily swayed by flattery.

CBN’s stated mission is to ready the U.S. “for the coming of Jesus Christ.” To that end, it focuses heavily on Middle East issues. It airs the weekly program Jerusalem Dateline, and regularly features guests like Joel Rosenberg, the author of a series of Middle East-set evangelical apocalyptic or political thriller novels and a member of Pompeo’s inner circle, who has helped broker interviews between the Secretary and the network. Earlier this month, Rosenberg appeared on CBN to discuss his latest work offiction, The Persian Gamble, which posits that Iran used U.S. money to buy North Korean nukes. Rosenberg said he’d recently explained the book’s plot to President Trump. “How do you know that’s not happening already?” Trump apparently replied.

The steady undercurrent to CBN’s focus is the Christian Zionist conviction that the return of Christ depends on a specific scenario involving the return of Jews to Israel. It’s a belief that Pompeo seems to share, having told a Kansas church audience in 2015 to keep fighting “until the rapture.”

Even amid an administration stacked with evangelical staffers and advisors, Pompeo stands out. As former CIA director he described the “war on terror” as a holy war and said the U.S. “worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.” He now readily tells audiences about how he keeps a Bible open on his State Department desk to remind him of God’s truth. One of the driving motivators of Pompeo’s State Department increasingly seems to be what Gardiner calls “well-documented beliefs in the prophetic necessity of the establishment of a ‘Greater Israel’ in order to usher in the End Times”—hardly a stabilizing central principle in an era of nuclear risk. Meanwhile, holding “separate interviews with religious broadcasters,” Gardiner pointed out, means “reaching the white evangelicals who are the single most unwavering part of the voting base of an embattled president.”

It’s easy to get distracted by the secular spectacle of Trump’s manic Twitter feed, filled with arbitrary bits of outrage or lavish praise, depending on whichever leader has flattered him lately. But as last week showed, better than others, there’s a more disciplined administrative force at work behind the scenes, crafting an intensely ideological foreign policy.

Kathryn Joyce is a contributing editor at The New Republic and author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption

---

omg wtf? seems like bizarroworld but rudy, perry? igor and parnas fruman all trying to do energy side deals // resource curse?!

“Erik Prince, a major Republican donor and founder of controversial security firm Blackwater, has been referred to the U.S. Treasury Department for possible sanctions violations tied to his recent trip to Venezuela for a meeting with a top aide of President Nicolas Maduro,” according to the AP.

WaPo also reported that Rudy Giuliani was involved in a back-channel negotiation with Maduro that would “reopen resource-rich Venezuela to business.” The effort, according to the report, “provides another example of how Giuliani used his private role to insert himself into foreign diplomacy, alarming administration officials confused about whose interests he was representing.”

*****

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/they-loan-you-money-then-they-get-a-warrant-for-your-arrest/

They loan you money. Then they get a warrant for your arrest

Written by Anjali Tsui / ProPublica December 3, 2019

Cecila Avila was finishing a work shift at a Walmart. David Gordon was at church. Darrell Reese was watching his granddaughter at home. Jessica Albritton had pulled into the parking lot at her job, where she packed and shipped bike parts.

All four were arrested by an armed constable, handcuffed and booked into jail. They spent anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days behind bars before being released after paying a few hundred dollars in bail or promising to appear in court.

None of the four, who live in northern Utah and were detained last year, had committed a crime. They had each borrowed money at high interest rates from a local lender called Loans for Less and were sued for owing sums that ranged from $800 to $3,600. When they missed a court date, the company obtained a warrant for their arrest.

Avila was handcuffed and marched down the main aisle in the Walmart in front of customers and co-workers. “It was the most embarrassing thing,” said Avila, 30, who has worked at the store for eight years. At the time of the arrest, Loans for Less had applied to garnish her wages. “It just didn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Why am I being arrested for it?”

It’s against the law to jail someone because of an unpaid debt. Congress banned debtors prisons in 1833. Yet, across the country, debtors are routinely threatened with arrest and sometimes jailed, and the practices are particularly aggressive in Utah. (ProPublica recently chronicled how medical debt collectors are wielding similar powers in Kansas.)

Technically, debtors are arrested for not responding to a court summons requested by the creditor. But for many low-income people, who are not familiar with court proceedings, lack access to transportation, child care options or time off, or move frequently and thus may not receive notifications, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Reese, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran, said he missed a hearing because he couldn’t afford to put gas in his car. Gordon, 46, said he was never personally notified of the court date. Avila and Albritton, 32, said they couldn’t take time off work.

:{:{}:

In Utah, payday lenders and similar companies that offer high-interest, small-dollar loans dominate small claims court. Loans for Less, for example, filed 95% of the small claims cases in South Ogden, a suburban city of 17,000 about a half-hour north of Salt Lake City on the interstate, in fiscal year 2018, according to state data.

:{:{}:

Across Utah, high-interest lenders filed 66% of all small claims cases heard between September 2017 and September 2018, according to a new analysis of court records conducted by a team led by Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and the financial services director at the Consumer Federation of America, and David McNeill, a legal data consultant and CEO of Docket Reminder.

Companies can sue for up to $11,000 in Utah’s small claims courts, which are stripped of certain formalities: There are rarely lawyers, judges are not always legally trained and the rules of evidence don’t apply.

Lenders file thousands of cases every year. When defendants don’t show up — and they often don’t — the lenders win by default. Once a judgment is entered, companies can garnish borrowers’ paychecks and seize their property. If borrowers fail to attend a supplemental hearing to answer questions about their income and assets, companies can ask the court to issue a bench warrant for their arrest.

Arrest warrants were issued in an estimated 3,100 small claims cases during the period studied by Peterson’s team. Almost all of the warrants — 91% — were issued in cases filed by payday, auto title or other high-interest lenders. The number of people who are jailed appears to be small. The state does not track the information, but ProPublica examined a sampling of court records and identified at least 17 people who were jailed over the course of 12 months.

Most people scramble to meet bail to avoid being incarcerated. Others, like Avila, Gordon and Albritton, are booked into jail and held until they pay. They often borrow from friends, family, bail bonds companies and even take on new payday loans.

“Bail” has a different meaning in Utah than it does in other states — one that tilts the power even more in the direction of lenders and other creditors.In 2014, state legislators passed a law that made it possible for creditors to get access to bail money posted in civil cases. Prior to that, bail money would return to the defendant. Now, it is routinely transferred to high-interest lenders. The law has transformed the state’s power to incarcerate into a powerful tool to guarantee that loan companies get paid....

---

DHS created a fake university near Detroit as part of a sting operation targeting foreign students — and around 250 have been arrested so far

Alex Henderson

Complaints from immigrant groups about the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) didn’t start with President Donald Trump: there were plenty of deportations under former President Barack Obama,…

---

GAME OVER?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/welcome-to-the-new-mainstream-gop-conservative-website-delivers-sobering-news-about-republicans-descent-into-the-alt-right/

no lnx

'Welcome to the new mainstream GOP': Conservative website delivers sobering news about Republicans' descent into the alt-right

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

Founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol in December 2018, The Bulwark has become a refuge for conservatives who are disdainful of Donald Trump's presidency. And contributor Laura K. Field, in a November 27 article, delivers some sobering news to The Bulwark's right-wing anti-Trump readers: the alt-right fringe has become the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Most of The Bulwark's readers probably knew that already, but Field (who has held faculty positions at Georgetown University and American University) offers a lot of evidence to drive the point home. Under Trump, Field laments, alt-right figures likeSteve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller have become "the face of today's conservatism and today's Republican Party."

Field demonstrates the prominence that extremists have achieved in the GOP by discussing an event held during Donald Trump Jr.'s recent book tour in support of "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us." The writer notes that when the tour took Trump Jr. to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Trump Jr. and the group Turning Point USA were described as "mainstream conservatives" - and Trump Jr. was heckled by supporters of antisemite Nick Fuentes.

"This shift in language represents a victory for Don Jr., as well as for the extremists who attacked him," Field explains. "Now that Junior has been upstaged by the neo-fascist far right, he gets to be cast as mainstream. And if Turning Point USA counts as establishment, it means that the extremists aren't so far out there anymore. It's a win-win for them all."

Field goes on to say that many of the people who defined "movement conservatism" in the past have been marginalized in the modern GOP.

"You don't have to lionize the old GOP to see that many of the think tanks, magazines and intellectuals that made up movement conservatism since the Reagan years have slid into irrelevance under Trump, while talk radio and Fox News have grown in influence," Field observes. "Individuals and organizations dedicated to defending Trump and promoting Trumpism have prospered."

Field also laments that recently, "e-mails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller's white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation."

The leaked e-mails that Field is referring to were exchanges between Miller and journalist Katie McHugh, formerly of Breitbart News, in 2015 and 2016. Some of the e-mails show Miller recommending that McHugh use white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance as sources of information.

Field wraps up her article on a troubling note, warning that extremists such as Fuentes won't be disappearing from the GOP anytime soon.

"The extreme environmentalists and Green New Dealers are fighting for the future of life on this planet; Nick Fuentes and his ilk want a white Christian ethnostate," Field writes. "That conservatives today aren't reeling at this difference tells us all we need to know about the successes of the alt-right…. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new mainstream GOP."

could not make this up

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/sen-inhofe-is-just-fine-with-flooding-his-neighbors-as-long-as-it-keeps-his-lake-view/

no lnx

Sen. Inhofe is just fine with flooding his neighbors as long as it keeps his lake view

Written by Sarah Okeson /DC Report November 27, 2019

Sen Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, tucked an amendment into the $750 billion defense spending bill that would benefit fellow wealthy homeowners at Grand Lake in northeast Oklahoma by keeping lake levels high but is expected to worsen flooding in nearby Miami, Okla.

The amendment, which starts on page 1,183 of the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, would limit the ability of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to say how high the lake should be. The Grand River Dam Authority, which has board members who also own lake houses, is licensed by the commission to operate the dam.

“He’s helping his buddies to make sure the lake is full during summer so those very big boats do well,” said Rebecca Jim of Local Environmental Action Demanded which put up a billboard in Miami criticizing Inhofe.

Grand Lake O’ the Cherokees was created in 1940, when the federal government’s New Deal-era Public Works Administration built the Pensacola Dam on the Grand River. The 66-mile-long lake is so beloved by the wealthy and powerful of Oklahoma that one of its subdivisions is called Governors Retreat. Inhofe, a climate-change denier and vocal anti-environmentalist with an estimated net worth is $4.5 million, built a vacation house at Grand Lake in 1962. Former Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and her husband bought a second home on Grand Lake in 2011. Dam authority board members Pete Churchwell, Jim Richie and Tom Kimball also have lake houses.

“For the better part of my career in the United States Senate I have been working to maintain higher lake levels on Grand,” Inhofe wrote the commission in 2016.

Law professor Richard Painter said the annual defense bill has been used before to try to get environmentally questionable projects through Congress. In 2018, the Senate defense bill included an amendment that would nullify lawsuits over a land exchange for PolyMet Mining Co. to build a copper-nickel mine in Minnesota. That provision was removed before the bill went to the president.

“That’s something that should not be dealt with in a defense appropriations bill,” said Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.

The federal financial conflict of interest law exempts members of Congress, the president and the vice president. Miami officials learned about Inhofe’s amendment just before the July 4 holiday from the press.

“It’s just as unfair as it can be,” said Miami City Manager Dean Kruithof.

Since the early 1990s, Miami has flooded more than two dozen times, most recently in May. A 2015 study Miami paid for found that the dam worsened flooding.

“The economic and social fabric of the community is slowly being destroyed,” said Miami Mayor Rudy Schultz.

Natasha McKibben spent her oldest son’s eighth birthday packing up their house near Miami, shortly before it flooded in 2007, causing $30 million to $40 million in damage to Miami and the surrounding area. Some of her neighbors’ houses are still vacant.

“We had a FEMA trailer for probably two months before we could get back in the house,” McKibben said.

Miami officials had hoped to address flooding problems with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The license for the dam runs through March 2022. The dam authority now wants to extend the license until Dec. 31, 2026.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/explosive-report-shows-coal-industry-was-aware-of-the-impending-climate-crisis-as-far-back-as-1966/

no lnx twt

Explosive report shows coal industry was aware of the impending climate crisis as far back as 1966

Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams November 22, 2019

A new report shows conclusively that the coal industry was aware of the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels as far back as 1966—and, like other sectors of the fossil fuel industry with knowledge of the consequences of their business model, did next to nothing about it.

The revelation was published in an article by Élan Young at HuffPost Friday.

“It wasn’t just big oil that knew about climate change decades ago,” tweeted HuffPost editor Kate Sheppard.

Kate Sheppard

@kate_sheppard

It wasn’t just big oil that knew about climate change decades ago, @YoungElan reports in @HuffPost today https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coal-industry-climate-change_n_5dd6bbebe4b0e29d7280984f?g4 … #exxonknew #coalknew

Coal Knew, Too

A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change.

huffpost.com

The story uses a discovery by Chris Cherry, professor of civil engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to show industry foreknowledge of the ramifications of extractive technologies over 50 years ago. Cherry found the evidence in a 1966 copy of the Mining Congress Journal he was given by his father-in-law.

Dave Anderson

@cleantechfacts

A 1966 article in the Mining Congress Journal shows that #CoalKnew about the climate risks of burning fossil fuels decades before the industry engaged in a campaign of climate denial that continues today https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coal-industry-climate-change_n_5dd6bbebe4b0e29d7280984f …

In the journal, James R. Garvey, president of now-defunct research firm Bituminous Coal Research Inc., describes the future consequences of coal.

“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” Garvey wrote. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”

Garvey added that the result of the changes in climate could include melting icecaps and rising seas.

“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” wrote Garvey.

...

API KNEW

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/21/headlines/report_oil_industry_knew_about_dangers_of_climate_change_in_1954

Leaders of the U.S. fossil fuel industry knew as early as 1954 that carbon dioxide pollution accumulating in the atmosphere posed a growing threat to life on Earth, but failed to warn the public. That’s according to new research published by Stanford historian Benjamin Franta in the journal Nature Climate Change. Franta found that in the 1950s the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a study by a Caltech scientist which concluded global CO2 levels had risen by 5 percent in a century. It’s the earliest known industry-funded research into climate change, and the findingsled in part to a 1965 report by President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee on the threat posed by global warming.Speaking to members of an oil industry conference that year, Frank Ikard, then-president of the American Petroleum Institute, warned, “This report unquestionably will fan emotions, raise fears, and bring demand for action. The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.” The American Petroleum Institute would instead go on to fund decades of climate change denial while fighting efforts to switch to renewable energy sources.

---

omg

ogalalla aquifer

Simmons’s company Waste Control Specialists LLC, a subsidiary of the publicly traded Valhi Inc.,

texas nuke dump permit perry

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omg

new 1119

1119 LCV

...story is still developing. It's just been leaked out of the EPA that the Trump administration is preparing to drop a new rule that will disallow the use of vast quantities of data in its policy making.

In effect, the new rule could virtually end meaningful implementation of significant parts of the Clean Air Act and many more bedrock environmental laws....

details: The new rule would prevent policy makers from using any study if the study's data, code, and models aren't made public.

It sounds innocuous enough, but in practice, the EPA currently relies on public health studies based on confidential medical information — data that is incredibly private and should never be made public. These public health studies are absolutely critical to implementing virtually every law that protects the water we drink and the air we breathe.

Scientists within the EPA are raising the alarm. This policy has been designed and pushed forward by lobbyists for the oil industry and big tobacco. Politically-appointed leaders within the EPA have pushed aside the agency's Science Advisory Boardin an end-run to stop the EPA from fulfilling its mission.

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Trump administration jailed ‘unprecedented’ 69,550 migrant kids in past year: report

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

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OMFG

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/that-1970s-scourge-acid-rain-is-back/

1970s scourge acid rain is back

Sarah Okeson / DC Report

Starting in the 1970s acid rain turned hundreds of lakes and streams in Adirondack Park in upstate New York so acidic that fish could not survive. Acid rain can be…

no lnx

That 1970s scourge acid rain is back

Written by Sarah Okeson / DC ReportOctober 26, 2019

Starting in the 1970s acid rain turned hundreds of lakes and streams in Adirondack Park in upstate New York so acidic that fish could not survive. Acid rain can be so toxic that it etches paint off cars.

The good news: some naturally reproducing trout were recently found in one body of water in the Adirondacks. Lake Colden had been without such naturally grown fish for 32 years. This revival comes after decades of government work to reduce the toxic air emissions that cause acid rain.

The bad news: Team Trump seems determined to create a comeback for acid rain. That would mean 500 other Adirondack ponds and lakes would continue without naturally breeding fish. Worse, some of the sprawling park’s 2,300 other bodies of water might also become too toxic for other wildlife such as crayfish, salamanders and frogs. And because acid rain leaches aluminum in the soil it also kills trees.

For people in the Northeast, it would also mean more asthma and heart disease as people breathe in air laced with greater amounts of sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas that causes acid rain.

The Trump EPA wants to squash Obama era rules that would force owners of electric power plants to clean up their toxic wastes.

To understand how Team Trump helps polluters and hurts everyone else, consider the coal-burning Martin Lake Power Plant in east Texas. It spews more sulfur dioxide than any other power plant in America. Last year it spit out 56,198 tons of sulfur dioxide, a 54% increase over 2017.

Acid rain, then and now.(From Environmental Defense Fund)]

Now the Trump EPA wants to squash Obama era rules that would force owners of this and other power plants to clean up their toxic wastes. Owners who escape these clean-up costs reap bigger profits. The rest of us pay the price: more sickness, shorter lives for some and hundreds of lakes with no fish surrounded by dying forests.

To help polluters escape those costs the Trump administration puts executives, lawyers and lobbyists for polluting companies in charge of various units of the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies. Instead of enforcement of clean air laws, Team Trump runs a protection racket for polluters.

Plant Owners Identified

The Texas power plant is owned by Luminant Generation Co., part of Vistra Energy. One of Vistra’s lobbying firms once employed a lawyer who was hired to head the Trump EPA air office. Vistra is one of nine politically connected polluters being scrutinized by Congressional investigators. In 2018 alone it gave more than $101,000 to members of Congress at a three-to-one ratio favoring Republicans.

The lawyer was Bill Wehrum, who oversaw the Trump EPA’s air policy office until he resigned in June during a federal ethics investigation.Previously Wehrum was a partner at Hunton & Williams where he made $2.1 million. That law firm is now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. A Congressional report dubbed the law firm “industry’s secret pipeline to EPA.”

Vistra Energy paid $140,000 in lobbying fees last year to Hunton Andrews Kurth.

Wehrum was accused of repeatedly violating his ethics pledge and legal duty to refrain from EPA matters involving his former clients. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, in May filed a detailed 14-page complaint against Wehrum with the EPA’s acting inspector general.

Other big sulfur dioxide polluters include DTE Energy Co., represented by Hunton Andrews Kurth in a long battle with the EPA over pollution from its coal-fired power plant in Monroe, Mich. David Harlow, attorney for the EPA Office of Air and Radiation, previously represented DTE for Hunton Andrews Kurth.

Lobbyists As Regulators

Soon after Harlow and Wehrum joined the EPA, the agency changed its position on a core issue in DTE’s case, adopting the company’s view.

A slightly different pro-polluter tactic was adopted for the power plant in east Texas. With former lobbyists for polluters in charge, the EPA made a mistake during the Obama years when it declared that parts of two counties near the Martin Lake plant exceeded the standard for sulfur dioxide emissions.

Trump’s EPA now wants to say the two-county area is “unclassifiable.” That would allow the plant to continue spewing tons of toxic air.

Because of actions assisting polluters, environmentalists fear acid rain is back.

While rain typically is slightly acidic with a pH reading of close to 6, acid rain is sometimes 3.2. That may not seem like much because pH is a scale. But acid rain can be more than 200 times more acidic than pollution-free rainfall.

Acid Rain Effects

EPA infographic]

Today 500 of 2,800 lakes and ponds in Adirondack State Park cannot support the plants and aquatic life that once existed in them.

Worse, acid rain can cause people to develop asthma as they breathe in even small concentrations of sulfur dioxide and the tiny particles it can form in the air. And it’s deadly for trees, trout and turtles.

“The numbers are going in the wrong direction,” said William Janeway, executive director of the Adirondack Council, about rising acidity in Northeast rainfall.

Adirondack, a state park, covers more than six million acres, making it bigger than the combined acreage of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Canyon and the Great Smokies National Parks.

When power plants in the heartland burn coal laced with sulfur the toxic waste goes up smokestacks. Prevailing winds that tend to blow eastward then carry pollution from these coal-burning power plants to the Northeast where much of it falls in rain that kills. Team Trump not only thinks that is fine, it wants more acid rain.

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1 link?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-ohios-fascist-pro-nuke-attack-on-democracy-threatens-the-referendum-process-across-the-nation/

no lnx

How Ohio’s fascist pro-nuke attack on democracy threatens the referendum process across the nation

Written by Harvey Wasserman / Common Dreams October 20, 2019

A terrifying series of gestapo-style assaults, petiton buying, bribery, mass media manipulation and systematic intimidation has smacked into the attempt of Ohio citizens to repeal a billion-dollar bailout for two dangerously failing atomic reactors on Lake Erie.

The unprecedented assault threatens the referendum process in Ohio and across the nation.

It also threatens to keep on line two very old, dangerously decayed reactors where melt-downs and explosions could forever contaminate the Great Lakes region and more. (For a full explanation, hear this one-hour discussion).

The story may end Monday, October 21, when signatures are due to qualify an anti-nuclear referendum for the fall 2020 ballot.

It begins with the July passage by the gerrymandered Ohio Legislatureof HB6, a massive bailout scheme designed to subsidize the Perry and Davis-Besse nukes, plus two fifty-year-old coal burners, one of them in Indiana. HB6 does support ten small solar facilities. But it also kills an extremely popular, effective energy efficiency program along with larger subsidies for wind and solar energy in general.

The bailout is vehemently opposed by a large majority of Ohioans, including most of its usually pro-corporate media. Commercial, industrial and environmental groups did mount a massive campaign meant to stop the bill from passing. But with help from Democrats in both houses, the Legislature narrowly approved the bailouts.

Almost immediately, a referendum was filed for repeal. With 265,000 signatures due by October 21, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts began hiring canvassers.

Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State delayed the process as long as possible. He waiting a full 20 days before turning down the first petition submission. He then waited another 20 to certify the second.

But as soon as the referendum supporters began gathering signatures, pro-nuke forces attacked with a fascist assault unlike any other in US history.

First they began running an astonishing wave of TV ads claiming thereferendum was a plot by Chinese Communists to take over Ohio’s electrical grid. The ads feature (they are still running!) hordes of goose-stepping Chinese soldiers, sinister footage of China’s dictator, shuttered US factories, and more.

Accompanied by high-gloss mass mailings, the pro-nuke forces are also running saturation radio ads warning Ohioans to shun all signature gatherers lest they be tracked by sinister communists out to ruin their lives and credit. A toll-free number is offered to those willing to call in the location of any repeal supporters.

But the pro-nuke gestapo has also leapt from mere media manipulation to physical intimidation.When the referendum-gatherers hit the streets, they were confronted by industry “blockers” to tangibly prevent them from doing their job. In one case (as filmed on a security camera) a blocker smacked the cell phone out of the hands of a signature gatherer as he tried to photograph her. Gatherers have widely reported close-up verbal assaults. In some cases as many as three paid blockers have surrounded a single signature gatherer to prevent anyone from coming near to signing a petition.

Because many of the signature gatherers are hired employees, they’re required to register contact information with the state. The pro-nuke mob has assaulted them with threatening phone calls. In some cases they’ve reportedly offered substantial cash payments and airline tickets if they leave the state. One signature gatherer reported being offered $2500 (!) for the day’s accumulated sign-up sheets, which would presumably then be shredded.

Under the circumstances, many now wonder if the pro-referendum forces have been able to accumulate the required 265,000 signatures, plus the many more needed for a traditional cushion. The Republican Secretary of State is certain to discard as many signatures as he can, especially with the micro-managed scrutiny of the nuclear industry.

The ramifications of such an outcome are staggering. It could signal the death of the popular referendum, a cornerstone of the democratic process.

It could also mean two old, uncompetitive, uninsured, un-inspected crumbling atomic reactors highly likely to explode will continue to threaten the entire Great Lakes region for years to come.

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/mike-pompeos-state-department-homepage-advocates-being-a-christian-leader/

no lnx

Mike Pompeo’s State Department homepage advocates ‘being a Christian leader’

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement October 14, 2019

The website of the U.S, Department of State currently features a photograph of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the words, “Being a Christian Leader.”

The link on the State Dept. homepage goes to a video and the text of Pompeo’s speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville, Tennessee on October 11.

Is separation of church and state dead?

The website of the U.S, Department of State currently features a photograph of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the words, “Being a Christian Leader.”

The link on the State Dept. homepage goes to a video and the text of Pompeo’s speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville, Tennessee on October 11.

Secretary Pompeo’s speech focuses on how he leads the Dept. of State as a devout Christian. He says he keeps a Bible open on his desk and refers to it during the day.

That in its self would not be exceptionally disturbing except that Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, has said the Bible “informs everything I do.”

He has said it’s “possible,” when asked if God made Trump president “to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”

And he has said the wars in the Middle East are a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”

Here’s how The New York Times explained Pompeo’s biblical views just this past March:

Studies show that white evangelicals are much more likely than other Americans to believe that Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy. Known as Christian Zionists, they believe God promised the land to the Jews, and that the gathering of Jews in Israel is foretold in the prophecy of the rapture — the ascent of Christians into the kingdom of God.

Mr. Pompeo talks about the rapture. “We will continue to fight these battles,” he said at a “God and Country Rally” in 2015, because there is a “never-ending struggle” until “the rapture.”

An L.A. Times opinion piece, referring to those remarks, said Pompeo “has his eye on an End Times cleansing.”

The State Dept. advertised Pompeo’s speech and even broadcast it live on the State Dept.’s website:

On October 11, @SecPompeo addresses the 2019 American Association of Christian Counselors World Conference in Nashville. Watch live on https://t.co/58Uc9lIgDz or https://t.co/O2lYyHUIHa at 12:00 PM EDT/ 11:00 AM CDT. pic.twitter.com/Ns5e0TyBXa

— Department of State (@StateDept) October 11, 2019

A few responses via Twitter:

Why are Republicans such as William Barr “willing to destroy the norms of both justice &… democracy…? To this observer, it seems it is the overwhelming desire to impose…a theocratic cultural agenda coupled w/ a..brand of capitalism rapidly devolving into a new feudalism.” https://t.co/NwJQu8g92R

— Jennifer Cohn (@jennycohn1) October 14, 2019

Holy Hell. This is the home page of https://t.co/sfyrXv8tpo. pic.twitter.com/FsE3IJBPlf

— Derek DelGaudio (@derek_del) October 14, 2019

Once again, anybody want to dispute my suggestion of an “evangelical caliphate?”https://t.co/hcdYOIZoHq

— I.M Hydrogen (@ChuckGore2) October 14, 2019

separation of church and state uh what https://t.co/uJL0tHlEx5 pic.twitter.com/UIRjsGZzco

— James K. Yu (@jyu_pdx) October 14, 2019

The home page of the State Department right now. If you believe in the separation of church and state, make sure you leave them a comment. https://t.co/bgEKT4oI0a pic.twitter.com/jOCet0avnh

— Juliana Aldous (@jaldous) October 14, 2019

What fresh hell is this?? I do not want religion in my government and I do not want the government in my religion. Separation of church and state protects both. https://t.co/FQdXxdfURW

— Carly B (@carly__bird) October 14, 2019

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omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/punishing-the-poor-for-being-hungry/

no lnx

Punishing the poor for being hungry

Written by David K. Shipler / Washington Monthly October 11, 2019

The United States might be the only country in the world where poverty is considered a moral failing—on the part of the victims, not the society. When conservatives are in charge of government, this judgment infiltrates policy. Republicans move repeatedly to twist regulations around an assumption that the poor don’t want to work and don’t make sound decisions. And when this bias affects children’s nutrition, it can cause lifelong impairment.

In the last year alone, the Trump administration has taken multiple shots at food stamps, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which helped feed about 40 million people last year. The latest change, one week ago, would cut benefits by $4.5 billion over five years. Even in a booming economy, one in seven households with children were considered “food insecure” last year, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2018 survey, meaning that they weren’t sure of having enough food for everyone.

Research in the rapidly advancing field of neuroscience has documented the severe biological assaults caused by inadequate nutrition during sensitive phases of brain development. Numerous studies, compiled in a lengthy National Academy of Sciences report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, portray a devastating landscape of cognitive deficiency resulting from nutritional deprivation. The insufficiency of healthy food during a pregnant woman’s second trimester can reduce the creation of neurons, the brain’s impulse-conducting cells. Malnutrition in the third trimester restricts their maturation and retards the production of branched cells called glia.

Iron is essential to promote the growth of the brain in size and the creation of the nerve-transmitting myelin sheath around the brain’s nerve fibers. The impact of iron deficiency in a baby, therefore, never disappears, even once the deficiency is eliminated. One longitudinal studythat followed children from infancy through adolescence found that they scored lower “in arithmetic achievement and written expression, motor functioning, and some specific cognitive processes such as spatial memory and selective recall.”

Teachers reported that such children displayed “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems.” It is no great leap of logic to see learning disabilities as one result of malnutrition. And a child who can’t do decently in school, who can’t follow half of what a teacher is saying, is more inclined to drop out.

For those Republicans who are moved more by self-interest than empathy, it’s worth noting that high school dropouts earn less that those with degrees, pay less in taxes, have more serious medical problems, and are at higher risk of ending up in jail.

Yet Trump’s people have sought to saddle the $68 billion-a-year SNAP program with restrictions and cuts to the monthly benefits, which now come on debit cards with declining balances, and typically last a family only two or three weeks. Certain regulations that the Trump administration has either enacted or has openly considered would treat needy Americans with suspicion and distrust. For instance:

Officials have considered imposing a drug-testing regime on SNAP recipients (although not on farmers who receive huge federal subsidies as part of the same legislation).

The Agriculture Department, which administers the program, published a rule in July to eliminate states’ option to raise eligibility limits above the federal ceiling, which is 130 percent of the poverty line.

Previously, states could get waivers to enroll families earning more if their housing and child-care expenses soaked up a big percentage of their income. More generous housing subsidies would help, because in many parts of the country, where rent can consume 50 percent or more of a family’s budget, the money for food gets squeezed. The comment period on the rule change ended in September; once adopted, it will cut off about 3 million recipients.

In last week’s action, the administration effectively took away $75 in benefits from one out of every five families by recalculating how housing and utilities costs are figured.

The Trump administration tried to tighten work requirements in this year’s budget, Congress refused, and officials have gone ahead anyway to partially evade the legislative intent. Since 1996, single able-bodied adults with no dependents, up to age 49, could get SNAP benefits for only three months in a three-year period unless they worked or were in job training at least 80 hours a month. States could waive the rule in areas with acute joblessness. Trump wanted to expand the requirement to age 59 and, more harmfully, apply it to those with children over six years old. That was rejected by Republicans and Democrats in Congress. So last December the Agriculture Department did what it could administratively by making it much harder for states to get waivers.

In his 2019 budget, Trump proposed replacing half of a family’s cash grants with a food package of cereal, pasta, peanut butter, canned fruit and vegetables, meat, poultry, and other items deemed good for them. Sending such packages to 40 million people would have been so costly and impractical that the idea collapsed of its own weight. But the notion seemed borne of a patronizing attitude toward the poor, who suffer from a disparaging stereotype that they do not act responsibly.

Clinics treating childhood malnutrition see a broad array of causes. Lack of money is the centerpiece, but lack of knowledge about healthy eating can also contribute to some cases. Health providers find that some parents don’t know how to cook with relatively inexpensive ingredients. New immigrants unfamiliar with American food can be fooled by ads into thinking that Coke and Cheetos are healthy. So can Americans themselves. Lots of junk food is cheap and filling, hence the nation’s epidemic of obesity, which can be a sign of malnutrition.

Supermarkets with fresh, healthy food are scarce in many low-income neighborhoods. A child’s food allergies can be baffling without the funds and information required to have a large assortment of choices on hand. Single parents doing shift work can’t keep track of what their kids are being fed by multiple caregivers. Nor do they usually have the orderly life that allows them to sit children down calmly to feed them, or have a regular family meal.

In other words, childhood malnutrition is created at the confluence of problems and disabilities that magnify and reinforce one another. They must all be addressed. The cognitive impairment that results cannot be attacked by a country that keeps electing officials who entangle the safety net in a set of punitive impulses.

David K. Shipler is a Washington Monthly contributing writer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven books, and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He blogs at The Shipler Report.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-beyonce-wants-to-eat-childrens-brains/

Alex Jones: Beyoncé Wants To Eat Children’s Brains

By Brian Tashman | April 26, 2016 12:50 pm

Yesterday, conspiracy theorist broadcaster Alex Jones claimed that Beyoncé’s new album, “Lemonade,” was part of an attempt by the CIA to promote violence and attacks on the police, which would in turn allow the federal government to take control over local police forces.

He expounded on this theory in an interview yesterday with far-right pastor James David Manning, urging parents to make sure that their kids aren’t exposed to Beyoncé because she intends to eat their brains.

“I’m pro-human so I say, black people, especially, stop killing your kids and get them in church, whatever, take them away from Beyoncé, who wants to eat their brain with the CIA, literally,” Jones said, adding: “Obama literally is the killer of black people and they love him.”

Manning, who said he gave Jones’ statements “three-and-a-half Boom Shakalakas,” said “Beyoncé is going to inspire children all across every spectrum to act in a violent way” while, at the same time, literal demons are “promoting” homosexuality “in our schools and in our institutions.”

Jones said that he even saw with his own eyes“literal, devil-worshiping communists”demonstrating in favor of abortion rights turn into satanic lizards: “The black people have a green tone, the white people have a green tone, they are turning into lizards or something.”

[vid]

The InfoWars commentator said that musicians like Beyoncé and Kesha are funded by nefarious actors “to be anti-family, anti-police.”

Beyoncé’s new music videos, Jones said, “are creating a Jezebel spirit injected into little girls to just be hateful and crazy and unhappy and make sure they die alone.”

Tags: Alex JonesJames David Manning

Law Enforcement for Rent (note series, gov't etc)

How Special Interests Fund Climate Policy through State Attorneys General

Christopher C. Horner • August 28, 2018

Author’s Note

This paper is based on documents obtained over two and a half years fromopen records requests and, in some cases, subsequent litigation. Due to the volume of records, not all cited records are included in the body of this paper. Key documents are provided in the paper’s appendix, which can be accessed at CEI.org. The complete collection of documents cited in this paper is available at ClimateLitigationWatch.org, a project of the nonprofit public interest law firm Government Accountability & Oversight.

Executive Summary

This paper details an extensive and elaborate campaign using electivelaw enforcement offices, in coordination with major donors and activist pressure groups, to attain a policy agenda that failed through the democratic process. The plan is revealed in emails and other public records obtained during two and a half years of requests under state open records laws. Most are being released now for the first time. Many were obtained only by court order in the face of a determined and coordinated resistance that one deputy attorney general foresaw, expressing early concerns over “an affirmative obligation to always litigate” requests looking into the effort.The paper details how donor-financed governance has expanded into dangerous and likely unconstitutional territory: state attorney general (AG) offices.

The plan traces back to 2012 when activists agreed to seek “a single sympathetic attorney general” to assist their cause. AGs began subpoenaing private parties’ records in service of a campaign of litigation against opponents of their climate policy agenda. The public records date to a July 2015 email in which Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists confided the group’s involvement with AGs.

Those public records reveal the following:(a) donors introduced plaintiffs’ lawyers to AG offices (OAGs),

(b) a slideshow tour by plaintiffs’ lawyers recruiting OAGs to the effort, and

(c) senior attorneys from OAGs flying in—some at taxpayer expense and others on the donors’ tab, which had been run through a pressure group— for a briefing with “prospective funders” about “potential state causes of action against major carbon producers.” One presenter described this briefing as a“secret meeting.”It was secret enough that one AG litigated to withhold the agenda— under implausible claims of privilege—for a year and a half before being compelled by a court to release the lineup for what turned out to have been an AG-assisted fundraiser.

Those public records reveal the anatomy of what began as an “informal coalition” of AGs to use the legal system in pursuit of anovertly political agenda in coordination with activists and plaintiffs’ lawyers. That coalition disbanded under open records and media scrutiny, but it has now reconstituted through a program by which donors fund, privately hire, and place investigators and prosecutors in AG offices. It uses a nonprofit organization to pass the funding through and to provide the OAGs with a network of “pro bono” attorneys and public relations services. In return, OAGs provide office space to the privately hired prosecutors; agree they are there to “advanc[e] progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions”; and provide regular reports about their work.

Led and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this scheme hires “Research Fellows,” which it then places as activist “Special Assistant Attorneys General.” All of the participating OAGs had to promise that this work would not get done but for this private funding. All OAGs also certified they are not violating the law by accepting privately funded prosecutors. At best, as several OAGs tacitly admit, this unprecedented arrangement operates in a gray area with neither prohibition nor authority. One state where the scheme is arguably illegal is New York, where disgraced former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had a leading and organizing role at every stage of the campaign this paper describes.

The New York OAG openly boasted to a donor that its “need” for privately funded prosecutors was driven in part by the “significant strain on staff resources” that had been caused by its “non- litigation advocacy”—that described as its having “led” the resistance to the Trump administration. Importantly, the NYOAG also cited its campaign “building models for two different types of common law cases to seek compensation” from industries for supposedly having caused global warming; moreover, it “needs additional attorney resources to assist with this project.”On these bases and with a claim to having statutory authority to enter the unprecedented arrangement—a claim which on its face appears to be an invention—the NYOAG was awarded not one but two privately underwritten prosecutors.

This is the most dangerous example of a modus operandi we have found: it uses nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors can support elected officials to, in turn, use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors. It also uses resources that legislatures will not provide and that donors cannot legally provide directly. The budget for climate policy work alone is in the tens of millions of dollars per year.

Across various levels of government—including mayors and governors—the bulk of this money is budgeted for pass-through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and off-the-books consultants, report writers, and public relations (PR) firms that are hired through an NGO. The NGO takes a percentage as its fee (up to 24 percent in some cases). Another component involves privately hiring and then placing in-house, non- official personnel as advisors when they are actually employed by a donor’s group.

The extension of this billion-dollar per year climate industry to privately fund AG investigations sets a dangerous precedent. It represents private interests commandeering the state’s police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda and to hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process’s rejection of a political agenda.

As a subsequent report will affirm, this model of using nonprofit groups as cutouts for donors to finance elected officials’ activism is, in fact, widely adopted generally by the axisof donors, elected officials, and NGOs and by the climate litigation industryspecifically. The de facto law enforcement for hire by private interests raises concerns beyond mere political opportunism, obvious appearances of impropriety, or even compliant 501(c)3s that seeminglyrent out their tax-exempt status on behalf ofactivist donors.

The use of this approach by AGs carries legal, ethical, and constitutionalimplications, as well as for the integrity of law enforcement and the constitutional policy process. The public–private partnership of law enforcement for hire revealed in this report, in which the partnership uses public office to expend resources not appropriated or approved by their legislatures, raises significant constitutional and other legal issues—as well as ethics concerns—and should be the subject of prompt and serious legislative oversight.

Introduction

BEFORE YOU GASP, PLEASE NOTE that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”1 So wrote Dan Carol, a senior aide to California Governor Jerry Brown(D), on October 3, 2017, to his colleagues and staff members for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) and Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) regarding charitable foundation spending that promotes their climate policy agenda (see Figure 1). This figure dwarfs spending in opposition to that agenda—efforts to portray matters otherwise notwithstanding.2

Carol offered this sum to make his case that $50 million per year is reasonable to ask so donors can privately underwrite an off-the-books network of “support functions” for a handful of governors’ climate policy advocacy.

In further support of his position, Carol attached a “draft agenda, presentation slides, and budget worksheet.”Those items are among a large cache of public records that were obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), along with other public policy groups, and that detail and propose the exploitation of a “plethora of funder interest” in secretly bankrolling the public office holders’ use of their positions to take a more aggressive role concerning climate politics and policy.

This years-long campaign by substantial, left-leaning donors revealed in Carol’s email correspondence and in other emails produced under state open records laws has now expanded into dangerous and likely unconstitutional territory. Led and funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this scheme centers

..[long]

i put this in a record number of nodes, means what?

not so much suppressed as ignored

trump epa fail

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-total-disgrace-outrage-as-trump-epa-says-it-wont-ban-pesticide-linked-to-brain-damage-in-children

no lnx

' A total disgrace’: Outrage as Trump EPA says it won’t ban pesticide linked to brain damage in children

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams July 19, 2019

In a move environmentalists denounced as yet another case of the Trump administration putting industry profits over public health, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Thursday that it will not ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to brain damage in children.

“By allowing chlorpyrifos to stay in our fruits and vegetables, Trump’s EPA is breaking the law and neglecting the overwhelming scientific evidence that this pesticide harms children’s brains,” Patti Goldman, attorney with Earthjustice said in a statement. “It is a tragedy that this administration sides with corporations instead of children’s health.”

EPA chief Andrew Wheeler’s decision to reject a petition by environmental groups calling for a ban on the neurotoxic chemical ignores the assessments of his agency’s own scientists, said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, pesticides and pollinators program manager for Friends of the Earth.

“The EPA’s refusal to ban chlorpyrifos ignores decades of science showing that this pesticide has irrevocable effects on human health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits.”

Friends of the Earth

@foe_us

Today Trump's @EPA announced that it will not #BanChlorpyrifos — a brain-damaging pesticide that EPA's own scientists have deemed unsafe at any level.

"The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits."https://foe.org/news/trumps-epa-continues-delay-federal-ban-brain-damaging-pesticide-chlorpyrifos-leaving-states-take-action/ …

Trump’s EPA continues to delay federal ban on the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, leaving...

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will not ban the neurotoxic, brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos. Last summer, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals...

foe.org

Chlorpyrifos has been banned for household use since 2000, but the pesticide is still used by farmers on “more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal, and vegetable crops,” according to the New York Times.

“In 2016,” the Times reported, “more than 640,000 acres were treated with chlorpyrifos in California alone.”

The Obama administration in 2015 proposed banning use of the pesticide on food crops, but former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt authorized its continued use in 2017.

“This is a total disgrace,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) tweeted in response to the EPA’s decision on Thursday.

Finck-Haynes ofFriends of the Earthsaid that as the federal government continues to work on behalf of chemical interests, states must take immediate action to protect the public and the environment.

“While the federal government refuses to act, we urge states to step in, ban chlorpyrifos, and demonstrate that they will safeguard public health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “We call on [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo to sign the chlorpyrifos ban bill sitting on his desk and protect New Yorkers from this toxic pesticide.”

In a statement on Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) highlighted the Trump administration’s ties to Dow Chemical, the largest producer of chlorpyrifos in the United States.

“The relationship between President Trump and Dow Chemical… has been called into question,” the group said. “Among other things, the chemical manufacturing giant reportedly donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and its CEO previously played a chief advisory role to the president, heading up his now defunct American Manufacturing Council.”

Erik Olson, senior director of health and food at NRDC,said the effort to achieve a ban on chlorpyrifos will continue.

“Until EPA gets this stuff out of our fields and off our food,” said Olson, “this fight is not over.”

---

While Hagee’s influence and the influence of his organization CUFI are stronger than ever with Trump in the White House, his political clout with the Trump administration is, at least partially, due to the presence of staunch Christian Zionists in two of the top offices in the executive branch: vice president and secretary of state.

Pence and Pompeo push “holy war”

Though several Trump officials spoke at the recent CUFI summit, two stand out — not just for their high-ranking positions but also for their open admissions that their Christian Zionist beliefs guide their policies. These officials are Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

After Trump chose his running mate, Pence’s religious fervor came under media scrutiny, with several outlets noting that he was known to be an ardent Christian Zionist. Pence’s faith gained particular attention owing to his past statements on Israel, which he has often described in prophetic terms.

Though raised Catholic, Pence gradually transitioned to an “evangelical Catholic” and then to an evangelical Protestant and has since become a key political figure representing the fundamentalist Christian movement that promotes “dominionism,” an ideology that varies in its interpretations but ultimately seeks to see the secular nature of theU.S. government shift towards one governed by “Biblical law.” Pence’s association with this movement has led prominent voices in the media to accuse him of supporting a theocratic form of government.

Though many of the initial concerns about Pence revolved around his likely effects on domestic policy, much of his influence has instead been seen in foreign policy, including the administration’sMiddle East policy. His public identification as a Christian Zionist and his speech to the 2017 CUFI summit, the first vice president to ever speak at the annual event, have led some to worry that the Christian Zionist view of prophecy is guiding Pence’s political actions.

[ pix Pence visits the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site in Jerusalem’s Old City, Jan. 23, 2018. Oded Balilty | AP

Following Pence’s first speech at CUFI, Daniel Hummel, a scholar and fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told the Washington Post:

Christian Zionism has a long history in American politics, but it has never captured the bully pulpit of the White House. Past administrations often used general biblical language in reference to Israel, but never has the evangelical theology of Christian Zionism been so close to the policymaking apparatus of the executive branch.

By identifying with Christian Zionism while in office, Pence risks the Trump administration’s ongoing search for an ‘ultimate deal’ to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and erodes the U.S.’ claim that it can be an ‘honest broker’ in the Middle East.”

Concerns that the U.S. is under the influence of extremist religious Zionism and Christian Zionism that would prevent the country from acting as an “honest broker” in the Israel-Palestine conflict have, unsurprisingly, been proven true. In fact, Pence’s religious beliefs are believed to have been a major factor in Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy to the contested city.

Though Mike Pence is the highest-ranking member of the Trump administration who is openly a Christian Zionist, it is Pompeo that is the most overt and open about how his religious beliefs regarding the end times guide his decision-making as head of the U.S. State Department.

For much of his political career, Pompeo has framed U.S. counterterrorism policy as a “holy war” between Christianity and Islam, which he believes is the earthly equivalent of acosmic battle between good and evil. In 2017, as CIA director, Pompeo claimed:

Radical Islamic terror [will] continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior [and] truly the only solution for our world.”

That same year, Pompeocreated a new CIA “mission center” targeting Iran headed by Michael D’Andrea, whose CIA nickname is “The Prince of Darkness.” Pompeo, like many Christian Zionists, believes that war between the United States and Iran is part of the end times, a belief that is outright alarming given his prior control over CIA covert operations and his focus on Iran, as well as his current role as the U.S.’ chief diplomat, in which he has also been laser-focused on promoting an aggressive policy towards Iran.

In addition to his views on “holy war,” Pompeo also frequently discussed his views on the rapture while serving as CIA director. *TYT* reported last year that Pompeo had spoken about the rapture so frequently that it had reportedly frightened top CIA officials.

According to Michael Weinstein — founder of theMilitary Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group on issues of religious freedom in the military and intelligence community — who was quoted in the TYTreport:

He [Pompeo] is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused — they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”

A 2015 video of Pompeo that surfaced while he was CIA director also shows the former congressman describing politics as “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

More recently, a New York Times article published in March again brought Pompeo’s obsession with the end times back into public view. Titled “The Rapture and the Real World: Mike Pompeo Blends Beliefs and Policy,” the article detailed how Pompeo has made it standard operating procedure to mix his Christian Zionist views with his approach to foreign policy. That article also referenced the statement Pompeo made earlier this year, in which he opined that it was “certainly possible” that President Trump had been sent by God to “save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.”

Pompeo made those statements during an official trip to Jerusalem that was also controversial for other reasons. Indeed, in a state department video shared on social media and meant to publicize Pompeo’s trip, footage of a model of the Third Jewish Temple was included while footage of the Al Aqsa mosque was notably excluded, despite it being the most iconic building in Jerusalem.

[ vid]

Given that Pompeo had also visited the tunnels that have worn away the historic mosque’s foundations, many Palestinians took the video as a sign that the Trump administration was colluding with the Temple Activist movement in Israel, which was discussed in detail in Part II of this series.

Joining forces to target Jerusalem

Well before Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the foreign policy of both nations in service of a religious obsession with ushering in the end times. The historical record clearly shows how Christian Zionists have influenced events throughout history, particularly in regard to the founding of the state of Israel and subsequent developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the pursuit of these dispensationalist end-times prophecies, Christian Zionists have forged alliances with Jewish Zionists and each has opportunistically used the other in order to usher in the common events that are believed to facilitate the coming of their respective apocalypses or to aid more secular, political goals. From Hechler and Herzl, to Scofield and Untermeyer, to Begin and Falwell, these alliances have shaped the policy of Western governments, particularly the U.S. and England, for over a century.

Today, only one such prophecy has yet to be fulfilled, the construction of a Third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, which is currently occupied by the Al Aqsa mosque compound. Now, more than ever before, Israel’s government, as shown in Part II, is filled with high-ranking officials who openly call for Al Aqsa’s destruction and seek to hastily construct a Third Temple. Similarly, as this report has shown, the Trump administration is greatly influenced by Christian Zionists who also seek the mosque’s destruction, in hopes that the Third Temple will soon be built.

Yet, the Trump administration’s ties to this apocalyptic ideology go even deeper than has been discussed in this article,as many other influential members in the Trump administration — especially top Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman — also share and actively promote this extremist religious Zionist ideology that seeks to rebuild a Third Temple. As will be seen in the next installment of this series, this ideology is also a driving factor for top Trump and Republican Party donors such as Sheldon Adelson.

The end result is that the hold of this apocalyptic ideology on both the governments of Israel and the United States appears to be stronger now than ever, meaning that the danger currently facing Al Aqsa mosque, and with it world peace, looms large.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/indicted-gop-congressman-offers-an-amazing-excuse-spending-campaign-money-on-extramarital-affairs/

omg

Rep. Duncan Hunter’s lawyers are asking a judge to keep the jury in Hunter’s campaign finance violations trial from hearing that he spent campaign money on his affairs with five different women. And the lawyers, saying that Hunter was “a married man mixing business with pleasure,” have come up with a line of argument that’s … creative.

Hunter is on trial for having spent campaign money for personal reasons, including not just affairs but vacations, clothes, and video games. His expenditures on affairs, then, are entirely relevant to the charges he faces. But! Hunter carried on these affairs with three lobbyists, a staffer in his own office, and a Republican National Committee official. So his lawyers are arguing that the money he spent in the course of having affairs with them should count as a legitimate political expenditure.

These women were, after all, professional contacts for Hunter. The relationships, the lawyers argue, “often served an overtly political purpose,” so “Unlike intimacy, the fact that an individual’s relationship with Mr. Hunter includes a professional aspect that directly, or indirectly, relates to his campaign or duties as a holder of Federal office, is directly relevant to whether Mr. Hunter could properly use campaign funds for an expense in connection with that individual.”

What a defense: Yes, he used campaign funds on his affairs, but he only had affairs with women who were also business contacts, so it’s all kosher. Prosecutors disagree. Strongly. Hunter’s wife, who has cut a deal to cooperate with prosecutors, presumably also disagrees....

---

omfg

Julia Conley

In a move that will roll back safety standards that have been observed for decades, the Trump administration reportedly has plans to reclassify nuclear waste previously listed as "high-level" radioactive to a lower level, in the interest of saving money and time when disposing of the material.

The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to observe a new interpretation of which nuclear waste qualifies as "high-level waste," which must be disposed of deep underground to avoid contaminating the surrounding environment. Under the new standards, radioactive materials at three nuclear sites will be classified as low-risk, enabling officials to dispose of the waste in shallow pits.

The Hanford Site in Washington state, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Idaho National Laboratory all contain millions of gallons of sludge and other waste following decades of use by the DOE, which reprocessed nuclear rods at the sites when the department was extracting plutonium for hydrogen bombs.

The DOE for decades classified any material that was created during reprocessing as high-level waste, but it will now label the sludge at the three sites as safe due to its level of radioactivity.

Under the new rules, the waste — which includes toxic and radioactive elements such as uranium and plutonium — can now be stored in shallow pits that may leak into the surrounding soil.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is running for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential race, slammed the Trump administration for "unilaterally" deciding to potentially put Washington residents and their environment at risk, without consulting with the states in question — going against previous agreements between the states and the federal government.

insleee twt]

By taking this action, the administration seeks to cut out state input and move towards disposal options of their choosing, including those already deemed to be unsafe by their own assessments and in violation of the existing legally binding agreement," Inslee said in a statement. "We will consider all options to stop this reckless and dangerous action."

The Energy Department claims that downgrading the risk level of the sludge is necessary to allow for faster clean-up of the sites and to save money for the federal government — a claim which "flies in the face of sound science and judgment," according to Columbia Riverkeeper, a non-profit group which aims to protect Washington state's Columbia River.

"The Trump administration's attempt to cut corners with nuclear waste undermines effective, long-term cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Site," said Lauren Goldberg, legal and program director at the organization. "People in the Pacific Northwest value clean water and strong salmon runs."

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) called the DOE's move "irresponsible and outrageous."

"The Trump administration is moving to fundamentally alter more than 50 years of national consensus on how the most toxic and radioactive waste in the world is managed and ultimately disposed of," saidGeoff Fettus, senior attorney at NRDC. "No matter what they call it, this waste needs a permanent, well-protected disposal option to guard it for generations to come."

At the Seattle-based newspaper The Stranger, Katie Herzog wrote that the DOE's action is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to "change the definition" of a problem to avoid addressing it effectively.

[twt]

Recently, the Trump administration has also sought to changethe official government definition of the poverty line to avoid paying for government benefits for struggling families, and the definition of domestic violence to limit the funds that go to agencies serving survivors.

Reclassifying dangerous elements, one critic wrote on social media, "doesn't mean it's going to make it any less harmful to the public."

...

OMG

Three times more money was spent in California's State Superintendent's race than in the race for Governor. EdSource reports that as of November 3rd well over **$26 million**was spent by outside groups.

We wrote in a previous post that the reason for the overwhelming outpouring of BIG money in the race was this year's Vergara decision, which declared teacher tenure in the state of California unconstitutional. The California Teachers Association has a very helpful guide to common myths about due process rights in California, including the myth that "tenure is a job for life."

OMFG

may 2017

Ruth Hopkins, Indian Country Today Media Network

https://truthout.org/articles/footing-the-15-million-bill-for-the-dakota-access-pipeline-s-private-army/

Last fall, the eyes of the world were fixated on Standing Rock.

Among the images burned into the brains of so many abroad were those of Morton County sheriff’s department, joined by law enforcement officers from across the country, bedecked in military gear and armed to the teeth, brutalizing defenseless water protectors for expressing their first amendment rights and freedom of religion. Eyes were opened when mercs sicced vicious attack dogs on women and children guarding sacred burial grounds with their lives. Folks thousands of miles away watched in horror as they witnessed concussion grenades being thrown into crowds and elders being maced in the midst of sweat lodge raids. People will never forget live stream video picked up by mainstream media, showing hundreds of civilians being shot with water cannons in subzero temperatures by a corporate police state army.Some photos of injuries were judged too graphic to post by social media, as they revealed a young woman with a near severed limb and another who’d been blinded in one eye.

This was not Iraq or Afghanistan. There was no foreign enemy invading our shores. These events occurred in the middle of the United States, on Lakota treaty lands; and the only thing these innocent people had done was dare to stand in the way of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the same one Bismarck, North Dakota residents rejected due to fears it would contaminate their water supply. This war zone created by Dakota Access and Morton County was meant to subdue Standing Rock residents and water protectors and force them to accept an unwarranted risk to their fresh water and the desecration of ancestral graves, under the barrel of a gun.

Here in the states, hundreds of Native Nations and the American public sided with Standing Rock. Scores came to camp along the shores of the Mni Sosa (Missouri River). Others rallied in the local cities, signed petitions, and called the White House. Millions were outraged by the injustice.

Yet who is paying for the corporate police state brutality I just mentioned? You are.

Senator John Hoeven (R-ND), who accepted money from Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline) and has been vocal in his support of both the Dakota Access Pipeline as well as the Keystone XL pipeline, has announced that North Dakota will receive $15 million in federal funds to reimburse the state for costs incurred as a result of militarizing Barney Fife and company while they pushed the pipeline through for ETP and engaged in the violent, forced removal of water protectors. Hoeven slid said monies into the Department of Justice’s budget as part of Fiscal 2017 funding legislation.

By the way, Hoeven sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and is now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.Welcome to Custer’s wet dream.

The distinguished Senator from North Dakota would have us believe his state was alone in its mission to extinguish #NoDAPL. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When Morton County requested backup, law enforcement officials from across the nation came to North Dakota via the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC). The Sheriff’s Association also showed up in full force.

New York Daily News writer Shaun King obtained audio where Energy Transfer Partners freely admitted that they worked closely with the Sheriff’s Association, and wow, did they ever. They became one and the same.

Water protectors who lived at camp can attest to ETP and law enforcement’s collusion and fraternization, but the record speaks for itself.

The Sheriffs’ Association has a $3.46 million budget, according to tax forms. Some of this funding comes from corporate sources, like TigerSwan. TigerSwan maintains offices in Iraq and Afghanistan. TigerSwan’s CEO is a former adviser to the multinational private security firm, Blackwater. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a Trump campaign donor and the brother of Betsy DeVos, the US Secretary of Education. Besides funding the Sheriff’s Association, TigerSwan is in charge of Dakota Access intelligence and supervising overall security for the company. Tigerswan works for Dakota Access, while funding and partnering with the Sheriffs’ Association.

The Sheriff’s Association purchased military gear from the US Department’s Defense Logistics Agency thanks to the Defense Department’s 1033 program.Think corporate welfare for the defense industry.

Wait, there’s more. Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren offered to reimburse North Dakota and Morton County for costs due to defending the Dakota Access Pipeline.

So why are US taxpayers forking over $15 million to North Dakota?

Despite the fossil fuel industry’s wishes, America is not an oil company with an army. We should not be bankrolling our own oppression.

Incidentally, the Dakota Access Pipeline is not even operational yet, and it’s already sprung a leak in South Dakota, just southwest of the Lake Traverse Reservation. End this foolishness.

---

When Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan in August 2018, its own estimates said the reduced regulations could lead to 1,400 early deaths a year from air pollution by 2030.

Now, the EPA wants to change the way it calculates the risks posed by particulate matter pollution, using a model that would lower the death toll from the new plan, The New York Times reported Monday. Five current or former EPA officials familiar with the plan told The Times that the new method would assume there is no significant health gain by lowering air pollution levels below the legal limit. However, many public health experts say that there is no safe level of particulate matter exposure, which has long been linked to heart and lung disease.

"Using fake math to hide the death toll from dirty air at the behest of the coal industry is sadly consistent with the Trump administration's complete disregard for public health," Environmental Working Group(EWG) Senior Science Advisor for Children's Environmental Health Dr. Olga Naidenko said in responseto the plan. "This sleight of hand means that more adults may die early and more children may become victims of asthma."

New York University environmental law expert Richard L. Revesz called the proposed change a "monumental departure" from how the agency has calculated air pollution risk under past administrations from both parties.

"Particulate matter is extremely harmful and it leads to a large number of premature deaths," Revesz said.

The new method will be used in the EPA's final version of the Clean Power Plan replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, due to be released in June. The new rule would improve the efficiency of coal plants slightly while also allowing older plants to remain in operation longer, leading both to more climate-change causing emissions and more particulate matter pollution.

When asked if the new method would appear in the final plan, former chemical and fossil fuel lobbyist and current EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation William L. Wehrumsaid the final draft would include multiple approaches and that the agency had not officially changed its methodology.

However, Wehrum also called the focus on the 1,400 number "unfortunate" and said the agency was considering a number of alternative calculations that would lead to lower death tolls. He said the lower figure would be included to show that different assumptions could lead to different results, but said that any new method would be peer-reviewed before being used as the EPA's leading means of assessing air pollution risk.

EPA spokesman James Hewitt echoed that message in a statement to CNN.

"No change to this scientific method will be made unless and until the new approach has been peer reviewed," he said.

The EPA is considering the new method as part of its regular review of air quality standards, which it aims to complete by 2020, CNN reported.

In recent years, studies have shown a growing number of health risks associated with particulate matter exposure, including dementia. Colorado School of Public Health Dean Dr. Jonathan M. Samet told The New York Times that most new studies showed risks at levels of exposure below the EPA's legal limit of 12 micrograms per cubic meter on average per year.

"It's not a hard stop where we can say 'below that, air is safe.' That would not be supported by the scientific evidence," Samet said. "It would be very nice for public health if things worked that way, but they don't seem to."

Revesz worried the new method would be used to roll back other environmental regulations as well.

"It could be an enormously significant impact," he told The New York Times.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

From Your Site Articles

omg

Pompeo actually just cheered the ‘new opportunities’ presented by the Arctic’s melting ice sheets

by Cody Fenwick May 6, 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has never been terribly worried about climate change, but in a new speech to the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Finland on Monday, he seemed…

through the looking glass mma week in dumb smart bit:

Right-wing outlets like The Wall Street Journal editorial page are touting a deeply flawed new study attacking electric vehicles.
Trump Fed pick Stephen Moore repeatedly said that he liked working at Fox News because he met "a lot of beautiful women" there. Moore has also praised slave-owning Confederate general Robert E. Lee and hates climate science so much that he even attacked Ivanka Trump.
Tucker Carlson's wild new talking point is that abortion is somehow a tool of "corporate" oppression.
A Fox host blamed bank regulation for high tuition and the student loan crisis.

glacier 16x, esda warm occean 2x, cada 2x

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https://grist.org/article/the-arctics-ticking-carbon-bomb-could-blow-up-the-paris-agreement/

yoder 3/19

Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by U.N. Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.

The report, released at the U.N. Environment conference in Kenya on Wednesday, says that theArctic is warming twice as fast as the planetary average, and models show that it’s on track to become ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.

That’s the bad news. So here’s even worse news. The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases. Estimates vary, but the report says1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year, and double the amount of the gas in the atmosphere today.

If that permafrost stayed permanently frozen, as the word itself suggests it should, we could continue worrying about other stuff. But researchers expect Arctic permafrost to shrink 45 percent compared to today. Unleashing that stored-up carbon dioxide and methane would obviously “derail efforts” to limit warming to 2 degrees C (3.6CK degrees F) as outlined in the Paris Agreement, the report says. But then again, it would derail pretty much everything.

“New evidence suggests that permafrost is thawing much faster than previously thought, withconsequences not just for Arctic peoples and ecosystems, but for the planet as a whole because of feedback loops,” the report states.

This is one of the runaway warming scenarios, often called the “carbon bomb” or “methane bomb.” (Permafrost holds both greenhouse gases.) Unlike a real bomb, however, it wouldn’t explode all at once. And at least one recent study suggests that we still have time to defuse it.

Within the Arctic, the soil formerly known as permafrost — let’s call it “meltafrost” — could pose a danger to 70 percent of current infrastructure by 2050, as well as the region’s 4 million inhabitants, 10 percent of whom areindigenous. Recent studies have shown that permafrost thaw could cause houses to collapse, lead to uneven roads, and threaten important cultural and archaeological sites.

The North Pole runs warmer than the rest of the planet because of a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification” — basically a region-specific term for feedback loops. “[W]hen sea ice melts in the summer, it opens up dark areas of water that absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice,” the report explains.

These rapid changes in the Arctic might seem far away, but you will feel them, too. For those of you on the coasts, keep in mind that the melting of Arctic glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet makes up a third of sea-level rise around the globe. Rising seas will wreak havoc in coastal regions as they deal with flooding, damaged buildings, and the saltwater contamination of drinking water sources.

And for those further inland, there’s the wild weather. The melting of the Arctic causes changes in the jet stream and disrupts weather patterns much further south. It’s been linked to worsening drought across the western United States, stalled hurricanes in the East, and the polar vortex that occasionally dips down over North America to turn us all into popsicles.

As many are fond of saying, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”

OMFG

prosecuted under espionage act

reality winner update in better prison; offered schol to local college, joined A force to be arab linguist; DA twisted all (medals) ISIS sympathizer

her social media posts used against her, critic of WH; she has isis lit at home for resarch ctr-insurg purposes

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-april-24-2019/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/06/09/Pro-Trump-media-falsely-claim-accused-leaker-Reality-Winner-had-plans-to-join-the-Taliban/216850

Fox & Friends is echoing baseless claims from fringe and pro-Trump media sites that the government contractor accused of leaking National Security Agency (NSA) documents revealing new information about Russian hacking in the 2016 election had “plans to join the Taliban.”

Fringe, far right,and "alt-right" affiliated media sites have baselessly pushed the claim that Reality Leigh Winner, who leaked government information about the Russian hacking to the Intercept, had plans to “pledge her allegiance to the Taliban.” However, according to The Washington Post, "prosecutors were not trying to link [Winner] to terrorism," and the assistant U.S. attorney told the judge on the case that “The government is not in any way suggesting the defendant has become a jihadist or that she is a Taliban sympathizer.” Nonetheless, Fox & Friends picked up the fringe right-wing claim and reported it as fact.

From the June 9 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends:

...

india and paki fight for water in Kashmir? Dar Jamal ice bk nukes

Are India and Pakistan on the Verge of a Water War?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/25/are-india-and-pakistan-on-the-verge-of-a-water-war-pulwama-kasmir-ravi-indus/

Interview Are India and Pakistan on the Verge of a Water War? In reprisal for a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir, the Indian government says it will divert river waters that downstream Pakistan ...

India to cut water to Pakistan as Kashmir** conflict escalates ...

https://www.dw.com/en/india-to-cut-water-to-pakistan-as-kashmir-conflict-escalates/a-47622188

News India to cut water to Pakistan as Kashmir conflict escalates. The move has come amid rising tensions in Kashmir after an attack on an Indian military post.

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omfg

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/china-created-a-racist-artificial-intelligence-to-track-muslims

The Chinese government is using facial-recognition software to “track and control” a predominantly Muslim minority group, according to a disturbing new report from The New York Times. The Chinese government has reportedly integrated artificial intelligence into its security cameras to identify the Uighurs and appears to be using the information to monitor the persecuted group. The report, based on the accounts of whistleblowers familiar with the systems and a review of databases used by the government and law enforcement, suggests the authoritarian country has opened up a new frontier in the use of A.I. for racist social control—and raises the discomfiting possibility that other governments could adopt similar practices.

Two people familiar with the matter told the Times that police in the Chinese city of Sanmenxia screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times in a single month. Documents provided to the paper reportedly show demand for the technology is ballooning: more than 20 departments in 16 provinces sought access to the camera system, in one case writing that it “should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.” This, experts say, is more than enough to raise red flags. “I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy,” Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.“Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”

Racial profiling has long been a concern in the use of artificial intelligence. But in the United States and other Western countries, much of that scrutiny has centered on biases built into A.I. systems. Computer scientist Aylin Caliskan put the matter succinctly in a 2017 interview with Vox: “Many people think machines are not biased. But machines are trained on human data. And humans are biased.” Already, studies have shown this to be the case. A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that machine-learning software rated black people at higher risk of committing another crime after an initial arrest. (The software’s conclusions were based on current incarceration rates.) American lawmakers have highlighted these concerns as the A.I. race heats up. “Algorithms are still made by human beings, and those algorithms are still pegged to basic human assumptions,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at an event in January. “They’re just automated assumptions. And if you don’t fix the bias, then you are just automating the bias.”

...

---

OMFG

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/17/libyan_humanitarian_crisis_worsens_as_over

...GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the role of Erik Prince and his former mercenary organization, Blackwater, in Libya?

ANAS EL GOMATI: Well, it’s really the UAE’s role that is behind this. I think, in 2010, theUAE, Mohammed bin Zayed, gave over half a billion dollars to the Frontier Services Group, which is now led by Erik Prince, formerly of Blackwater. And since then, allegedly, according to Western print media, Erik Prince, alongside the UAE, established an air base, a military base, a drone base, in eastern Libya between 2014 and '16.Now, this is well documented by the U.N. Panel of Experts on the Security Council, where the year that Libya was supposed to be delivered an enduring peace, a sustainable peace, a concession by both sides in the civil war, in 2016, when they announced the beginning of this new chapter in Libya's history and delivered this Government of National Accord in Tripoli, was the very year that the UAE violated the arms embargo in Libya in unprecedented levels but also began to establish the final touches and final pieces of this air base in eastern Libya called al-Khadim. Now, it possesses a massive arsenal of drones, Wing Loongs, which are Chinese kind of mimics of the American Predator F1 drone, but it also houses at least two Air Tractors, which are kind of industrial—industrial kind of aircraft that have been kitted out with air-to-surface missiles. And at the very least, this kind of move—I mean, it’s very, very difficult to pin down, so that’s whyI’m using the word “alleged,” because I don’t want to get sued. But at the very least, there have been many, many investigations that have pinned this to Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group.

At least in the last two years, that arsenal of drones and Air Tractors have been used to support Khalifa Haftar’s ground offensives in Benghazi and in Derna, that have displaced around 100,000 people in Benghazi but have also led to 1,700 people being imprisoned in Derna. And many of those ground invasions, many of those military assaults, are now being investigated by the ICC for war crimes. So, I think it’s that kind of tacit and underlying kind of discreet military assistance that the UAEprovided, that the French provided in Benghazi, that has not only bolstered Khalifa Haftar in the east of the country but has been the platform and the pretext for this latest offensive in Tripoli.

And we should remind ourselves that thi

...

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2015, late settled

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-payday-lawsuit-20150804-story.html

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has filed a lawsuit against a Canadian payday lending company, alleging that its web of subsidiaries collected money that consumers did not owe and falsely threatened borrowers with imprisonment or wage garnishment.

In the lawsuit, regulators say the British Columbia-based NDG Financial Corp. and its "maze" of nine interrelated companies made and collected payday loans that were either completely or partially void in 17 states.

The companies, collectively called the NDG Enterprise, made consumers believe that federal and state laws did not apply to them, according to the lawsuit.

All of the companies except two are Canadian. Two are incorporated in Malta.

NDG Financial Corp. could not be reached for comment.

"Companies making loans within the U.S. have to comply with federal law," bureau director Richard Cordray said in a statement. "The Consumer Bureau will work to ensure that American consumers receive the protections and fair treatment they deserve.”

The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in New York, said that since 2011,NDG Financial has extended payday loans exclusively over the Internet through its subsidiaries to U.S. consumers.

The NDG Enterprise has made loans in all 50 states. Loans generally are 14 days, or short term, and range from $100 to $1,500. Finance charges for each $100 borrowed can be between $19.98 and $26.98.

Some loan agreements also had an illegal clause giving the NDG Enterprise the authority to collect outstanding loan amounts directly from a consumer's wages via their employers if the borrower defaulted on the payment.

According to the lawsuit, the NDG Enterprise received payment directly from the employers' payroll accounts "numerous" times.This type of action could result in "serious and detrimental interference with employment relationships" and negatively affect promotions, raises or even lead to job loss, according to the lawsuit.

In "numerous instances," the NDG Enterprise also told consumers that non-payment of debt would result in a lawsuit, arrest, imprisonment or wage garnishment, even though it did not have the legal authority to do so.

Regulators are seeking monetary damages and to prevent the NDG Enterprise from violating federal consumer financial protection laws.

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omfg

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-fossil-fuel-deregulation-2634118702.html

Jake Johnson

Just a week after a chemical plant explosion killed one worker and spewed thousands of pounds of dangerous pollutants into the airin Crosby, Texas, President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to visit that city Wednesday to sign executive orders to speed up approval of pipelines and other fossil fuel projects.

In coming to the location of a deadly fossil fuel-related explosion to sign an order that would gut states' power to protect residents from the hazards of oil and gas pipelines, Trump is adding tasteless insult to the injury he is inflicting on our planet," Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

"Trump's support for the fossil fuel industry reflects a real disdain for public safety and a livable climate for generations to come," Hauter continued. "Expediting pipelines means more petrochemical buildout in places like Appalachia, and more disasters waiting in the wings — not to mention climate catastrophe."

According to the Houston Chronicle, Trump will appear at the International Union of Operating Engineers International Training and Education Center in Crosby, where he will deliver a speech about "how he plans to aid the United States' booming domestic oil and gas production."

While the full details of Trump's forthcoming executive orders have not yet been made public, a White House official told the Chronicle they will be geared toward helping oil and gas companies avoid "red tape."

"With oil industry cronies and swamp monsters filling the ranks of his administration, it's no surprise that Trump is once again taking an action championed by climate deniers and fossil fuel companies," Rachel Rye Butler, climate campaigner with Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. "This executive order is nothing but an attempt to trample people's rights to protect their air, water, and climate from polluting oil and gas pipelines."

"This is particularly appalling given that many parts of the country are reeling from climate disasters—like the historic flooding in the Midwest that has much of the Keystone XL pipeline route underwater," Butler added. "Instead of creating jobs in the rapidly growing green energy economy, Trump is putting fossil fuels on life support at the expense of our climate and communities."

The president's move to expand fossil fuel production in Texas and across the nation — including TransCanada's Keystone pipeline — comes as the international scientific community warns carbon emissions must be slashed drastically and quickly to avert planet-wide climate catastrophe.

Oil Change International (OCI) estimated in a report published earlier this year that Trump's Big Oil-friendly agenda has put the U.S. on track to account for 60 percent of global growth in fossil fuel production between 2019 and 2030.

"If not curtailed, U.S. oil and gas expansion will impede the rest of the world's ability to manage a climate-safe, equitable decline of oil and gas production," OCI's report warned.

TRUMP EPA WITHDRAWS CLEAN AIR POLICY OPPOSED BY FOSSIL FUEL ... ›

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irony perry, craft, murray crony capitalism

So it still remains possible that the Trump administration will be able to achieve its dream of a centrally-planned economy where consumers are forced to pay billions to keep coal plants running and spewing their toxic and climate-destroying pollution.

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methane, carbon bomb? end of ice bk

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OMG ew 219

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported last week that in 2018 it issued so-called "emergency" approvals to spray sulfoxaflor—an insecticide the agency considers "very highly toxic" to bees—on more than 16 million acres of crops known to attract bees.

EPA Considers 300,000-Acre Expansion for Bee-Toxic Pesticide

The Center for Biological Diversity Thursday urged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to deny Bayer CropScience's request to allow the highly bee-toxic pesticide flupyradifurone to be sprayed on tobacco in states like Kentucky and North Carolina.

omfg

https://www.ecowatch.com/bee-killing-pesticides-in-national-wildlife-refuges-2593236939.html

trump Admin Reverses Ban on 'Bee-Killing' Pesticides in National Wildlife Refuges

both koch and MBS tried to buy Time Mag ?!

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/national-enquirers-suspected-source-for-bezos-story-believed-trump-knew-and-supported-the-effort-report/

On Sunday, The Daily Beast reported that the National Enquirer’s likely source for the steamy text messages between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his mistress Lauren Sanchez was the mistress’ brother, Michael Sanchez.

But the saga could be deeper than that. It turns out that Sanchez believed that the Enquirer, and its parent company AMI, were acting with the blessing of President Donald Trump, who allegedly wanted revenge on Bezos for negative coverage about him in the Washington Post:

Documents reviewed by The Daily Beast show that Michael Sanchez believed the Enquirer pursued its story about Bezos with “President Trump’s knowledge and appreciation” — a chase encouraged, in Sanchez’s estimation, by Republican operatives “who THINK Jeff gets up every morning and has a WaPo meeting to plot its next diabolical attack on President Trump.”

Bezos, the richest man in the world, purchased the Post in 2013. However, there is no evidence he plays any role in the paper’s editorial direction, and the Post has actually run a number of articles critical of Amazon under his ownership without comment from him.

AMI and its owner, David Pecker, are facing backlash after Bezos revealed that the company tried to blackmail him with nude photos after he launched an investigationinto how they acquired text messages from his affair.

Pecker, a friend of Trump’s, was granted immunity last fall as part of an investigation by the Southern District of New York attorney’s office into Trump’s hush payments to women prior to the 2016 presidential election, one of which — to cover up Trump’s encounter with Playboy Playmate Karen MacDougal — was brokered by AMI. If it turns out that AMI broke the law by blackmailing Bezos, which could constitute criminal extortion, this would violate the terms of their immunity agreement, meaning SDNY prosecutors could pursue charges against the company.

Moreover, there may be yet another side to Trump’s alleged involvement. The president has reportedly “rewarded” Pecker by putting him in touch with people connected to the Saudi royal family, at roughly the same time that AMI was attempting to secure funding from the Saudis to acquire Time Magazine and ran a special edition that lavished praise on Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

If it transpired that Trump tried to hook up his publisher friend with funding from a despotic foreign regime in return for helping to discredit a businessman at the center of a personal vendetta, then the Russia collusion allegations could be just the tip of the iceberg for the president’s wrongdoing. Sanchez’s belief that Trump gave his imprimatur to AMI’s actions does little to help him.

1/19

OMG evil sorta, the tookl to equalize is going after poor and ignoring rich and corps

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/14/as_govt_shutdown_drags_on_irs

EIC audits up (1/3) because automated, but rich ppl have complex taxes that take human power, so rates dropping

also large corps not audited much anymore

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OMFG klh cdv

..President Trump is better at commanding the agenda than he is at any other single thing that he as a communicator does. The press has been an accomplice in the process of ceding agenda control to him by virtue of his tweeting -- and having the press respond immediately, as if every tweet is presumed to be newsworthy. Donald Trump has thecapacity to get whatever he wants the public to focus on by directing the cable news agenda.We really should ask: Aren't there other things we ought to be paying more attention to? How often are we being distracted from something that Trump does not want us to pay attention to? Being distracted by his effective use of tweets to set an alternative agenda.

Fox News is de facto Trump's state-sponsored media. How does this impact American political culture?

We are increasingly going into ideological enclaves to get our news. To the extent that people find the news compatible with what they already believe, that means they are not being exposed to alternative interpretations of reality and alternative points of view. What is unprecedented about the relationship between Fox News and the president of the United States is the extent to which what is said and shown on Fox News appears to influence what is said and featured by the president of the United States. Thetraditional model of agenda-setting is that the president sets the agenda and the news media follows. This _{reversal }_with Donald Trump and Fox News is something new.

....

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death spiral IRS cuts:

[OMG]

The story has been different for poor taxpayers. The IRS oversees one of the government’s largest anti-poverty programs, the earned income tax credit, which provides cash to the working poor. Under continued pressure from Republicans, the IRS has long made a priority of auditing people who receive that money, and as the IRS has shrunk, those audits have consumed even more resources, accounting for 36 percent of audits last year. The credit’s recipients — whose annual income is typically less than $20,000 — are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year. Only people with incomes above $1 million are examined much more frequently.

API KNEW

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/21/headlines/report_oil_industry_knew_about_dangers_of_climate_change_in_1954

Leaders of the U.S. fossil fuel industry knew as early as 1954 that carbon dioxide pollution accumulating in the atmosphere posed a growing threat to life on Earth, but failed to warn the public. That’s according to new research published by Stanford historian Benjamin Franta in the journal Nature Climate Change. Franta found that in the 1950s the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a study by a Caltech scientist which concluded global CO2 levels had risen by 5 percent in a century. It’s the earliest known industry-funded research into climate change, and the findings led in part to a 1965 report by President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee on the threat posed by global warming.Speaking to members of an oil industry conference that year, Frank Ikard, then-president of the American Petroleum Institute, warned, “This report unquestionably will fan emotions, raise fears, and bring demand for action. The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.” The American Petroleum Institute would instead go on to fund decades of climate change denial while fighting efforts to switch to renewable energy sources.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/richard-sackler-purdue-pharma-opioid-crisis

Friday, the Financial Times reported that billionaire pharmaceutical tycoon Richard Sackler has secured a patent for a new drug to treat opioid addiction.

The drug, a reformulation of buprenorphine, is essentially just a milder opioid that can blunt the symptoms of withdrawal while a person is being weaned off — competing variants of which are already generating nearly $900 million in U.S. sales.

Sackler's family also happens to own Purdue Pharma, the company that first developed OxyContin — a powerful narcotic painkiller that has been blamed for spurring the epidemic of opioid addiction that has decimated communities all across America.

In other words, Sackler made millions off of sales of a drug that caused a massive public health crisis — and now he stands to make millions more by selling the public a solution.

Purdue, one of several drug companies that made a decades-long push for liberal prescription of opioids, is currently facing a mountain of lawsuits. Prosecutors in several states allege Purdue was aware of the risk of addiction and overdose, but deceived doctors and patients and downplayed the risks to increase their sales — a charge the company denies. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey directly names several members of the Sackler family as defendants.

The National Institute of Drug Abuse estimates that up to 12 percent of patients prescribed an opioid develop an abuse disorder, and as many as 6 percent eventually switch to heroin. More than 115 people a day are now killed by opioid overdoses.

Rural areas have been especially impacted, with an astonishing 74 percent of farmers reporting they or someone they know is suffering from opioid addiction.

While increased availability of addiction treatment is a good thing, it is not a solution to the epidemic. Opioids remain a necessary tool to treat severe pain from surgery, cancer, and other serious conditions, but they must be used judiciously, and alternative therapies must be made available — particularly in lower-income rural areas where people are at higher risk.

8/27 kpfa news beaches ca gone , wildfires, jerry comment

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EPA’s Pruitt Hears From Bible Study Leader That ‘Radical Environmentalism’ Is A ‘False Religion’

MARCH 21, 2018 5:32 PM

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/epas-pruitt-hears-from-bible-study-leader-that-radical-environmentalism-is-a-false-religion/

Drollinger, the man who leads weekly Bible study meetings for members of Congress and Trump’s Cabinet—including embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt—distributed on Monday a Bible study warning that America is in the process of shifting from Christianity to the “false religion of Radical Environmentalism.” Pruitt told CBN last year that it was “wonderful” to participate in the Cabinet Bible studies.

Drollinger’s weekly written Bible studies (also available online in print and audio versions) are distributed to public officials by Capitol Ministries, which is expanding in the U.S. and globally. Drollinger, who sometimes describes them as a kind of a homework supplement to the in-person Bible study meetings, told a reporter last year that Trump reads the studies and sends him positive hand-written notes about them.

The study posted on Monday, “Coming to Grips with the Religion of Environmentalism,” appears to be an updated version of a previous written study with the same title. It draws heavily on a passage in the biblical book of Genesis in which God grants mankind dominion over the Earth and all its creatures and instructs man to rule and subdue creation.

Drollinger argues that it is unbiblical to believe that mankind’s actions could destroy the Earth:

To think that man can alter the Earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man.

Here’s another bit of policy-related teaching that Drollinger has shared with Pruitt and his colleagues in the Cabinet:

To allow fish to govern the construction of dams, endangered species to govern power plants, flies to govern hospitals, or kangaroo rats, homes, is to miss the clear proclamation of God in Genesis.

Because of biblical promises that God would not again destroy the Earth in a great flood, and would continue to send rain, says Drollinger, “we can all rest assured and wholly rely on God’s aforementioned promises pertaining to His ability and willingness to sustain our world’s ecosystem.”

Drollinger, who is from California and recently held a fundraiser with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue during the World Ag Expo in the heart of California’s agriculture industry, decries efforts in California to limit household water usage, saying there is “more than enough to go around” and that environmentalists’ efforts to restrict water usage reflects asecular worldview that says the environment is more important than people.

“The biblically informed public servant,” says Drollinger, must “order his thinking in light of God’s revealed hierarchy in creation.”

Drollinger says it’s good politics to side against “Radical Environmentalists,” in part because they have fewer children than those who believe “in the biblical truth of multiplying and filling the earth.” His Bible study says thatBible-believers have “outperformed” environmentalist parents “by six million children since the advent of Radical Environmentalism in America,” adding:

Those six million children are just now reaching voting status. Said another way, young Americans raised with a Christian worldview will soon outnumber the children of Radical Environmentalists by at least six million voters in the coming elections. Indeed the scriptural truth that your sins will find you outwill soon be realized across the country. Hopefully the religion of Radical Environmentalism will soon be relegated to fringe minority status in American society. Amen.

Drollinger may have unique access to Cabinet members like Pruitt, and members of the House and Senate, but his anti-environmentalist theology is not unique. For years, Religious Right leaders have attacked the environmental movement—which some have called the Green Dragon. Right-wing “historian” David Barton is among those who signed the 2009 Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which denounced efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and said that God had made the Earth and its ecosystems “robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory.”

E&E News examined the impact of Pruitt’s faith on his approach to policy-making in a July 2017 profile, noting that Pruitt served on the board of trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. It also pointed to a 2016 interview, when Pruitt was Oklahoma’s attorney general battling a state Supreme Court ruling about the Ten Commandments, where he said, “A Christian worldview means that God has answers to our problems.” He added, “And part of our responsibility is to convey to those in society that the answers that he has, as represented in Scripture, are important and should be followed, because they lead to freedom and liberty.” Pruitt accused the “political left, the liberals, and those that are anti-faith” of misinterpreting the First Amendment as “a mandate for the government to eradicate all vestiges of religion in the public square.”

Tags: Ralph Drollinger Scott Pruitt Church-State Environment Trump Administration Capitol Ministries

yikes 818

https://www.ecowatch.com/generational-harm-of-pesticides-2596453994.html

Environmentally-Caused Disease Crisis? Pesticide Damage to DNA Found 'Programmed' Into Future Generations

When Dr. Paul Winchester, a pediatrician, moved to Indiana fromColoradoin 2002, he noticed something disturbing—a high number of birth defects.

"I was used to the number of birth defects I should see in a community hospital, and I saw many more in Indiana," said Winchester, who is medical director of the Neonatal and Intensive Care Unit at St. Francis Hospital in Indianapolis.

Winchester decided to investigate the reason for the higher numbers of birth defects. His research zeroed in on the herbicide atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. and the most commonly detected pesticide in U.S. drinking water.

Winchester and several other researchers including Michael Skinner, professor of biology at Washington State University's Center for Reproductive Biology, conducted a study to see if there was a link between atrazine in drinking water and birth defects.

Studies have found that atrazine is an endocrine disruptor, a substance that can alter the human hormonal system. Atrazine was banned by the European Union because of its persistent groundwater contamination.

In their study, Winchester and his team found that concentrations of atrazine in drinking water were highest in May and June when farmers sprayed their fields with the herbicide. They also found that birth defects peaked during the same months indicating a close correlation.

"We plotted water concentrations and birth defects, and they fit like a hat," Winchester said.

Their study, which was funded by the Gerber Foundation, was published in 2017 on PLOS One.

Epigenetic Changes Programmed Into Future Generations

But the most disturbing finding was that atrazine had epigenetic effects. Epigenetics is the theory that environmental factors, such as diet, lifestyle choices and pesticides can impact the health of people who are exposed to them and also their descendants. Human DNA, according to epigenetics, is not unchangeable; it can be altered by such environmental factors. Epigenetic changes can be imprinted on the DNA of a fetus during pregnancy according to Winchester.

"If it is fixed then, it becomes inheritable and it becomes a trait that you can pass on to the next generation and the next and next."

Epigenetics is a fairly new concept that is slowly gaining acceptance.

"This is a really important concept that is difficult to teach the public, and when I say the public I include my clinical colleagues," Winchester said.

For the atrazine study, Winchester's team used Skinner's advanced technology to detect epigenetic changes—and resulting negative health impacts—over several generations of rats whose mothers were exposed to atrazine.

Common sense would seem to dictate that fewer negative health outcomes would be seen with subsequent generations. But the study found the opposite: There were more abnormalities and diseases in later generations of rats.The first generation of rats whose mother was exposed to atrazine weighed less than a group of control rats. The second generation weighed less but also had incidences of testicular disease and breast cancer. The third generation suffered the most problems, according to Winchester.

"We waited until the third generation, where no direct exposure (to atrazine) occurred, to ask if these epigenetic effects could be inherited, because there is no mechanism, no exposure, no toxicity that could explain a change in disease rates in the third generation. We found that 50 percent of offspring had multiple diseases, emotional and physical problems, hyperactivity, abnormal sperm, and premature puberty."

In an earlier study, Skinner found that the fungicide vinclozolin also caused inheritable diseases in rats. In all, he tested nearly 20 chemicals and found that all produce epigenetic effects, said Winchester.

"The most alarming (finding) to me is that almost every chemical tested including atrazine reduced fertility in the third generation of offspring."

Winchester called the discovery of the link between chemicals like pesticides and epigenetic changes leading to disease "the most important next discovery in all of medicine."

"What we are learning is that virtually every adult disease we have is going to be linked to epigenetic origins as well," he said.

More research needs to be done on the link between epigenetic effects and disease but Winchester says limited funding is available for such research.

"This is a huge thing that is going to change how we understand the origin of disease. But a big part of that is that it will change our interpretation of what chemicals are safe. In medicine I can't give a drug to somebody unless it has gone through a huge amount of testing. But all these chemicals haven't gone through anything like that. We've been experimented on for the last 70 years, and there's not one study on multigenerational effects."

Glyphosate Levels in Mothers Linked to Shorter Pregnancies

Winchester also co-authored a study published recently in Environmental Health that found detectable levels of glyphosate in the urine of 93 percent of a group of pregnant women in Central Indiana. The levels of glyphosate detected correlated with shorter pregnancies.

Again, the study raises concerns of possible epigenetic effects leading to disease in later generations.

"We are the first researchers in the U.S. to report that virtually every pregnant mother has glyphosate in her body at the time that she is creating fetal (epigenetic) imprints in her baby," Winchester said.

Winchester and his team focused on atrazine and glyphosate because they are the most heavily used pesticides in the U.S.

"That's the only reason they were chosen. We looked to see how commonly they are found in pregnant women, and we were mortified."

Winchester has been surprised by the lack of reaction to the glyphosate study.

"A chemical (glyphosate) that didn't come onto the scene until the 1970s has now managed to find its way into every single pregnant woman in the U.S, except seven percent of them. We thought that should be news. But in the current paradigm, which is definitely pro-business, the only thing companies have to prove is that it doesn't kill you if you drink it or take a big dose of it."

He sees a potentially catastrophic outcome resulting from the epigenetic damage caused by pesticides.

"Every one of the chemicals tested so far produces infertility, and the industrial world has reached the lowest level of fertility on record. We are below replacement levels in most industrialized countries including the U.S.This is looking at your own species extinction."

Winchester lays the blame at the feet of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which doesn't consider epigenetic or generational effects of chemicals, and the pesticide and chemical manufacturers like Monsanto.

"They can sell all the Roundup they want, but if it's in me they are going to have to pay for that. Every molecule that I find is on them … What I want to know is: has my fetus had altered DNA imprinting because of this chemical? I have a right to know that. If we are going to have to wait 75 years to find out if my grandchildren are going to be affected by it, I think somebody has to pay. They better put a fund together. I want somebody's head to roll. I don't think that the EPA and Monsanto get to walk away."

Winchester connects an ancient expression to a modern health crisis.

"Even in the Bible, there is the saying, 'the sins of the father are visited upon his offspring.' Well, it turns out that they are."

omg

https://www.ecowatch.com/antibiotic-resistant-genes-are-airborne-2590397877.html

Antibiotic-Resistant Genes Are Airborne, Exposing Millions

By Jonathan Hahn

In 1991, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District launched a Spare the Air program to keep residents in the San Francisco Bay Area informed of high ozone-level days, when air is smoggy and exposure to poor air quality poses health risks. Now, the air district might need to update its alert system for something other than just ozone: antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs).

A team of researchers from the U.S., China, South Korea, Switzerland, and France examined air samples from nearly two dozen cities, including San Francisco, Paris, Warsaw, Zurich, Beijing, Brisbane, and Seoul. They discovered airborne concentrations of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in each of the cities at varying levels, produced by concentrated animal feeding operations, hospitals, wastewater treatment plants and other sources.

Their findings indicate that antibiotic-resistant genes can spread from one bacterium to another, and that this bacteria has the ability not only to travel through the air, but to travel across continents, even across the globe—exposing millions of people to antibiotic-resistant genes whether they live in proximity to those sources or not.

"Common everyday human activities such as car traffic can kick up the bacteria and make them airborne," Dr. Maosheng Yao, a collaborating author of the study, Global Survey of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Air, and professor of environmental sciences and engineering at Peking University, told Sierra. "Natural winds can also suspend these biologicals into the air."

For wastewater treatment, there is an aeration process that can make biologicals airborne. They are prevalent in areas where human consumption of antibiotics is widespread, such as in hospitals, or where agricultural practices rely heavily on the use of antibiotics.

San Francisco topped the list of the cities with the highest readings of antibiotic-resistant genes in the air.

"We used a novel protocol to get enough air samples from different world cities," Yao told Sierra. "That way we could tell where there were significant differences in levels of ARGs."

The report was published July 25 in Environmental Science & Technology....

omfg2

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-quietly-awards-dozens-of-lion-trophy-permits-2590084960.html

Trump Admin. Quietly Awards Dozens of Lion Trophy Permits to Hunters, GOP Donors

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued more than three dozen permits for hunters to bring back liontrophy parts from Zimbabwe and Zambia between 2016-2018, according to copies of the permits obtained by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The documents were obtained by Friends of Animals and reported by Huffington Post on Thursday. Thirty-three hunters received a total of 38 lion trophy permits, according to the animal advocacy nonprofit.

More than half of those hunters donated to Republican lawmakers or have ties to hunting advocacy group Safari Club International, Friends of Animals said.

"The permits show that the current administration, not only has loosened restrictions on lion hunting, but is rewarding supporters," the nonprofit said in a press release. The report follows the Trump administration's move in March to allow elephant and lion trophy imports from Zimbabwe and Zambia on a case by case basis, a reversal from President Trump's previous statements that his administration would keep the Obama-era ban on imports of the animals.

Last year, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke created an advisory committee called the International Wildlife Conservation Council that is mainly comprised of trophy hunters and members of Safari Club International.

Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to HuffPost's request for comment.

Among the hunters who received a permit was Steven Chancellor, a wealthy Indiana businessman and major GOP donor who raised more than $1 million for Republican candidates at a fundraiser at his home headlined by Donald Trump in 2016, Friends of Animals said. Chancellor—an avid hunter who has registered 482 confirmed kills, including 18 lions, between 1980 and 2008, the Courier & Press reported—is an appointee on Sec. Zinke's International Wildlife Conservation Council. He was allowed to import lion parts from a July 2016 hunt in Zimbabwe, according to the FOIA request.

Another hunter who received permits was Virginia resident Kent Greenawalt, who has donated more than $100,000 to Republican candidates and committees and $5,400 to Trump. He was allowed to bring back lion trophies after a hunt in Zambia in 2017 and another hunt in Zimbabwe in 2016, Friends of Animals revealed.

Big game hunters say their sport provides a service through game management and the trophy hunting fees provide revenue that directly funds conservation and contributes to African economies.

However, opponents say that killing the animals is wrong and endangers vulnerable populations.

"If African wildlife is to survive the next few decades in their homelands, these elephants, lions and other animals—coveted by hunters for their strength and beauty—must be worth more alive than dead," said Friends of Animals President Priscilla Feral in the press release. "That means safeguarding habitat along with photographic safaris and ecotourism must outpace blood-drenched trophy hunting expeditions. Trophy hunting must expire and collapse from its own dead weight. Let's press for an administration that stops catering to an industry that has actually been in decline with a dwindling number of hunters."

The New York Times reported that Fish and Wildlife Service previously made determinations about trophies publicly available, but under new rules, interested parties must file a FOIA request to see details of the permits.

---

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-charles-koch-is-helping-neo-confederates-teach-college-students/

no many lnx

How Charles Koch Is Helping Neo-Confederates Teach College Students

The Koch Foundation is often praised for its higher-ed funding, but the money is going to some radical professors

By Alex Kotch MARCH 21, 2018

Billionaire industrialist and conservative political mega-donor Charles Koch first entered the political world through the John Birch Society, a secretive anti-Communist outfit that campaigned against the civil-rights movement. Since then, he and his brother David amassed enormous wealth and put together a powerful conservative political network that rivals either major party in size and funding.

A new report from activist group UnKoch My Campus shows that Charles Koch’s ties to white supremacy have persisted throughout his adult life. The report details an array of instances where Koch has funded neo-Confederate scholars—a largely unnoticed aspect of the Koch Industries CEO’s ambitious project of funding higher education.Most alarming is a collaboration between Florida Atlantic University, the Charles Koch Foundation, and a major private-prison company, which is led by a professor who was a member of the research arm of a white-nationalist hate group.

While raking in corporate profits as the head of the family’s oil-refining business since the mid-1960s, Charles Koch and his top tactician, Richard Fink, developed a “Structure of Social Change,” which they would deploy to pull America as far to the right on taxes and regulations as they could. Koch, a libertarian, had resigned from the John Birch Society after opposing its position on the Vietnam War, and created a regressive sphere of influence. The first step in this strategy was funding higher education, because, as he said at a 1974 gathering of the Institute for Humane Studies, now a George Mason University center that he finances and directs, “educational programs are superior to political action, and support of talented free-market scholars is preferable to mass advertising.”

Koch and his family foundations have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities around the United States. In 2013, the Charles Koch Foundation began donating to Florida Atlantic University, offering $5,000 that year. By 2016, the annual donation had risen to $32,000.

Marshall DeRosa, who runs a prison-education program with financial backing from the Koch Foundation, is a Florida Atlantic University political-science professor who has written extensively on the Confederacy. He also has ties to its modern remnants.

From 2000 until at least 2009, according to archived web pages,DeRosa was a “faculty member” at the League of the South Institute, the “educational arm of the Southern independence movement” where “the South’s finest unreconstructed scholars” taught summer institutes and seminars. The LOS Institute acts as the charitable nonprofit of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers aneo-Confederate hate group, and supports a second Southern secession in order to form a nation ruled by “Anglo-Celtic” people.

The LOS was co-founded in 1994 by an original member of the Center for Libertarian Studies, which was launched in 1976 with seed money from Charles Koch. Michael Tubbs, a white nationalist who once stockpiled military weapons and planned to target businesses owned by African Americans and Jews, is still the current chairman of the Florida LOS chapter, according to Newsweek, and has appeared at the side of LOS president Michael Hill as recently as January 2018. In 1987, Hill and three accomplices called themselves “guardians of the gene pool.”

The League of the South Institute is “the educational branch of the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation,” named after the wife of the late Jack Kershaw, longtime leader within the violent White Citizens Council and founding board member of the League of the South. In 1998, Kershaw erected a statue of Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest and declared, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”

Recently, LOS was a prominent white-nationalist force at the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hill, a board member of the Kershey Foundation, had told supporters to prepare for violence. Another LOS member was charged in January for brutally beating a 20-year-old black man at the rally.

Regarding his LOS affiliation, DeRosa told The Nation, “That was a long time ago. I disengaged early on. They’d invite me to things and I’d go to talk about my scholarship, especially the Confederate constitution, but I got an inkling as to some of the characters involved…. I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Experts on hate groups have a different view. “The LOS was different when DeRosa was involved, not as militant, but it still had very, very bad racial views,” said Heidi Beirich, an expert on right-wing extremism and director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He can’t scurry away from the fact that for a long time he was a member of a group that had white-supremacist view

DeRosa isn’t the only former LOS Institute academic in the Koch higher-ed network. The founder of the institute, Donald Livingston, who served on the Institute for Humane Studies Academic Review Committee—which grants Koch’s “Humane Studies Fellowships” (originally “Claude R. Lambe Fellowships”)—from 1996 to 1999, has stayed in the network’s orbit. Last spring, he lectured at an Institute for Humane Studies seminar at George Mason University.

Thomas DiLorenzo, an “affiliated scholar” of the LOS Institute as recently as 2008, was an economics professor in George Mason University and worked on policy for the Koch-funded, libertarian Cato Institute. In 2005, several years after the Southern Poverty Law Center classified LOS as a hate group, he defended the organization, writing that it “advocates peace and prosperity in the tradition of a George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson.”

DeRosa and DiLorenzo taught a three-day LOS “summer school” together in 2000 on topics including “Why secession was, and is, constitutional” and “How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.”

Not long after SPLC labeled the LOS a hate group in the early 2000s, Livingston left the LOS Institute and founded its successor, the Abbeville Institute, named after the birthplace of fierce slavery advocate John Calhoun, and is still president. (DiLorenzo is currently affiliated with the Abbeville Institute, as well.) In 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed the Abbeville Institute a place where scholars “nostalgic for the Old South” went to “study the virtues of secession.” The Chronicle reported that Abbeville scholars argued that the Civil War, or “the War of Northern Aggression,” was “not about slavery…and that the antebellum Southern states had every right to secede.”

Beirich said that while Livingston did leave the LOS when it became especially extreme, “he runs his own incredibly neo-Confederate institute…. A question [for the Koch Foundation] is, why are you affiliated with a person like that? His position is not a serious historical position. The South did not just fight for states’ rights—it was about slavery. These are distorted views of history.”

DeRosa remains part of Abbeville as well, and other ex-LOS Institute scholars including DiLorenzo have recently been active with the group.

Several former LOS scholars are also part of the Mises Institute, a think tank formed in 1982 that the Southern Poverty Law Center says has “strong neo-Confederate principles.” Its founder, Lewis Rockwell, argued that the Civil War “transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order.”

At least nine Mises Institutes scholars have worked with LOS, according to the UnKoch report, and Mises employs several Koch-funded academics. Mises scholars collectively received $12.5 million in academic funding from the Charles Koch Foundation between 2005 and 2016.

“Through their support for these faculty, the Koch Foundation is subsidizing and strengthening an already booming wave of violent, alt-right anarcho-capitalists,” said Ralph Wilson, the UnKoch report’s author and the group’s co-founder.

When asked for detailed comment about several aspects of this reporting, the Koch Foundation issued a two-sentence reply to The Nation: “The Charles Koch Foundation’s criminal justice reform work is rooted in the principles of human dignity. We do not tolerate racism in any shape or form.”

THE PRISON-TO-WHITE-SUPREMACY PIPELINE

But Florida Atlantic students aren’t the only minds that DeRosa is being paid to shape. After getting commitments from the Koch Foundation and GEO Group, one of the world’s largest private-prison companies, DeRosa got state certification for a pilot program, the Inmate Civics Education Enhancement Project. He taught the first class at a South Bay, Florida, GEO Group prison in 2015.

“It’s disturbing that people of color might be exposed to neo-Confederate ideas in prison,” said Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “If you’re going to find someone to teach in prisons you’d think you could find someone who wasn’t involved with a neo-Confederate hate group.”

Meanwhile, at least four GEO Group executives have served on the Florida Atlantic University board of trustees. GEO Group had an agreement with FAU to donate $6 million to the university in 2013 in exchange for naming rights over the football stadium, but it was withdrawn because it sparked significant controversy. “GEO is very much committed to recidivism. They have a reentry program. They’re amazing,” said DeRosa.

PRESS RELEASE: HEARTLAND INSTITUTE STATEMENT ON ALEC ENDANGERMENT FINDING RESOLUTION

DECEMBER 7, 2017

By Tim Huelskamp, Ph.D.

‘Heartland thanks Rep. Piscopo for taking the lead on this important issue, and thanks ALEC for allowing this debate to take place.’ – Tim Huelskamp, Ph.D.

ALEC logo

Yesterday, a task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) debated a resolution calling for a review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding.” After a lively debate and straw vote, the sponsor of the resolution, Rep. John Piscopo (R-CT), along with Bette Grande, a research fellow for The Heartland Institute who helped draft the resolution, withdrew it for now, saying “the final decision on this issue will be made by the Trump Administration.”

Background links:

Resolution to review the Endangerment Finding [click here]

Coalition letter in favor of the resolution [click here]

Letter withdrawing the resolution [click here]

Rep. Piscopo and Ms. Grande agreed to withdraw the resolution after corporate members of ALEC, led byExxonMobil and Edison Electric Institute (EEI), packed the meeting room with lobbyists and allies and indicated they would vote against the resolution. Heartland’s discussions with state legislators on the task force, as well as a straw vote of elected officials attending the committee meeting, showed a majority of them supported the resolution.

The following statement from Tim Huelskamp, Ph.D., president of The Heartland Institute – may be used for attribution. For more comments or to book Dr. Huelskamp on your radio or television program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 312/731-9364.

[OMFG]

“This result is disappointing, but not surprising. Big corporations like ExxonMobil and trade groups like EEI have long been members of the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement. They’ve put their profits and ‘green’ virtue signaling above sound science and the interests of their customers.

“Heartland thanks Rep. Piscopo for taking the lead on this important issue, and thanks ALEC for allowing this debate to take place. The debate will continue both inside ALEC, where a majority of legislative members and policy advisors agree that the Endangerment Finding ought to be reviewed, as well as outside the organization. We will continue to work with scientists, economists, policy experts, and allies at ALEC to strengthen the case for rescinding the Endangerment Finding.

“This discussion at ALEC changes nothing at the federal level, where action to repeal the Endangerment Finding will take place. President Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt have rejected unscientific alarmism, embraced sound science, and are implementing pro-energy, pro-America policies. Rescinding the Endangerment Finding is the logical and necessary next step.We are optimistic that the self-serving regulatory capture and green preening of big corporations like ExxonMobil may delay but will not prevent that step.”

The Heartland Institute is a 33-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our website or call 312/377-4000.

omfg

..To understand why Republicans are continuing to embarrass themselves this way, it helps to look at what was happening in the Senate the very same afternoon that Trump was reading his fake walk-back of his deep Putin love. While most of the press was, understandably, watching Trump do a bad job of feigning disapproval of Russia's action, the Senatedecided to move forward with the confirmation of a far-right radical named Andrew Oldham to sit on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. On Wednesday afternoon, by a 50-49 vote, he was confirmed.

---

omg

https://www.alternet.org/trump-mulls-hiring-former-fox-news-executive-who-covered-sexual-harassment-gets-bill-oreilly-stamp

...uring the Trump administration, the position was also held by Sean Spicer twice, Mike Dubke and for ten days, by Anthony Scaramucci.

SCOOP: Former @FoxNews co-president Bill Shine is in final talks with @realDonaldTrump about becoming @WhiteHouseCommunications Director. Announcement could be soon.

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) June 27, 2018

The move was confirmed by The New York Times, which reported, “the move has not been finalized, but two people familiar with the decision said it was likely to be announced and that the president had offered him the job.”

Shine left Fox News in May of 2017 after women at the network reportedly circulated a petition demanding he be fired.

Shine reportedly told a female executive that the network’s pattern of sexual harassment was a “necessary evil.”

“Officials at the White House are aware that they will face blowback for appointing someone so closely tied to Mr. Ailes and the culture of harassment toward women at Fox News,” The Timesnoted. “But they said Wednesday that they believe they can weather it.”It was also reported at the time that Shine had attempted to have a female executive institutionalized against her will at a psychiatric hospital to prevent her going public with about sexual harassment by former Fox News boss Roger Ailes.

According to The Times, Kellyanne Conway declined the position and Mercedes Schlapp was not offered the job.

---

omg change how rules are made

sci supp

swamp thing, inside the wire

https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-nancy-beck-chemical-safety-2389388927.html

By Melanie Benesh

The Trump administration just appointed a chemical industry bigwig to a high-level chemical safety position at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

You read that right. Nancy Beck is coming to the EPA straight from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the powerful lobby whose members include Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, ExxonMobil Chemical, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Bayer.Now she'll be making decisions as the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA department whose stated mission is to "protect you, your family, and the environment from potential risks from pesticides and toxic chemicals."

Here's three things to know about Nancy Beck:

1. She has helped craft the chemical industry's political agenda for years.

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https://www.ecowatch.com/lawyer-fire-death-protest-brooklyn-2560544422.html

no lnx

Lawyer Burns Himself to Death to Protest Environmental Destruction

A nationally known civil rights lawyer and environmental advocate died after setting himself on fire in Brooklyn's Prospect Park on Saturday to protest environmental destruction.

David Buckel, 60, doused himself with an accelerant before starting a fire that ultimately killed him.

"I apologize to you for the mess," he wrote in a suicide note he left in a shopping cart near his body, the Daily News reported.

In an emailed copy of the note the New York Times received, he said: "Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves."

The Times further reported:

In his note, which was received by the Times at 5:55 a.m., Mr. Buckel discussed the difficulty of improving the world even for those who make vigorous efforts to do so.

Privilege, he said, was derived from the suffering of others.

"Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help," Mr. Buckel wrote, adding that donating to organizations was not enough.

Noting that he was privileged with "good health to the final moment," Mr. Buckel said he wanted his death to lead to increased action. "Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death," he wrote.

Buckel was the lead attorney in Brandon v. County of Richardson, a lawsuit regarding Brandon Teena, a transgender man who was murdered in Nebraska. Teena's tragic story was the subject of the Oscar-winning 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, starring Hilary Swank.

The environmental activist was the senior organics recovery coordinator with the NYC Compost Project and worked as an Added Value member at the Red Hook Community Farm. In the video below, Buckel explains how to build a windrow to make rich compost for the local community.

...

---

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/382030-gop-worries-blankenship-surge-will-cost-party-w-va-senate-seat

OMFG

W.VA. — A former coal CEO’s post-prison rise is scrambling the GOP battle to unseat Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin(W.Va.).

Don Blankenship, released from jail less than a year ago, now appears to be within striking distance of the party’s nomination.

Strategists — and even his primary opponents — acknowledge he’s managed to turn an expected showdown between Rep. Evan Jenkins(W.Va.) and Attorney General Patrick Morrisey into a three-way fight with roughly a month to go until the May 8 primary election.

“It is a weird little race right now, [but] it’s looking like a legitimate three-person race,” said a national GOP strategist who is monitoring the Senate fight.

Blankenship’s anti-establishment message is resonating in a state that has turned increasingly red. Recent internal polling from Morrisey and Jenkins place him in second place — with first place varying based on the candidate releasing the polling.

omfg cf pvt war afghan EIC erik prince

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/04/trump-white-house-weighing-plans-for-private-spies-to-counter-deep-state-enemies/

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal— to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.

The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence official.

---

omg

https://thinkprogress.org/epa-eliminates-key-research-office-074f12d18393/

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to eliminate its National Center for Environmental Research (NCER), a department that funds research into environmental impacts on communities.

The center, tasked with distributing “grants to test the effects of chemical exposure on adults and children,” will be shuttered amid a reorganization at the agency as part of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s goal of creating more efficiency at the agency.

Most of the EPA’s grants come out of the NCER, a division of the agency’s Office of Research and Development. Last October, Pruitt ordered that scientists who have received EPA grants from the NCER and other programs at the agency won’t be allowed to serve on the agency’s advisory boards. Critics of the policy change denounced the move as a poorly disguised attempt to push out experts at odds with industry.

The NCER’s most prominent program is called Science to Achieve Results, or STAR, which was created in 1995. The STAR program has distributed grants to the Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research Centers. The two centers have been “successful in advancing our scientific understanding and ability do address the ways that environmental chemicals can impact children’s health,” a former EPA senior scientist told The Hill.

A recent report issued by the National Academies of Sciences concluded that through the STAR program, EPA has created a vehicle that fosters collaboration and knowledge-sharing in a way that “may reduce the cost of regulations, protect public health, and save lives.” About eight years after STAR’s creation, a National Research Council committee reviewed the program and strongly endorsed it as an integral part of EPA’s research program.

The Trump administration, however, has singled out the STAR program for elimination in its budget proposals. The STAR program’s budget allocation has varied over the years, peaking at around $138 million in 2001 and 2002 and reaching its lowest point in 2016 at about $39 million. Between 2001 and 2015, the program awarded nearly 1,500 grants and fellowships in total, according to the National Academies of Sciences report.

...

OMG

Avaaz worries about the scope of the subpoena, as it would also include the names and email addresses of members who have signed Monsanto petitions. GM Watch noted that one of its petitions calling for a moratorium on glyphosate garnered more than 2 million signatures.

The subpoena was issued as part of a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto in which plaintiffs around the country claim that they or their loved ones developed non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup.

Avaaz is now fighting back and is raising funds for the defense effort. The group will be represented by the New York firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, LLP.

"This is big," Avaaz writes in a new petition. "[Monsanto's] a $50 billion mega-corporation, infamous for legal strong-arm tactics like this. They have unlimited resources. If they get their hands on all our private information, there's no telling what they'll use it for."

Emma Ruby-Sachs, Deputy Director of Avaaz, said Monsanto's demand for internal communications is a "violation" of first amendment rights.

"There are millions of people around the world who have a deep and genuine concern that Monsanto's glyphosate is making us and our environment sick," she added. "That is the sole reason our members have called on governments to regulate it based on independent science. We're not going to let this legal attack slow down that essential work one bit."

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/army-prayer-breakfast-feature-christian-extremist-who-believes-ptsd-only-impacts

Tlevangelist Kenneth Copeland is scheduled to be a featured speaker at the Fort Jackson army base prayer breakfast in Columbia, S.C. on February 1. Copeland is a member of President Donald Trump's faith advisory council and a self-described "Christian extremist."

In 2013, Copeland claimed that PTSD wasn't a medical condition requiring psychiatric intervention, but a problem that could be solved by being a devout Evangelical Christian.

“Any of you suffering from PTSD right now, you listen to me,” Copeland added. “You get rid of that right now. You don’t take drugs to get rid of it. It doesn’t take psychology. That promise right there will get rid of it.”

Copeland, worth an estimated $26.5 million, cited demons flying on commercial airlines to explain his 2015 purchase of a private jet.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has filed a formal complaint with base commander Major General Pete Jackson to request that Copeland's invitation to the Army prayer breakfast be rescinded.

---

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/1/18/headlines/un_agency_for_palestinians_appeals_for_funds_as_us_slashes_contributions

omg

Meanwhile, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees made an urgent appeal for funds Wednesday, after the Trump administration canceled $65 million in annual contributions to the agency, known as UNRWA. In Gaza, residents say they could soon starve unless international donors step up to fill the funding gap left by President Trump.

Fathiya Abed al-Jawad: “We will be lost. It will be a catastrophe. People will be stealing from each other. We will live in a catastrophe. We will suffer to provide food and wheat. People will kill each other.”

Naim Hamad: “What should I do? Should I go sell one of my kids or sell my kidney? What should I do? Should I go and steal or work as a spy? I need cooking oil, yogurt, eggs and bread.”

---

omg. so much for deferring to pentagon:

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-climate-change-national-security-2518369455.html

Trump to Drop Climate Change as National Security Threat

President Donald Trump's new national security strategy will reverse an Obama-era declaration that placed climate change as a major threat facing the nation.

Trump's "America First" plan will instead focus on four themes surrounding economic security for the U.S: “protecting the homeland and way of life; promoting American prosperity; demonstrating peace through strength; and advancing American influence in an ever-competitive world," the Associated Press reported, quoting senior administration officials.

“Climate change is not identified as a national security threat but climate and the importance of the environment and environmental stewardship are discussed," a senior administration official explained to the Guardian.

The move reflects the Trump administration's stance— and downright indifference—towards global warming. In June, the president announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement.

Another official explained to the Guardian that Trump's remarks about exiting the Paris agreement “would be the guidepost for the language in the [national security strategy] on climate."

Trump had said that June: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris" and claimed the Paris accord “hamstrings the United States while empowering some of the world's top polluting countries."

According to the Federalist, which first obtained a draft document of the national security strategy, the Trump administration would actively oppose efforts to reduce the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

"U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy security interests," the document stated, per the Federalist.

“Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty."

As the Federalist pointed out, the move to nix climate change from the list of national security threats "matches President Trump's vision, sometimes shared using his trademark hyperbole, that the United States needs to emphasize national security and economic growth over climate change."

For instance, check out Trump's tweet from 2013 below:

In 2015, former President Obama said in a speech to the Coast Guard's then-graduating class that “climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security."

"And make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country," he said.

Climate change, Obama continued, "will shape how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip and protect their infrastructure, their capabilities, today and for the long term."

The new Trump doctrine is seemingly at odds with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis' views on the issue of climate change.

"Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today," Mattis wrote in March. "It is appropriate for the Combatant Commands to incorporate drivers of instability that impact the security environment in their areas into their planning."

Incidentally, just last week, Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law that would require the Pentagon to do a report on how military installations and overseas staff may be vulnerable to climate change over the next 20 years.

The following language was included in the act:

Climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States and is impacting stability in areas of the world both where the United States Armed Forces are operating today, and where strategic implications for future conflict exist.

National Guard Chief Highlights Climate Change as Pruitt Touts Denial on TV

The Trump Administration Word Ban Extends to Other Federal Agencies. Its Ongoing Assault on Science Is Much Worse.

By Michael Halpern

A word ban extends beyond the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Washington Post reported last night, including at another, unnamed U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agency that was told how to talk about the Affordable Care Act, presumably to discourage people from signing up for health care. The directive came from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates the president's budget proposal and rule-making agenda.

On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news, and other outlets confirmed, that CDC officials were prevented from referring to seven words when putting together the agency's budget: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and science-based.

If only the banning of "science-based" and "diversity" was the worst thing the Trump administration has done to science.

Additional terminology guidance given to the State Department suggests that the administration intends to pull funding from science-based HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives that work to promote abstinence-only programs instead, even though peer-reviewed research consistently finds that abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual activity or change other sexual risk behaviors.

The CDC word ban was widely repudiated by scientists, senators and public health advocates. The issue has attracted enormous attention—even from Cher—as emblematic of a morally, scientifically and ethically corrupt style of governing.

In an email to staff last night, CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald said that the CDC "remains committed to our public health mission as a science and evidence based institution…science is and will remain the foundation of our work."

Yet recently, CDC scientists were banned from responding to basic data requests from reporters without political approval—a clear violation of the agency's scientific integrity policy.

Sidelining Science Since Day One

This starts with words and communication, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Just last week, Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke summoned the head of Joshua Tree National Park to his office for a tongue lashing over tweets the park had sent out referencing climate change. That's right: the park director flew across the country to be reprimanded for a couple of tweets, in order to send a message to all park directors: talking about climate change is verboten.

And oh, if only word choice was the worst action this administration has taken to undermine the use of science in policy-making. They're not just trying to downplay the phrase "evidence-based." They're trying to ditch the whole idea of basing policy on evidence.

In July, we chronicled how the Trump administration has sidelined science since day one. And since then the abuses of evidence have continued to flow.

The Treasury Secretary claimed that economists were working "around the clock" to come up with analysis justifying the tax bill. They were not. The EPA banned scientists who receive EPA grants—the ones the agency has decided do the most promising environmental and public health research—from providing science advice to the agency. The Department of Interior is trying to defund and prevent public access to the U.S. Geological Survey library system.

The White House has no science advisor, and the president's Office of Science and Technology Policy is a ghost town. Numerous political appointees—including the CDC director and the nominee for NOAA administrator—have financial conflicts of interest that lead many to question their ability to do the jobs. The administration has shut down studies where it expects it won't like the outcome: on climate change in the tropics, on teen pregnancy prevention and on the health risks of surface coal mining in West Virginia. Science agencies are targeted across the board for severe budget cuts.

An exhaustive list is, quite frankly, impossible. President Trump's attacks on science harm our environment and make all of us sicker and less safe. If the Trump administration won't allow federal agencies to do their job, it's time to ask Congress to step up its game, engage in meaningful oversight and do its job.

Michael Halpern is an expert on political interference in science and solutions to reduce suppression, manipulation and distortion of government science.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

pensionplan1217

huelskamp tp 2010 flanked heartland prez

CU CFG gamechangers pivots

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05122017/lamar-smith-congress-climate-change-fossil-fuel-industry-house-science-committee

no link pix grafic

FREDERICKSBURG, Texas—It's midway through fall, and cold has yet to settle over the Eckhardt family orchard. So, Diane Eckhardt waits with rising apprehension.

Cold is the switch that triggers the growing sequence that by summer has limbs sagging with ripe, juicy peaches. The reliable chill season in Texas Hill Country allowed Eckhardt's grandfather, Otto, to start the family business here in the 1930s.

But last year, with temperatures the warmest since 1939, Eckhardt's trees produced just 10 percent of their usual yield. And the year before, warm weather reduced production between 60 and 70 percent. Now, Eckhardt worries not only about the next crop, but about the future of a business she hopes will be passed on to her niece and nephews.

"We know climate change is happening," she said.

But while the Eckhardts face that certainty, their congressman sows uncertainty, casting doubt on the consensus science that greenhouse gases are the dominant cause of rising global temperatures, and opposing government action to curb them.

Sixteen-term Republican Lamar Smith has used his power as chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee for the past five years to do battle on behalf of the fossil fuel industry.Embracing the arguments of a small group of climate contrarians, Smith acknowledges that warming is happening but says more research is needed to determine the amount and causes, and whether it does more good than harm.

Smith's critics say he misrepresents facts, cleverly casts doubt on legitimate studies by claiming they are based on "secret data" and uses his subpoena power to help industry battle state and federal regulators and environmental groups. The result is that a panel with vast jurisdiction over all government non-military science, research and development has become an instrument of attack on mainstream climate science.

"Anyone stating what the climate will be in 500 years or even at the end of the century is not credible," Smith said at a hearing he chaired in March. "In the field of climate science, there is legitimate concern that scientists are biased in favor of reaching predetermined conclusions. This invariably leads to alarmist findings that are wrongly reported as facts."

Things weren't always this way. Under both Democratic and moderate Republican leadership, the science committee since the late 1970s had educated lawmakers and the public about the threats posed by rising temperatures caused by human activity and the need for decisive action.

But in a case study of the power of fossil fuel interests to shape government policy, the industry's money and alliances with conservative think tanks and advocacy groups transformed the committee's membership and supported the rise of Smith, son of an old oil and ranching family in South Texas.

Choke Hold: House Science

Today, "we're in total denial," says the highest-ranking Democrat on the panel, fellow Texan Eddie Bernice Johnson. Instead of looking at the evidence and making policy recommendations on climate—as once happened—the committee is "pretending to be oblivious."

"When you look at the [campaign] contribution list, it becomes very clear" that the forces that oppose regulation are calling the shots, she said.

Smith, 70, has announced he will retire after his term as chairman ends next year. But many believe his legacy will be lasting.The committee under Smith has "contributed to the sort of diminishment of science in public policy," said Andrew Rosenberg, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization that has been one of Smith's targets. "It has reinforced the view that everything must be partisan, and you've got to choose sides. It sends a message that science is partisan, too."

The Science Committee Transformed

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The House Science Committee held Congress' first hearings on climate science in 1976, and it resulted in passage of bipartisan legislation to establish a National Climate Program Office. Five years later, Al Gore, then a congressman and committee member, co-chaired another set of hearings on "Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Greenhouse Effect."

With fidelity to its nonpartisan tradition, the committee championed scientists who found themselves under fire during President George W. Bush's administration. The Republican chairman at the time, Sherwood Boehlert of New York, faced off against Bush officials and GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill, armed, he says now, with what he learned about global warming during 24 years on the committee. "I [witnessed] a parade of some of the most distinguished scientists...from around the world testify that climate change is for real, it has serious and negative consequences, and we damn well better do something about it," Boehlert said.

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But by 2013, Republican moderates like Boehlert who accepted climate science were eliminated. Redistricting by both parties—to make red districts redder and blue districts bluer—was partly to blame. But much of the change was due to a systematic effort by conservatives, with significant help from fossil fuel interests that were seeking to stave off policies that might cut into their profits.

The Senate Science Committee's Disappearing Center

Helping the effort was the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the door to unlimited political spending. The decision empowered hugely wealthy donors like the oil billionaire Koch brothers seeking to shape politics in America. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, individuals and companies in the fossil fuel industry spent an unprecedented $90.5 million to elect friendly Republicans, an increase of 66 percent over the previous two election cycles (compared with $15.7 million they gave to Democrats), according to Center for Responsive Politics data.

Sherwood Boehlert

In the end, nearly a third of the Republicans who sat on the committee in 2006—seven of 24, including Boehlert—were defeated or retired over the next six years in the wake of primary challenges from the right.

The conservative advocacy group, the Club for Growth,financed many of the challenges. The group has a broad low-tax, less-government agenda, but its victims saw the hand of fossil fuel interests at work.

"My most enduring heresy was saying that climate change was real," said Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who became convinced of climate reality on a science committee trip to Antarctica. He lost in 2010 to Rep. Trey Gowdy, who was endorsed by the Club for Growth. "It had appeared that I had crossed to the other side and had become unfaithful to the tribe."

Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, a science committee Republican defeated in the 2008 primary, believed the conservative activists had a deeper objection than his stand on climate issues. "The foundation upon which their enterprise was built was to select members of Congress that could be told what to do," Gilchrest said. "They wanted a puppet."

The Club for Growth, which spent between $6 million and $22 million each election cycle between 2004 and 2016, did not have to disclose its donors until it established a Super PAC in 2010. But at least $3 million came into the club from the labyrinth Koch network between 2009 and 2015, according to the tax returns of their various nonprofit advocacy groups. And the club's Super PAC disclosures show that its wealthy donors include some heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry and connected to the Koch brothers, like hedge fund manager Paul Singer of Elliott Management, and Quantum Energy, a Houston private equity and venture capital firm specializing in oil and gas.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry became the biggest contributor to science committee members, according to Center for Responsive Politics data.

House Science Committee: Follow the Money

The oil and gas industry has been Smith's biggest contributor, with $764,000 in donations over the course of his career in Congress. Smith points out that the industry's share is just a small portion of his overall contributions—about 5 percent of the $14 million he has raised since the 1989 election cycle.

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Lamar Smith's Campaign Contributions

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"I'm supported by a wide variety of individuals and industries, including the energy sector, which employs 400,000 Texans statewide," Smith told InsideClimate News.

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After the 2012 election, with GOP moderates on the science committee wiped out, the House Republican leadership chose Smith from among three climate deniers vying for the chairmanship. He had raised four times more money that election cycle than his competitors, F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Dana Rohrabacher of California, and had doled out more than $147,000 to help other Republican candidates.

'Secret Science' Charge Returns

Even before Smith took over the committee, he co-signed a letter in December 2012 calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release the "secret data" behind proposed air pollution regulations. On the letter with him was Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), a conservative who had unseated Gilchrest and who then chaired the panel's energy subcommittee. "It is likely that the majority of benefits from all federal regulations are grounded in data sets that have never been available to the public," the letter said.

The "secret science" charge was false. At issue was a large, long-term federally funded study published by Harvard researchers in 1993 showing that fine soot pollution, largely from burning fossil fuels, shortened lives. The researchers had obtained personal health information from 22,000 participants on the promise of confidentiality. Fossil fuel interests and advocacy groups they funded rebranded this common health research privacy measure as sinister. In 1997, when the Clinton administration was finalizing the first-ever air quality standards on fine soot, protesters in white lab coats appeared on Capitol Hill holding signs that said, "Harvard, release the data!" The protesters were hired by a group called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was founded by the Koch brothers and which also received funding from the Exxon Foundation that year.

The oil and gas industry has been Rep. Lamar Smith's biggest campaign contributor. The Texas Republican was first elected to Congress in 1986.

Since that time, hundreds of studies have affirmed that fine soot causes respiratory and cardiovascular disease and death. And a panel jointly funded by the EPA and the auto industry received access to the Harvard study's raw data for a reanalysis in 2001 that validated the original study.

But 16 years after the white lab coat protests, Smith was reviving the "secret science" charge just as the Obama administration was finalizing a plan to tighten the fine soot regulations, a move vehemently opposed by coal-fired power generators and oil refiners.

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Eight months after assuming the chairmanship, Smith slapped the EPA with the first subpoena that the House science committee had issued in 21 years. The subpoena demanded the EPA release data from the Harvard study and a separate American Cancer Society study in sufficient detail "to allow one-to-one mapping of each pollutant and ecological variable to each subject." The EPA worked to obtain the data without personal information, and the agency ultimately released some to Smith, but he was not satisfied. "What is EPA Hiding From the Public?" was the title of a Smith op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in June 2014.

Smith drafted legislation called the Secret Science Reform Act to require that the EPA base its regulatory decisions only on scientific data that is publicly available and reproducible. Science advocacy groups say the restriction would curb all regulation to protect public health because health research routinely relies on confidential patient information. It also would rule out regulations based on studies of natural disasters or human-caused events—like spills of oil or fracking wastewater—since they could not be reproduced. And it might put at risk EPA's 2009 finding that carbon pollution was an endangerment to health—the underpinning of all Obama administration action on climate change. The bill is "based on a misunderstanding of how science works," said Rush Holt, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at a hearing earlier this year.

Smith's legislation, which passed the House twice in the Obama era but died in the Senate, was approved by the House again in March with a new name: the HONEST ACT (the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017).

"Our goal has been to rely on good science, the facts and reliable data in an effort to discover the truth," Smith told InsideClimate News, when asked to sum up the role he has tried to play. "It is my responsibility to ensure that federal agencies rely on science that has integrity and is free from political influence."

Political Operatives Replace Scientists

Smith's first subpoena came only after a contentious debate and party-line vote in the committee. But his powers were greatly expanded in 2015, when the House leadership allowed him unilateral subpoena power. Smith said it was necessary because, under Obama, "federal agencies often stonewalled the committee's constitutional obligations to conduct oversight." He would issue 25 subpoenas over the next two years, against scientists, regulators, environmental groups and even state attorneys general.

Smith also hired seven staffers from the aggressive House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which had provided fodder for Republican attacks on the Obama administration with its probes on Benghazi, IRS treatment of conservative groups, solar manufacturer Solyndra's bankruptcy and other issues. "In 2015, it became increasingly apparent that the Obama administration was advancing a one-sided, unconstitutional agenda," Smith told InsideClimate News. "We needed to bring in staff who had strong backgrounds in conducting oversight of government agencies and getting them to answer questions."

Feeling Climate Impacts in Texas' 21st District

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The science committee majority staff, which had more than a dozen Ph.D. scientists during the Boehlert era, now was loaded with political operatives like Mark Marin, who had been deputy staff director for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Joe Brazauskas, who had been a law clerk for the National Mining Association before serving as a counsel on Issa's House Oversight committee.

Warming 'Pause': Smith Investigates NOAA

In June 2015, Smith and his team targeted research published by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The paper in the peer-reviewed journal Science undercut a key talking point of climate science deniers: It found that there had been no pause in global warming over the past two decades.

In response to Smith's subpoenas and letters, NOAA provided the science committee with its raw data and methodology, and its scientists gave briefings on their research for committee staff. But Smith wanted the researchers' emails.

He said an agency whistleblower had alleged that the paper had been rushed to publication despite the concerns and objections of a number of agency employees. The purported whistleblower, a NOAA scientist named John Bates, later said his complaint had been mischaracterized; he disagreed with how the scientists stored and archived their climate data, but he did not dispute the study's findings or allege data manipulation. "I knew people would misuse this," he told Science magazine's website.

Eddie Bernice Johnson fired back at her committee's chairman in a letter: "The only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science—i.e., doing their jobs."

Smith's NOAA investigation provoked an unusual rebuke from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and six other major scientific groups, who accused him of chilling scientific inquiry.

Since the NOAA paper's publication, several studies as well as a reanalysis of the original NOAA work have affirmed the finding that there has been no hiatus in global warming.

But Smith continued to accuse the scientists of wrongdoing. In a March hearing, Smith reiterated that the committee heard from whistleblowers that NOAA employees "put their 'thumb on the scale' during the analysis of data." And in an April speech at an annual conference of climate deniers sponsored by the Heartland Institute, Smith said both NOAA and EPA during the Obama administration had been "complicit in furthering a one-sided partisan agenda focused on climate change."

MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel believes he gained insight into Smith and his approach after an exchange a couple of years ago. It began with a discussion on a topic on which they agreed—how the U.S. had fallen behind Europe in numerical weather prediction. Emanuel took the opportunity to give Smith a copy of a primer he had written for non-scientists on climate science and risk.

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Lamar Smith on the Science

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A few days later, Emanuel got a call from Smith, who wanted to talk about the book. "He struck me as a very astute man," Emanuel said. "Clearly he had read the book very thoroughly or had been thoroughly briefed on it.

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"He proceeded politely to ask sharp questions. Could this be wrong? Could it be not as bad? A lot of the questions were about uncertainty," Emanuel recalled. At first the scientist felt he was making headway with the congressman, a hope that was quashed the next time he heard Smith publicly dismissing climate science. "In hindsight, I think I was unwittingly a coach, helping him armor himself against reasonable arguments."

"There's nothing stupid about Lamar Smith," said Emanuel. "He's not uniformly anti-science. It's not that he doesn't understand the science. He struck me as a lawyer for the defense, who knows his defendant is guilty, but is bound by law or honor or legal code to defend."

Subpoena Power Unleashed

Smith's tactics to defend fossil fuel energy created legal worries for the EPA, which was battling the industry in court. Officials feared that the constant document requests by Smith would help industry lawyers obtain otherwise confidential material that could be used against the agency in court.

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In one instance, Smith acted with a like-minded Republican committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz of House Oversight, to demand internal documents on one of the Obama administration's most contentious regulations, intended to protect thousands of waterways and marshlands. After Chaffetz obtained memos showing an interagency dispute over the rule, he released them. EPA's foes, including the oil industry, which would not normally have had access to the records, sought to introduce them in a court challenge to the new clean water regulation. "Once documents have been disclosed and widely disseminated, an agency has waived any deliberative process or other privilege that may have applied," argued North Dakota's attorney general, the lead litigant.

In letters to Smith, EPA repeatedly raised its concern about the risk of releasing documents in cases involving the Clean Water Act, the regional haze pollution standards, a decision over a controversial copper mine decision in Alaska, and others.

Rep. Lamar Smith, speaking here with John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama, strongly opposed the Obama administration's efforts to reduce power plant emissions.

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Smith's most dramatic rush to the legal defense of the fossil fuel industry was his unprecedented move last year to issue subpoenas to two state attorneys general and several nongovernmental advocacy groups over the states' climate change fraud investigation of Exxon. He accused the attorneys general of colluding with environmentalists, violating Exxon's free speech rights and chilling private sector science funding.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, refused to comply with the subpoena, which he said "oversteps the boundaries of federalism, separation of powers, and the committee's own jurisdiction."

Smith disagreed. "The science committee has jurisdiction over all non-military, non-medical research and development," he said in the email to InsideClimate News. "We had an obligation to the scientific community and the American people to find out whether the attorneys general have intentionally intimidated researchers who disagree with them."

Legal experts see another possible outcome of Smith's inquiry. If he were to obtain and make public internal documents like correspondence among the attorneys general—material that Exxon would have trouble obtaining as a litigant—the company could use it in court.

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"It sure looks like he is acting on behalf of Exxon," said Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat who is part of a coalition supporting the investigation by New York and Massachusetts. "It's hard to understand why he thinks that it's an appropriate role for a congressman and Congress to get involved on behalf of an entity like Exxon. It's not like ExxonMobil is incapable of defending itself."

And, indeed, even though Smith did not obtain documents, Exxon cited the mere fact of his inquiry to give weight to its effort last year to derail the probe. Exxon picked up Smith's argument that the attorneys general were appointing "themselves to decide what is valid and what is invalid regarding climate change." For that reason and on multiple constitutional grounds, Exxon lawyers asked a federal judge in Texas to dismiss the investigations.

Although the Texas judge declined to rule, he embraced Exxon and Smith's contention that the New York and Massachusetts investigations were intended to "squelch public discourse by a private company that may not toe the same line as these two attorneys general." The case has been transferred to New York federal court, where a judge has yet to rule.

Back Home in the 21st District

For the most part, Smith hasn't had to address the climate issue back home, even though polls show that a majority of his adult constituents believe human activity is causing global warming and Texas has suffered more severe climate and weather disasters since 1980 than any other state....

tax reform kills camp finance reform

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http://prospect.org/article/scott-pruitt%E2%80%99s-dirty-war-clean-water

This week, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that will determine how far the federal government can go in safeguarding American waterways. At issue are challenges to the Clean Water Rule that began working its way up to the high court two years ago.

Yet no matter what the Court decides, the Clean Water Rule’s days are almost certainly numbered as the Environmental Protection Agency finalizes a plan to kill the rule outright this fall. The agency has come under fire from scientists, environmental advocates, and state officials for moves related to its repeal crusade, including cutting back on public input, an ominous sign that flies in the face of past EPA practice.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA, has a personal stake in this battle royale: He helped lead the multi-state legal assault against the rule during his tenure as Oklahoma’s attorney general, which culminated in National Association of Manufacturers v. Department of Defense, the case currently before the high court. The case hinges on whether a federal appeals court had the authority to stay the rule in 2015.

As Oklahoma’s top law enforcement officer, Pruitt repeatedly blocked Obama’s environmental agenda with multi-state lawsuits. Characterizing the water-protection rule as a federal land grab, Pruitt and another opponent, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, once smeared it as “the greatest threat to private property rights the modern era has ever seen.” The men went on to pledge a concerted campaign to kill the rule. “Failure is not an option,” they wrote.

Since becoming President Trump’s top environmental official, Pruitt has taken dead aim at the Clean Water Rule.

Since becoming President Trump’s top environmental official, Pruitt has taken dead aim at the Clean Water Rule.Whether or not Pruitt can finally kill the rule, his assault on the EPA’s rulemaking process and its ability to enforce basic environmental standards is unlikely to slow down. At risk are not just clean water protections, but the ability of citizens influence how regulations are crafted and enforced, threats that do not bode well for American democracy.

“The degree of aggressiveness in the [Clean Water Rule] repeal effort is unprecedented,” says Jon Devine, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Water Program. “It’s hard to identify an action that the previous administration took that this new administration isn’t trying to dismantle.”

First passed in 1972, the Clean Water Act’s authority was intentionally broad. The act originally covered all water bodies with a “significant nexus,” or connection, to “navigable waters.” But during the George W. Bush years, a series of court cases dramatically curtailed that authority and left much of the act’s enforcement in legal limbo.

The Clean Water Rule clarified which bodies of water fell under Clean Water Act protections and which did not. First proposed in 2014, the rule was designed to expand federal protections across 20 million acres of lakes, wetlands, and streams, along with drinking water for more than 117 million Americans. It would also help protect drinking water against contaminants like algal blooms, which last year posed a threat to water sources in more than 20 states.

“There’s been a lot of confusion and inconsistency over what’s protected and what’s not,” says Jennifer Peters, water programs director at Clean Water Action. “The Clean Water Rule itself doesn’t require any new regulations. It just more clearly defines what’s protected.”

Public input was a top priority when the EPA first proposed the new rule. While the rule was in the works, the agency gave state and local officials, environmental advocates, and private citizens 180 days to comment. Of the one million–plus comments the agency received, nearly 90 percent supported the policy.

But the EPA under Trump has taken a very different approach to its responsibilities to the public. While most major regulatory proposals give people 60 days to contact the agency with comments, the Trump EPA allotted just 30 days for the Clean Water Rule repeal. That move prompted 22 Democratic senators to demand the EPA give the public 90 days to send in their views on the rule. Clean Water Action, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, and other national and state advocacy groups also protested the new cutoff. The outcry produced a modest victory: The EPA finally agreed on a 60-day comment window.

Yet Trump’s EPA has scheduled only ten hearings on the Clean Water Rule, with only one of them open to the public, and did not include environmental advocates at all. In a July “outreach” session in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Pruitt held a closed-door meeting with a group of farmers, developers, and utility company officials—the people who are enthusiastic about repeal. Pruitt told reporters after the meeting, “What we’re doing is hearing from folks in the states … not associations in Washington, D.C., not 501c(3)s and … other organizations which exist just to engage in advocacy.”

If this conduct seems extreme, Pruitt’s allies in Congress were willing to go much further. In July, House lawmakers, including South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, who attended the Orangeburg meeting, offered a proposal that would allow the agency to ignore public comments entirely and bar environmental groups from challenging the repeal in court. The plan did not get far, but it may signal a new Trump strategy in the push for deregulation. “It would be a remarkable action to remove the public from democratic decision-making,” says Michael Gerrard, a Columbia University environmental law professor.

Unlike their Trump counterparts, Obama environmental officials made a concerted effort to engage farmers, business owners, and developers as well as scientists and environmental advocates about the Clean Water Rule. The EPA conducted hundreds of public meetings across the country and visited farms in nine states. Feedback from these meetings prompted officials to redefine which tributaries would be impacted by the rule and to clarify protections around floodplains and covered waterways.

“Under the previous administration, we would have been invited to a meeting like [Orangeburg],” says Peters. “Clearly, we’re not the stakeholder group they’re interested in engaging with.”

Perhaps that’s because environmental groups are particularly effective in organizing public opposition to dubious undertakings that pose environmental risks. People power played a critical role in the campaign to halt the Keystone XL pipeline project: Organizations like 350.org, Bold Nebraska, and the Sierra Club helped galvanize grassroots opposition. After federal officials conducted dozens of hearings and plowed through more than five million public comments, President Obama killed the pipeline in 2015. (The Trump administration later moved to revive the project.)

“There are not many mechanisms by which the public can have input that affects rulemaking,” says Gerrard. Without public comments and hearings, “only the lobbyists and others wired into the process know what’s happening and can express their views.”

During his tenure at Gardere & Wynne, a Tulsa law firm, in the 1990s, Page tried several cases for Pruitt. He claims that Pruitt, who was fresh out of law school and did not have much litigation experience, relied on him and others to try cases in court. Most of their work focused on patent law and product liability, and Page recalls that Pruitt didn’t have much interest in environmental law or regulation.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, PRUITT HAS NEVER had much interest in protecting the health of waterways or ecosystems—or listening to the people who do. “Scott has no expertise in environmental matters,” says David Page, an environmental attorney with Leach & Sullivan in Duncan, Oklahoma, “other than what he learned from corporate donors.”

That worldview shifted when Pruitt entered politics in 1998. As a state senator in Oklahoma, he chaired the Civil Justice Task Force of the Koch-connected American Legislative Exchange Council. He also relied heavily on campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies like Devon Energy, Chesapeake Energy, and Koch Industries.

“Some big states like California or Florida have similar units, but for a smaller state like Oklahoma it was very unique and it was very powerful,” says Page. “When you have a company as big as Tyson or Cargill, a typical city or county can’t stand up to a powerful entity like that.”Pruitt launched a full-fledged anti-environmental crusade when he became Oklahoma attorney general in 2010. He dismantled the Environmental Protection Unit, which defended state environmental laws. The move was a major blow for families and towns that were often at the mercy of the large agricultural and fossil fuel companies that dominate Oklahoma politics and pollute local communities.

Under Pruitt, pending environmental cases ground to a halt, including a lawsuit against Tyson Foods and other large poultry companies over toxic pollution in Oklahoma’s Illinois River, a watershed designated as highly vulnerable to groundwater contamination. For years, hundreds of thousands of tons of chicken waste had been seeping into the watershed. To stop the pollution, the state sued the companies in federal district court in 2005.

Page, then working for the state’s Environmental Protection Unit, spent five years preparing the case. When Pruitt took office, he made it clear he wouldn’t push for a resolution. Today, the case remains in legal limbo. Much like his Clean Water rule repeal effort, Pruitt’s slow-going in the Tyson case allowed him to sidestep the case’s legal and environmental merits, as well as his responsibility to enforce the law. “If you delay enforcement, it no longer has the opportunity to get back into the regulatory process,” Page explains. “That seemed to be a tactic, and it looks like he’s doing it in the same way now.”

In July 2015, backed by corporate allies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Mining Association, Pruitt filed a lawsuit against the Clean Water Rule—one of 14 suits he filed against the EPA. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, each of these co-litigators in the Clean Water Rule lawsuit has been a major donor to the Republican Attorneys General Association. In 2016 alone, the Chamber of Commerce donated more than $1.3 million, making it the group’s second-largest benefactor.

Repealing the Clean Water Rule has also been a major priority for the Business Roundtable, a conservative group of CEOs representing nearly two-dozen of America’s largest corporations. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, the group sent the administration a letter, calling on the new administration to rescind a number of Obama-era programs, including the Clean Water Rule. Tellingly, the Business Roundtable includes Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan, and AT&T—all major donors to Pruitt, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Pruitt’s lawsuit was part of a broader assault called the Rule of Law campaign, an alliance of conservative attorneys general that Pruitt helped found when he chaired the Republican Attorneys General Association. Likened to a “large national law firm,” the alliance filed lawsuits against a range of Obama-era initiatives including the Affordable Care Act and DACA. Though the Rule of Law campaign, Pruitt took dead aim at the EPA’s regulatory processes on everything from how agency experts review scientific data to how they estimate the costs of new regulations. The campaign depends heavily on dark-money sponsors like the Judicial Crisis Network and the Koch-connected Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce for as much as 40 percent of its budget.

A federal district judge stayed the Clean Water Rule just hours before it was to go into effect in August 2015, and a federal appeals court expanded the stay nationwide. The end result? Pruitt’s lawsuit had ensured that the Clean Water Rule was never fully enforced.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoman’s aggressive record of undermining federal rulemaking prompted 13 former state environmental protection agency heads to publicly oppose his nomination as EPA administrator. “His record, particularly as a litigator against many EPA rules, causes us to question whether he … appropriately respects science-based decision making,” the former officials warned. “We fear that an EPA under Mr. Pruitt would undermine the rules that help to make sure that our state regulations are successful.” The Senate confirmed Pruitt in February.

The warning proved prescient.In less than seven months, Pruitt has moved to delay or reverse not only the Clean Water Rule but more than 30 other environmental regulations on everything from landfill pollution limits to ozone smog standards to pesticide worker safety protections—a deregulatory assault unprecedented in the agency’s history. The EPA head has also reportedly shifted decision-making away from the EPA’s career staff in favor of political appointees and outside lawyers, along with his former colleagues at the Republican Attorneys General Association.

“Even under Bush, you didn’t see this aggressive attacking and rolling back of regulations,” says Peters. “This is new territory.”

The irony is that this assault has created exactly the type of “regulatory uncertainty” Pruitt and his anti-government allies love to rail against. In attacking Obama-era regulations so aggressively, and with such flimsy legal authority, the EPA has made the regulatory environment too unpredictable. “Industry really has no idea what they can rely on in this atmosphere,” says Meleah Geertsma, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It seems to be hurting the people that Pruitt is trying to help. Industry lawyers have not been happy.”

But even if the rule survives, it is still vulnerable to the severe budget cutbacks that the White House and Congress are hammering out. In May, the Trump administration proposed slashing the EPA’s 2018 funding by 31 percent, a cutback one Democratic lawmaker called “downright offensive.” While the House budget plan does not go quite that far, the proposal would reduce the agency’s funding to its lowest level in more than a decade.The Trump administration is headed into murky legal waters as the Supreme Court considers the Clean Water Rule.If the court reverses the nationwide stay when it delivers its opinion next year and the rule goes into effect, environmental advocates say that the decision would demonstrate that the rule is not the great threat to private property and states’ rights that Pruitt and his allies have made it out to be. “They’re trying to push repeal through as fast as possible,” says Peters. “Clearly they’re on shaky ground.”

Trump officials have promised to return the agency to what they view as its primary mission: protecting “clean water, clean air, and other core responsibilities rather than activities that are not required by law.” Yet major budget cuts would directly affect the EPA’s ability to implement the regulations it is legally required to enforce. “The budget would be yet another major obstacle to effectively enforcing the Clean Water Act,” says Devine of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It would be devastating.”

Pruitt’s multi-pronged assault on the EPA not only threatens core environmental protections, but also the ability of citizens to impact how those protections are crafted and enforced. Whether or not the Clean Water Rule can survive, Pruitt’s destructive campaign against the EPA’s regulatory process ensures that the public is increasingly shut out.

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/animal-rights/after-targeting-elephants-trump-administration-puts-african-lions-crosshairs

Wednesday, I reacted in real time on my blog to the Safari Club International’s announcement that the U.S. Department of the Interior plans to lift a ban on the import of sport-hunted trophies of rare and beleaguered African elephants. In short, our government is essentially turning loose American trophy hunters in Zimbabwe, at a time when declines in elephant populations have been documented because of the ruthless killing of the animals for their ivory. The United States has led the fight against the ivory trade worldwide, and now it’s undermining that morally urgent fight by allowing one class of ivory hunters to have their way with elephants. The upper class, that is.

And it’s just as shocking that the agency is also turning trophy hunters loose to kill African lions. The lion hunters are typically the elephant hunters too, because of the contest killing framework that the Safari Club has devised. You see, SCI has an awards program that promotes the trophy killing of the world’s rarest animals, as a way to drive business to the guides and outfitters who contribute to the organization. One award is the Africa Big Five, which involves killing an elephant, lion, rhino, leopard, and Cape buffalo.

With yesterday’s news, which has prompted trophy hunting companies to advertise Zimbabwean elephant hunts on their websites, the Interior Department and the government of Zimbabwe (whoever is in charge) are rolling out the red carpet for the next Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who lured a famous and beloved lion, Cecil,out of a national park and shot and wounded him with an arrow.

Palmer left Cecil to bleed through the night, and then went out the next morning to finish him off. Walter Palmer never ended up facing any charges. Adding insult to injury, as an example of Zimbabwe’s inability to properly manage trophy hunting, its government dropped all charges against the hunting guide who accompanied him on this infamous and illegal hunt.

In July, I wrote about an eerily familiar slaying in Zimbabwe: a trophy hunter shot and killed Xanda the lion, whose primary range consisted of a portion of Hwange National Park. Xanda was the son of Cecil, and about four years old when Palmer killed his father.

No one knew what would become of Cecil’s progeny, since trophy hunting disrupts social relationships among family members. Lions live in communities where males sometimes work together to protect their mates and cubs; when a dominant male is lost, new male coalitions may seize the moment and try to take over their prides. When they succeed, they are known to kill the cubs to ensure the females continue only their lineage. Xanda survived the loss of his father and grew into a mature male who mated and had cubs of his own.

In 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, acting on a petition from The HSUS and Humane Society International, classified all African lions as endangered or threatened. In response to that plea, the agency, based on the best available science, forbid the imports of sport-hunted trophies effective January 22, 2016. Each year prior to that, trophy hunters had been killing as many as 600 lions in Africa and bringing their parts home, with the continent-wide population at only 20,000 and rapidly declining. Their numbers have been cut in half in just the last two decades. Trophy hunting is, without question, one of the greatest threats to lions.

Yesterday’s announcement from the Interior Department will not only allow sport-hunting trophies for 2017 to come into the United States, but it will also permit entry of those from 2016. The administration is doing a reachback and accommodating all of those American hunters who killed lions in 2016 but couldn’t legally bring them back. Call it an amnesty program for the lion hunters.

The outrage factor is almost beyond compare for us at The HSUS.

Remember, this same administration took aim at two Obama-era rules to protect grizzly bears, wolves, and other native carnivores on 100 million acres of national wildlife refuges and national preserves. In April, President Trump signed a repeal of the refuge rule protecting predators. And just last week, the agency announced that it was revisiting the rule—which means starting the process to nix it—for National Park Service lands in Alaska.

So first there was an assault on Alaskan wildlife. And now an assault on African wildlife. The American public should not stand for these human attacks on these remarkable animals—all drivers of rural economies at home and abroad because of the wildlife-watching they attract.

The laughable part of this latest regulatory maneuvering dance is that the Interior Department is essentially saying that Zimbabwe has strict controls and has a sound wildlife management program. Remember, this is a nation run by a ruthless dictator who has targeted political opponents and average citizens. It is a country where poaching by shooting and poisoning of wildlife has been rampant. And it is a country that has a notorious pay-to-play approach—offering up animals to the highest bidder. In the middle of a political crisis of the worst order there, the U.S. government is working not to improve governance and promote the democratic process in Zimbabwe, but to open the door for Americans to join in the pillaging of that nation’s extraordinary wildlife.

What also defies understanding is, why would the U.S. government allow American trophy hunters to import lion trophies when they are unlikely to find an airline that will carry them into the country. After the killing of Cecil, 43 airlines, including all major U.S. carriers, said they would no longer ship lion trophies in the cargo holds of their planes.

The folly that the killing helps lions and elephants is just that—pure folly. We’ll see the agency in court.African elephants and African lions drive billions of dollars of economic activity in Africa. But they drive that activity only when they are alive. Killing them deducts from their populations, diminishes wildlife-watching experiences for others, and robs the countries of Africa of its greatest resources.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13102017/trump-kathleen-hartnett-white-ceq-nominee-climate-change-fossil-fuels-supporter-texas

President Donald Trump has picked Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas regulator and unapologetic advocate of expanding U.S. fossil fuel production regardless of carbon dioxide emissions, for the top White House environment post.

Putting her in charge of the Council on Environmental Quality, which has been rudderless since Trump took office, would place an extreme denier of mainstream climate science, a hero of those who oppose urgent action on global warming, at the fulcrum of federal interagency policy discussions on energy and environmental matters.

White has argued against the federal government's "endangerment finding" that carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas feeding worldwide climate change, is a danger to human health and the environment. If confirmed to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, she would be coordinating environmental efforts across the federal agencies.

As a fellow of the conservative Austin-based think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, White leaves a long paper trail that will surely be fodder for her confirmation hearing. The group has been funded by fossil fuel interests, including Exxon and the Koch brothers.

She has decried regulation of carbon dioxide, which she calls "the gas of life," and co-authored last year's paean to the fracking boom, "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy." Her co-author, economist Stephen Moore, founded the Club for Growth, the political action group that weaponized the primary process to successfully move the Republican party to the right over the past two decades.

"An invisible, harmless trace gas in the Earth's atmosphere, CO2 is a plant food," White said last year in a Q&A with the Orlando Sentinel.

In her 2014 monograph, "Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case," she wrote: "Humanity's use of fossil fuels has released whole populations from abject poverty. ... Until energy sources fully comparable or superior to fossil fuels are securely available, policies to reduce emissions of CO2 should proceed with caution lest they prematurely exhaust the well-springs of mankind's greatest advance."

She has also promoted tactics for undermining the Endangered Species Act, claiming its protections for endangered wildlife imperil prosperity.

In its announcement Thursday of Trump's intent to nominate White, the White House highlighted her role on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (2001-2007) and as a former director of the Lower Colorado River Authority.

White's appointment to a top position in the administration has long been rumored; she met with the president-elect in Trump Tower while he was mulling his choice for Environmental Protection Agency administrator. But her supporters betrayed no sense of disappointment when Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was named to that post instead.

At an energy policy summit that the Texas Public Policy Foundation co-hosted with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., last December, the group's president Brooke Rollins, said she expected that there would be "something very special" ahead for White in the Trump administration.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

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see related artl'

ref

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-28/how-a-canadian-timber-company-is-using-u-s-racketeering-law-to-go-after-greenpeace

Racketeering Law to Go After Greenpeace

And how Hustler Magazine may help the defense.

By Paul Barrett

July 28, 2017, 6:00 AM PDT

For several years, Greenpeace has been mounting a multimedia campaign against Canada's Resolute Forest Products, one of the largest timber-and-paper companies in the world. Called “Resolute: Forest Destroyer,” the campaign accuses the company of endangering the Boreal Forest, a vast evergreen swath that covers a third of northern Canada.

In response, Resolute has taken the extreme step of suing Greenpeace in the U.S. for violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The suit, filed last year and pending in federal court in San Francisco, home to Greenpeace’s forest campaigners, seeks to prove that theenvironmental group is akin to a mob syndicate.The company says it has suffered a $100 million hit to its reputation. Given that damages can be tripled under RICO, a decision in Resolute’s favor would endanger Greenpeace’s very existence.

The suit has strong support in communities tied to the forestry industry. “This is the first time a company has stood up to an outside group and said we won’t take this anymore,” says David Canfield, the mayor of Kenora, a town in northwestern Ontario.

Resolute isn’t the first corporation to try this strategy. Chevron recently used the racketeering act against environmental activists who had sued it over oil pollution in Ecuador. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling that protected the company from having to pay damages in the U.S. related to the Ecuadorian mess. Chevron proved that its activist foes had transformed their suit against the company into an extortion plot featuring bribery, fabrication of evidence, and the ghostwriting of judicial opinions.

By comparison, Greenpeace’s alleged offenses seem less dire, but that isn’t to say its assertions have been airtight. For one thing, Resolute isn’t “destroying” the Boreal. According to the government agency Natural Resources Canada, less than 0.5 percent of the country’s forest acreage is harvested annually (and only a minority of that is taken by Resolute).

With the exception of logging roads, 100 percent of forest that’s harvested is regenerated naturally or by seeding or planting, the agency says. “‘Destroying’ means something: It's going away and not coming back,” Resolute’s lawyer, Michael Bowe, says. The Boreal, he adds, isn’t disappearing in that fashion.

“The idea that we’re the ones doing damage is patently false and malicious,” says Seth Kursman, Resolute’s spokesman. The company accuses Greenpeace of other distortions—misrepresenting trees felled by natural causes as having been illegally cut down; predicting that Resolute activities will lead to a caribou “death spiral,” when the animals at risk are in western Canada, far from Resolute’s operations in the east; and blaming the company for hastening climate change when, Resolute claims, the old-growth forest that loggers take down absorbs dramatically less carbon dioxide than young forest growth that results from seeding, planting, or natural regeneration.

In keeping with RICO, the suit holds that Greenpeace has run something like a protection racket by threatening the company’s corporate customers with boycotts if they don’t cut ties with Resolute over these issues. Resolute says it has lost $100 million in revenue because of such threats—the basis of its damages claim. The company also accuses Greenpeace of fraudulently inducing “many millions of dollars” in donations from “regular working-class people who have been duped” into believing their money prevents forest loss, climate change, and caribou suffering. When I question whether Resolute has standing to vindicate the rights of Greenpeace contributors, Bowe responds that donors were harmed by the racketeering “enterprise” and are therefore properly included as victims. While he acknowledges that his evidence may not have the earmarks of traditional organized crime, he hastens to add, “I don’t think you have to have a Chevron case to have a RICO case.”

Greenpeace General Counsel Tom Wetterer says that the group stands behind its past statements and actions. But in its legal papers, the organization claims it can win the case without having been error-free in its claims about Resolute. The defense argument begins with the idea that Resolute has dressed up a garden-variety defamation suit as a racketeering case.When viewed properly under U.S. defamation law, the defense says, Greenpeace’s attacks on the company—including boycott threats—constitute protected free speech. And when statements relate to issues of public concern, the First Amendment protects accusatory language employed “in a loose figurative sense.” That last point comes from the holding of a 1974 Supreme Court decision on labor organizing, which also said “rhetorical hyperbole” and “vigorous epithet” are protected. Activists, Greenpeace adds, aren’t obliged to “hew to strict literalisms or scientific precision.”

So, even if Resolute hasn’t literally “destroyed” the forest or pushed caribou into a “death spiral,” Greenpeace feels entitled to say that it did—and the U.S. judiciary may agree. “We’re doing legitimate advocacy work,” says Wetterer.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 11 other media organizations have filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Greenpeace. They point to a 1988 Supreme Court decision that protected Hustler’s right to publish a parody ad depicting the late conservative Christian evangelist Jerry Falwell as an incestuous drunk. “In the world of debate about public affairs,” the court’s unanimous ruling read, “many things done with motives that are less than admirable are protected by the First Amendment.”

A federal judge is expected to hear Greenpeace’s motion to dismiss the Resolute suit this fall. Unsettling though it may be to watch a litigant wrap its free-speech fate in a revolting porn magazine, I predict Greenpeace will have the better of the constitutional argument. The First Amendment offers activists a strong shield.

As a final observation, though, it’s worth noting that in a different context, Greenpeace has taken a narrower view of protected expression. On ExxonSecrets.org, a website it sponsors, the organization says that the oil company ’s past support for climate-change denial doesn’t deserve First Amendment insulation. There is a “responsibility that goes with freedom of speech, which is based around honesty and transparency,” Greenpeace asserts. “Freedom of speech does not apply to misinformation and propaganda.” Those lines sound an awful lot like something Resolute would say.

Bruce Lund, a senior member of In-Q-Tel’s technical staff, noted in a 2012 paper that “monitoring social media” is increasingly essential for government agencies seeking to keep track of “erupting political movements, crises, epidemics, and disasters, not to mention general global trends.”

The recent wave of investments in social media-related companies suggests the CIA has accelerated the drive to make collection of user-generated online data a priority. Alongside its investments in start-ups, In-Q-Tel has also developed a special technology laboratory in Silicon Valley, called Lab41, to provide tools for the intelligence community to in large sets of data.

In February, Lab41 published an article exploring the ways in which a Twitter user’s location could be predicted with a degree of certainty through the location of the user’s friends. On Github, an open source website for developers, Lab41 currently has a project to ascertain the “feasibility of using architectures such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks to classify the positive, negative, or neutral sentiment of Twitter messages towards a specific topic.”

Collecting intelligence on foreign adversaries has potential benefits for counterterrorism, but such CIA-supported surveillance technology is also used for domestic law enforcement and by the private sector to spy on activist groups.

Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiationfor a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a “tech unicorn” — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.

:{:{}:

Lee Guthman, an executive at Geofeedia,toldreporter John Knefel that his company could predict the potential for violence at Black Lives Matter protests just by using the location and sentiment of tweets. Guthman said the technology could gauge sentiment by attaching “positive and negative points” to certain phrases, while measuring “proximity of words to certain words.”Yet other In-Q-Tel-backed companies are now openly embracing the practice. Geofeedia, for instance, promotes its research into Greenpeace activists, student demonstrations, minimum wage advocates, and other political movements. Police departments in Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, and other major municipalities have contracted with Geofeedia, as well as private firms such as the Mall of America and McDonald’s.}:

Privacy advocates, however, have expressed concern about these sorts of automated judgments.

“When you have private companies deciding which algorithms get you a so-called threat score, or make you a person of interest, there’s obviously room for targeting people based on viewpoints or even unlawfully targeting people based on race or religion,” said Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

She added that there is a dangerous trend toward government relying on tech companies to “build massive dossiers on people” using “nothing but constitutionally protected speech.”

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With so much news, however, perhaps the most shocking and consequential story of all slipped under the radar: A bombshell report in the Nation that the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC) – the most influential power behind conservative legislation marching through state legislatures – has drafted a proposal to return the power to select U.S. senators to state legislators.

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b2 holmsted pruitt # 2 epa

aslo doi horrors? 717

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Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

guard uk mercer, cambr anal, psy-ops;

nat sheriff deploy on recall?! walker p black panther;

psy-ops marellus shale ETP then dapl?

trumppyle (lewandowski, pombo, ebell transition?) perry DOE trying to gut cafe/leed/energy effing star

green dragon: BULB act; God wants us to use fossil fuels; keeping 3rd world from burning FF is Genocide

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psy-op afghan congress vip franken and marcellus shale

mckinley inhofe ~ green military

https://thinkprogress.org/house-votes-to-deny-climate-science-and-ties-pentagons-hands-on-climate-change-6fb577189fb0

Betsy DeVos has been met with angry mobs since her narrow confimation in mid-February. As a result, the department is spending a staggering $1 million per month to keep her safe, according to the Washington Post. "The [U.S.] Marshals Service is hiring nearly two-dozen people to guard her," the report finds.

Under an agreement signed in late Month, DeVos will be under its protection through September, but she may use law enforcement agency's services for the duration of her term.

The Post report also noted that while "the new outlay is a tiny fraction of the department’s budget, [it] comes as the Trump administration has proposed slashing the spending plan by $9 billion, or 13.5 percent."

The education secretary is the sole cabinet member who requires protection from the United States Marshal Service. According to the agency's spokeswoman Lynzey Donahue, no cabinet member has required such protection in nearly a decade.

As News One Now host Roland Martin pointed out Monday, "DeVos' stance on charter schools and special education has caused protesters to show up at every school she visits."

church in Alabama is well on its way to having its own police force. On Tuesday, Alabama state senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill that would allow Briarwood Presbyterian, in suburban Birmingham, to have its own cops. Now the proposed legislation heads to the desk of Governor Kay Ivey, who was sworn in days ago after Robert Brentley resigned in disgrace over a sex scandal.

Alabama Senate Bill 193 is sponsored by Republican Majority Leader J.T. "Jabo" Waggoner, who has represented the district for nearly 30 years, making him one of the longest-serving -- and most powerful -- senators in the state legislature. The bill would endow the church with the power to “appoint and employ one or more persons to act as police officers,” and would give members of the church police department “all of the powers of law enforcement officers in this state.”

Spokesperson Matt Moore said in a recent statement that Briarwood Presbyterian needs its own armed police force to protect its 4,100 parishioners, as well as its on-site K-12 school and seminary.

"After the shooting at Sandy Hook and in the wake of similar assaults at churches and schools, Briarwood recognized the need to provide qualified first responders to coordinate with local law enforcement," Moore stated in the message. "The sole purpose of this proposed legislation is to provide a safe environment for the church, its members, students and guests."

"We've got over 30,000 events a year that take place at Briarwood - going on all day, all night, at the school, at the church, at the seminary," Briarwood attorney Eric Johnston, who wrote much of the language in the bill, told AL.com. "We have to hire policemen all the time. It would be so much easier to have someone on staff."

The myriad glaring problems with Briarwood having its own, private police department was not lost on all members of Alabama’s state Congress. A previous version of the bill made it through the Senate last year, but was never signed by the Governor. At the time, Senate Democrat Hank Sanders, who represents Selma, said the legislation would likely “start an avalanche of private police forces with public authority."

Police corruption, which has long been an issue in law enforcement departments around the country, should be an even greater concern for Briarwood’s private force. Opponents of the bill have questioned whether church law enforcement would properly handle illegal activity, such as a drug investigation that took place at its K-12 school in 2015. Rodger Smitherman, a Senate Democrat from Birmingham, told NBC News he doesn’t think that will pose a real problem because the church promised it wouldn’t.

"I voted to get it out of committee after getting assurances that they would act like a real police force and they would not be an agency that covers things up," Smitherman said. The lawmaker did go on to acknowledge that there are “valid constitutional concerns.”

Randall Marshall, the legal director of the Alabama, was more pointed in his criticisms of the bill.

"It's our view this would plainly be unconstitutional," Marshall wrote in a letter to the legislature cited by NBC. "Vesting state police powers in a church police force violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. These bills unnecessarily carve out special programs for religious organizations and inextricably intertwine state authority and power with church operations."

Meanwhile, another bill in the the Alabama House would permit “designated members” of a church to “to carry firearms for the protection of the congregation.” As the Huffington Post points out, these bills are particularly troubling, considering how nonexistent gun control already is in Alabama. “The state does not require a background check prior to private gun sales, nor does it prohibit the transfer or possession of assault weapons, 50 caliber rifles, or large capacity ammunition magazines,” the outlet notes. “And firearm owners are not required to register their weapons.”

Briarwood administrators have admitted to the that the megachurch hasn’t been targeted by threats or violence, such as those endured by mosques around the country. Maybe Muslim houses of worship in Alabama should also consider proposing bills to have their own police departments, since legislators should logically be all for it.

bachmann bulb bill; trump care sorta makes sense re red tape ineff puts US at disadvantage but...anti effic LEED ag 21 nuts

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http://www.ecowatch.com/heartland-institute-climate-science-2334892782.html

Koch-Funded Group Tries to Persuade 200,000 Science Teachers That Climate Change Is Debatable

The Heartland Institute is trying to nurture the next generation of climate change deniers.

The conservative and libertarian think tank has sent out 25,000 copies of the organization's book, Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming,and an accompanying 10-minute DVD to 25,000 science teachers this month, according to a Frontline report. The book argues that climate change is not settled science.

Katie Worth, who authored the Frontline report, called the effort a "massive propaganda campaign by the nation's leading climate change skeptical think tank."

The Heartland Institute, which has received funding from polluting industries such as Exxon and the Koch family, rejectsthe scientific community's widespread consensus that human activity causes climate change.

The organization plans to send the materials to another 25,000 teachers every two weeks until every public-school science teacher in the nation has a copy, Heartland president and CEO Joseph Bast said.

This means the book and DVD could end up in the mailboxes of more than 200,000 K-12 science teachers in the country. The campaign began in mid-March.

Frontline also published a cover letter of the materials from Lennie Jarratt, project manager of Heartland's Center for Transforming Education, who asks that the teacher "consider the possibility" that climate science is not settled.

img

The 2015 book is coauthored by Drs. Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter and S. Fred Singer, who have been heavily involved in the "debate" over global warming.

Here are some tidbits about the authors:

According to DeSmog, Idso believes that "CO2 is not a pollutant" and is the chairman and former resident of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which has a mission is to "separate reality from rhetoric in the emotionally-charged debate that swirls around the subject of carbon dioxide and global change."

Carter, who passed away last year, was an Australian marine geologist and a paid climate change denier, SourceWatch noted. He once asserted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not found evidence that global warming was caused by human activity.

Singer, a former space scientist and government scientific administrator, founded the Science & Environmental Policy Project in 1990, a 501(c)(3) "educational group" focusing on global warming denial, according to DeSmog. Idso and Singer helped develop the Heartland Institute's "Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. Singer said in Jan. 2016 that "the real threat to humanity comes not from any (trivial) greenhouse warming but from cooling periods creating food shortages and famines."

The letter directs teachers to visit Izzit.org to access an online guide to using the DVD. Izzit.org is a "right-wing advocacy organization" that provides free educational videos to U.S. educators and homeschoolers.

The National Center for Science Education, an Oakland, California nonprofit that monitors climate change education in classrooms criticized the mailing campaign.

"It's not science, but it's dressed up to look like science," NCSE executive director Ann Reid told Frontline. "It's clearly intended to confuse teachers."

Climatologist Michael Mann also tweeted that the Heartland Institute is trying to "indoctrinate children with climate denial propaganda."

Bast, Heartland's president, said that some teachers have appreciated the information and even asked for a Heartland speaker to visit a class.

However, many science teachers have not welcomed the campaign.

As Frontline wrote:

Lori Baker, a sixth-grade science teacher at North Putnam Middle School in Roachdale, Indiana, found the package in her school mailbox and was dismayed by its contents. "I read quite a bit of the book, actually, and it was extremely frustrating. It's an attempt to sound science literate, but there's very little actual data," she said.

Baker pointed to the first paragraph of the foreword, written by Marita Noon, executive director of Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy, a nonprofit and lobbying group that advocates for the use of fossil fuels. In it, Noon writes that Obama's description of climate change as the greatest threat facing mankind is "laughable" at a time when "ISIS is beheading innocent people."

"That as a foreword to something claiming to be scientific is pretty shocking," said Baker.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/opinion/congress-says-let-the-mentally-ill-buy-guns.html

For all their dysfunction, the Republican Senate and House have managed to act with lightning speed in striking down a sensible Obama administration rule designed to stop people with severe mental problems from buying guns.

President Trump, who championed the National Rifle Association agenda as a candidate, is expected to sign the regressive measure. This, despite the Republican mantra that tighter control of mentally troubled individuals — not stronger gun control — is the better way to deal with the mass shootings and gun carnage that regularly afflict the nation.

The Senate voted Wednesday to join the House in revoking the rule. It would have required the Social Security Administration to add about 75,000 people, currently on disability support, to the national background check database and deny them gun purchases. These individuals suffer schizophrenia, psychotic disorders and other problems to such an extent that they are unable to manage their financial affairs and other basic tasks without help.

allowing them to buy guns poses an inordinate and needless risk to public safety. An existing law bars gun purchases to people “adjudicated as a mental defective” or involuntarily committed to a mental institution. But enforcement of that law has been spotty, because medical records often aren’t added to the federal databases — thus prompting the Obama administration to create the Social Security rule. Congress struck down the rule with Republican majorities — and some Democrats notably up for re-election next year — contending that the Second Amendment rights of these troubled, disabled individuals have to be the prime concern.

Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, envisioned people with “an eating disorder” being barred from buying a gun. To the contrary, the rule was focused narrowly on disabled individuals who require a trustee for personal management. They would have had the right to appeal. Senator Grassley himself noted last year the flaws in the background check database when he proposed greater cooperation among federal agencies with relevant information.

“The Republicans are so hypocritical on this issue,” said Senator Christopher Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. He has fought for both stronger gun controls and better mental health care in the aftermath of the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn. A mentally troubled individual used a legally purchased assault weapon and shot to death 20 children and six school workers. The disability rule was a response to that tragedy after Congress refused to tighten gun safety laws.

“I hope something truly awful doesn’t happen because of this,” Senator Murphy said of Congress’s repeal of the new rule. Americans can only join in that hope while Congress continues to bend to the will of the gun industry.

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THE LEAKED DRAFT of a presidential memorandum Donald Trump is expected to sign within days suspends a 2010 rule that discouraged American companies from funding conflict and human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo through their purchase of “conflict minerals.”

The memo, distributed inside the administration on Friday afternoon and obtained by The Intercept,directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to temporarily waive the requirements of the Conflict Mineral Rule, a provision of the Dodd Frank Act, for two years — which the rule explicitly allows the president to do for national security purposes. The memorandum also directs the State Department and Treasury Department to find an alternative plan to “address such problems in the DRC and adjoining countries.”

The idea behind the rule, which had bipartisan support, was to drain militias of revenue by forcing firms to conduct reviews of their supply chain to determine if contractors used minerals sourced from the militias.

The impending decision comes as Trump held a meeting Wednesday with Brian Krzanich, the chief executive of Intel, one of the leading firms impacted by conflict mineral regulations. At the White House today, Krzanich appeared with the president to announce a new manufacturing plant in Arizona.

nat ass schol p wppd

Democrat/Republican: UCB Sociology* 17:0 UCB Political Science* 28:2 UCB English* 29:1 UCB History* 31:1 UCB Psychology* 26:1 UCLA History 53:3 UCLA English 29:2 UCSD Politics 27:0 UCSD History 26:1 UCSB English 21:0 UCSB History 28:1 These are astonishing, and astonishingly consistent margins; yet they are consistent with national data, for even Gross and Simmons found that in the2004 presidential election the overall margin favoring John Kerry over George Bush was 19:1 among professors of history, as it also was among professors of political science and of sociology. These figures confirm yet again both that the shift to the left of recent years has been striking, and that in those departments where it matters most to be able to draw on a spectrum of political and social views (that is, where such concerns are central to a department’s work)

David Schnare, who has waged intimidation campaigns against climate scientists, worked for 33 years at the EPA before joining a number of Koch-affiliated entities.

Schnare is director of the the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic at George Mason University, which serves as the official attorney for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. Both are funded extensively by Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Schnare is also an energy policy expert at the Heartland Institute.

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death star;

kind of like anti-kyoto, prop 23 does not go straight at regulations (that most ppl wpuld approve of, like clean air) but neurtralizes if hurts economy, or in reins, req second step to implement thus kills

And it's not just the transition team that's looking for help from Koch minions—it's Trump himself. As Steve Horn reported in DeSmog, the only person Trump spoke to on the record about a big anti-regulatory act that's been on the Kochs' agenda for years was Phil Kerpen, former vice president of policy for Americans for Prosperity.The REINS Act just passed the House on Jan. 5.

Tags: b1, Forrest Lucas, Harold G. Hamm, Interior Department, interior secretary, Lucas Oil, natural resources, oil and gas industry, Ray Washburne, Robert E. Grady, Sarah Palin, transition, Trump cabinet

omfg

Donald Trump is considering ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State, according to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.

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Mercer privacy

The use of personal data collected without knowledge or permission to establish sophisticated models of user's personalities raises ethical and privacy issues.^[6] CA operates out of the United States; its operations would be illegal in Europe with its stricter privacy laws.^[7] While Cruz is outspoken about protecting personal information from the government, his data base of CA has been described as "political-voter surveillance".^[7]

Regarding CA's use of Facebook users, a speaker for CA indicated that these users gave permission when signing up with the provider, while Facebook declared that "misleading people or misusing information" is in violation of Facebook's policies.^[6] Facebook indicated that is investigating the matter.^[6]

While Nix suggests that data collection and microtargetting benefits the voters as they receive messages about issues they care about, digital rights protection groups are concerned that private information is collected , stored, and shared while individuals are "left in the dark about (it)" and have no control.^[19]

The political operation created by the billionaire conservative mega-donors Charles and David Koch is quietly investing millions of dollars in programs to win over an unlikely demographic target for their brand of small-government conservatism ― poor people.

The outreach includes everything from turkey giveaways, GED training and English-language instruction for Hispanic immigrants to community holiday meals and healthy living classes for predominantly African American groups to vocational training and couponing classes for the under-employed. The strategy, according to sources familiar with it and documents reviewed by POLITICO, calls for presenting a more compassionate side of the brothers’ politics to new audiences, while fighting the perception that their groups are merely fronts for rich Republicans seeking to game the political process for personal gain.

The efforts include a healthy dose of proselytizing about free enterprise and how it can do more than government to lift people out of poverty.

“We want people to know that they can earn their own success. They don’t need the government to give it to them,” Koch network official Jennifer Stefano told activists and donors during in Columbus, Ohio, at which she introduced one such project, Bridge to Wellbeing.

Housed within the foundation arm of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s largest group, the program represents “the new way to advance freedom,” Stefano boasted. “And so that’s why, today, you’ll see Americans for Prosperity Foundation reaching out to new communities offering not just classes on the Constitution, and knowing your rights, but on couponing and how to turn your passion into profit by helping other people be successful, to not just tell them about the economy and economic freedom, but to show them that we want them to economically thrive, and how to do it.”

Bridge to Wellbeing last week served hot dinners to crowds of dozens of primarily African American attendees at a church in Miami and a community center in Orlando. A chef offered tips on how to prepare “dinner on a dime,” while attendees were guided into “learning about freedom,” according to the Twitter feed of one AFP staffer.

The Koch efforts can seem at times almost like a post-Citizens United version of turn-of-the-century political machines like Tammany Hall ― part privatized social-service agency, part voter mobilization. But liberal critics see it as a craven and patronizing gambit to bribe the disadvantaged into supporting a de-regulatory agenda that helps the haves at the expense of the have-nots.

"It won't work. They can't hide their agenda of lower wages, no unions and no health care, which would be devastating to these communities, merely by trying to 'help' them with a food coupon," said David Brock, who founded a liberal non-profit group that tracks the Koch network. He added, "It's also creepy. It sounds like something Hezbollah would do to get recruits."

Like most else in the Kochs’ expansive network, which plans to spend as much as $889 million from the industrialist Koch brothers and hundreds of allied mega-donors in the run-up to the 2016 election, the so-called well-being efforts, as they are known within the network, are only partly about electing Republicans.

Charles Koch has long argued ― mostly privately until recently ― that government welfare and regulation actually hold back many of its ostensible beneficiaries. His network's goal, he told hundreds of ultra-rich conservatives he had summoned to a tony Southern California resort this summer, “is to remove the shackles preventing all Americans, especially the disadvantaged, from pursuing their dreams. That’s what’s happening in this country. We are crushing ― these policies are crushing peoples’ dreams,” including by making "it nearly impossible for the poor to start a small business or, in many cases, even work.”

Koch went on to call his network "the most effective movement in history for helping people improve their lives and making the world a better place."

In addition to Bridge to Wellbeing, Koch-backed wellness efforts include the Hispanic-focused LIBRE Initiative, which has given away holiday turkeys and toys, as well as Spanish-language training for drivers’ licensing, GED exams and tax-preparation. Another network group,Concerned Veterans for America, is expected to begin offering similar well-being programs for veterans, according to sources. There are also initiatives aimed at the homeless, developmentally disabled and mentally ill. And there’s a new group called Stand Together for America focused partly on using well-being-related outreach to appeal to what network officials call “the middle third” ― persuadable voters who are mostly disengaged. And the Charles Koch Institute in 2013 launched a “Well-Being Initiative” to provideintellectual firepower for the overall network effort.

“Sometimes, we have not been as good at explaining the virtues of economic freedom and individual liberty to people who are struggling,” said Americans for Prosperity’s president Tim Phillips. He also conceded that well-being initiatives could help AFP’s main arm satisfy an Internal Revenue Service requirement that the group spend most of its money on educational or charitable purposes, not political or policy advocacy. “Part of it is we are a social welfare organization. And, so, yes, we do try to help folks live more prosperous lives. That’s not related to direct policy.”

“Could come off as not being genuine”

The well-being push includes causes that defy easy partisan typecasting ― such as a major criminal justice reform push and a fledgling fight to reduce occupational licensing ― on which Koch allies have worked with liberal groups and even lately with President Barack Obama’s administration. But messages about reining in government and empowering the private sector undergird all of the efforts ― even pitching in to help emergency victims.

After a chemical spill polluted the water supply in nine West Virginia counties last year, AFP Foundation gave away more than 100,000 gallons of bottled water to affected residents. Some environmentalists bristled, pointing out that Koch-backed groups have fought against stricter environmental regulations. But sources say that Stefano, the Bridge to Wellbeing leader, in a presentation to AFP staff, argued that charitable efforts like the one in West Virginia “allow us to demonstrate our values of individual responsibility and the private sector stepping up in times of need, instead of waiting for government.”

Inside the network, the well-being initiatives are viewed as a legacy project for Charles Koch and his longtime lieutenant Rich Fink. An executive at the brothers' multinational industrial conglomerate Koch Industries, Fink advocated for the creation of Stand Together for America, and has sat on the boards of Charles Koch Institute and Americans for Prosperity Foundation, though he left the AFPF board at the end of last month. Sources familiar with the network tell POLITICO that, in weekly meetings of top officials from across the expanding network, groups are urged to pursue outreach to disadvantaged groups.

“They’re trying to reshape the country, and they realize they can’t do that without changing the perception of conservatism,” said one operative who works with Koch-backed groups, who requested anonymity. In an internal network memo reviewed by POLITICO, though, in which AFP sought additional program funds, it predicted that the Bridge to Wellbeing initiative would allow the group and its foundation to “go on the offense against the current suggestions that AFPF is extreme, an arm of a political party or the front group for wealthy donors.”

Still, there’s a fair amount of concern inside the network that the efforts could be a costly boondoggle that is unlikely to yield any progress towards the Kochs' goals, and more likely risks backlash.

Stefano privately addressed those concerns during Bridge to Wellbeing's formative stages, according to sources familiar with the discussions, who said she warned network officials on multiple occasions that “capitalizing on these types of events could come off as not being genuine.”

And one former network executive said, “There are a lot of high-up lieutenants who roll their eyes when they talk about this and question whether it’s getting any bang for the buck. How does teaching people how to clip coupons or giving them free turkeys translate into convincing them that conservatives or Republicans have the best interests of the disadvantaged at heart? Is this really changing people's minds or are they just showing up for the free turkeys?”

The calculation, according to AFP spokesman Levi Russell, is that new audiences might be more receptive to the message if it’s presented in a less-political context. “If we're only engaging people on the latest piece of legislation being debated, we're starting too late in the process,” Russell said.

‘Care and intent’

After spending more than $400 million boosting conservative candidates and causes in the run-up to the 2012 election, only to see Democrats retain the White House and the Senate, the Koch network commissioned a forensic analysis to determine where their efforts had fallen short.

It identified a number of needed tactical and strategic adjustments. But it also concluded that its efforts were hampered by the widespread perception that conservatives don’t care about the plight of regular folks struggling to make ends meet ― let alone the underprivileged.

Sources tell POLITICO that, in post-election strategy sessions, Charles Koch and his inner circle fixated on an exit poll finding that highlighted a so-called “empathy gap” that plagued GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Among voters seeking a candidate who “cares about people like me”, Obama clobbered Romney 81 percent to 18 percent ― by far the widest gap among the four traits commonly measured (the others are vision for the future, shares my values and strong leader).

“All we talked about post-2012 was that statistic,” said a former executive with one network group. “How Romney won on economics or national defense but lost like 80 to 20 on who cares about you. It spoke to a larger problem with the conservative movement. Romney just embodied that.”

Koch and Fink concluded that winning over empathy-seeking voters could help them tilt the electoral map in their favor.

“If we are successful, there will be enough … support to not only drive state policies, but also to elect a majority of freedom advocates in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and we need 317 electoral votes to elect a president who will advance” economic freedom, Fink argued to donors at a closed-door 2014 session. In his remarks, which were secretly recorded and posted online by a liberal blogger, he stressed that “intent matters to this middle third,” and pointed out “Mitt Romney won on leadership. He won on the economy. He won on experience. What did he lose on? He lost on care and intent.”

He conceded that the Koch network’s efforts to reach the coveted middle third have been clumsy.The focus has been on “telling them what’s important — what we think is important should be important to them. And they’re not responding and don’t like it, okay? Well, we get business — what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy.”

The network commissioned focus groups done by veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz, a Koch favorite, to assess the concerns of the middle third, and determine how best to reach them, sources told POLITICO. On top of that, Fink told the donors the network gathered “20 years of objective research of left, right, middle scientists, and we’ve looked at 170,000 surveys of people around the world, in the United States — they were all people in the middle — and what they think is important.”

The result was an index of “six dimensions demonstrated to be key factors of well-being,” according to documents from the Charles Koch Institute. Among them were increasing the standard of living by providing for basic necessities, offering opportunity through strong job markets and entrepreneurship, bolstering personal freedom, encouraging family and community bonds, promoting physical and mental health and providing safety from war and crime.

It’s difficult to assess how much of the network’s $889-million budget for the 2016 cycle is slated for well-being initiatives, both because the efforts are spread across multiple groups and because the groups aren’t required to disclose detailed financial information.

But sources tell POLITICO that Fink has directed that a greater percentage of AFP’s overall budget be allocated to its foundation, which runs Bridge to Wellbeing and which tax filings show had a 2014 budget of $23 million (as compared to $82 million for AFP's main arm). And leaked documents reveal that the Koch network has pitched donors on well-being projects and concepts since at least last year.

At a June 2014 network gathering, donors were given the option of attending breakout sessions entitled “Well-Being: What It Is and Why It’s Important” and “Value-Added Events: Engaging the Middle Third.” The latter session, which refers to the precursor program to Bridge to Wellbeing, featured presentations by Stefano and Fink’s daughter Justine Fink, who helps run Bridge to Wellbeing. Stefano was listed as the “VP of Value Added Events” on AFP’s 2014 tax filings, which show she received an annual salary of $184,000.

“Not politics”

The Bridge to Wellbeing pilot program was launched in key swing states like Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. And insiders profess that the hope is that some of those helped by the network’s social services will embrace free-enterprise conservatism and possibly even join the ground troops that Koch-backed groups deploy to get out the vote.

Yet, publicly, the Kochs and their allies downplay political motivations.

In a promotional video shot at a Bridge to Wellbeing turkey giveaway, an "instructor" named Nicole Thorton, who previously worked as a high school history teacher and now teaches courses for AFP Foundation about the Constitution and individual rights, explained that the purpose “is not politics. It’s to help citizens to have a better quality of life and that is something that everybody wants, regardless of your political affiliation.”

There’s an almost evangelical undercurrent to the group’s efforts, which came across during Stefano’s speech in Columbus this summer.

“We have to go out and we have to embrace people for who they are. We have to meet them where they’re at. We must personalize freedom so that it’s meaningful to them and not just to us,” Stefano said, after taking the stage to the Rocky theme song. “There is no community, no group of people, no barrier that the six states that have agreed to a test of this model would not overcome to advance this new way of introducing Americans again to freedom,” she said. “We have gone in to shelters, rescue missions. We have gone and taken our message to people with intellectual disabilities, those with mental illness.”

Bridge seeks to cultivate relationships with potential activists by holding smaller-group events that bring in “aligned but unengaged” people, according to sources familiar with the planning. A particular focus is women. An AFP survey found women would be more likely to attend events if childcare or child-friendly entertainment is offered, sources said. It also found that events using words like “everyday affordability” were popular with “aligned but unengaged women.”

Bridge’s events are typically held at churches or community centers. They offer “coaches” in areas including “budgeting and finance” and “health and lifestyle, nutrition” and “constitutional and personal rights.” Free workshops are geared towards teaching “how to save money and have economic freedom.” Specific skills have included couponing, healthy and affordable eating and tips for answering the question “Is My Child’s School Any Good?”

It held a “Business, Budgeting and Money Saving Tips” event at a conservative church in Richmond, Va., and a healthcare event in Phoenix, Ariz., where a local doctor discussed how women can lead healthier lives while also criticizing Obamacare as hindering healthcare delivery and medical advances.

One event attendee explained in a promotional video he’s “learned how to flip furniture” and use coupons, as well as better time management.

During the turkey giveaway featured in the video, a participant identified as Alyssa thanked Bridge to Wellbeing for helping her family recover from her husband's lay-off.

“If it wasn’t for you guys, I don’t know how we would have made it the past few months, if you guys hadn’t offered that couponing class, because I didn’t even know how I was going to put groceries in my cabinet,” she said. “And I am incredibly grateful and I really appreciate all the hard work that you guys do and you put into it.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/charles-david-koch-poverty-charity-216631

murray coal v musk on subsidies

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OMG CRUZ SCI COMM

Climate-denying arguments by Ted Cruz at a Senate committee hearing last year have been soundly debunked by a new study published in the Journal of Climate. Testimony at the hearing attacked climate change by using cherry-picked satellite temperature data allegedly inconsistent with global warming. The paper found errors in this analysis that refutes the bogus claims.

In the midst of the Texas senator's stillborn run for nomination as the Republican presidential candidate, he used his position as chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness to convene a hearing entitled, "Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth's Climate."Hand-picked witnesses included noted climate skeptics John Christy, Judith Curry, conservative author Mark Steyn and Princeton University's William Harper. Harper was caught up in a sting operation by Greenpeace last year when he agreed to write a paper that, he was told, would be paid for by an unnamed Middle Eastern oil and gas company that wanted the payments to remain undisclosed.

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Ebell looks to be in good company in the Republican nominee’s camp.

In August, Trump’s team announced Kathleen Hartnett-White as one of several new additions to its “economic advisory team.”

Hartnett-White is another who doubts the well-established link between fossil fuel burning and climate change.

In a column last year, Hartnett-White lauded the “environmental benefits” of fossil fuel burning, while claiming the evidence for climate change was waning.

Hartnett-White is director of an energy and environment project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — another group that has taken money from the Koch brothers.

In July, the TPPF released a “research booklet” written by contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer that attempted to undermine findings related to sea level rise, extreme temperatures, and other impacts from burning fossil fuels.

Hartnett-White is also an adviser to the CO2 Coalition — a group that includes extreme climate science denier Patrick Moore, who rejects any evidence for human-caused climate change.

HAMM cramer

not my aha

The sociologists say one major reason why attempts to better communicate the realities of climate change to conservatives have failed is down to “motivated cognition” — described as the tendency for people to only accept information that reinforces their existing political beliefs and their views on the world.

Even when Republicans experience extreme weather events, there was little evidence that this was enough for those voters to change their views. Dunlap told DeSmog:

“I fear polarization will be difficult to overcome because Republican reluctance to accept the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change is in a self-reinforcing loop.

There are top-down cues from Republican political elites and their supporters from conservative think tanks to conservative media — especially the Murdoch media— that influence voters, as well as bottom-up pressure from party activists such as Tea Party supporters who act as ‘enforcers’ of party principles, especially in primary elections to select Republican candidates.

The result is that global warming has joined God, guns, gays, and abortion as core elements of Republican identity, and this will be hard to change.”

http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/08/31/americans-now-more-politically-polarized-climate-change-ever-analysis-finds

musk v murray soal on sibsidies, yet

http://www.ecowatch.com/firstenergy-bailout-puco-2043994096.html

The Ohio Public Utilities Commission (PUCO) approved a scheme Wednesday that will force FirstEnergy's customers to hand over approximately $200 million annually to the company and its shareholders for the next 3-5 years. Customers will receive virtually nothing in return for this massive subsidy, which could ultimately reach $1 billion.

Under Wednesday's order, FirstEnergy will begin to receive hundreds of millions of dollars, with effectively no strings attached. Although characterized as a "distribution modernization rider," nothing in the commission's order requires that these customer dollars be invested in modernizing Ohio's electrical grid or in any way be spent to benefit Ohio customers. Instead, the dollars can be siphoned off from FirstEnergy's Ohio utilities and used to bail FirstEnergy Corp. out of its poor coal investments while boosting the profits of corporate shareholders.

"Today's decision takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of customers' pockets in order to create a massive slush fund for FirstEnergy Corp. and its shareholders," said Shannon Fisk, attorney at the non-profit environmental law firm Earthjustice.

"And the fact that FirstEnergy asked for billions more does not make this decision any less unreasonable. Rather than forcing customers to prop up profits for a corporation that made a bad bet on aging coal plants, the commission should be looking after customers and ensuring investments in job-creating renewable energy, energy efficiency and smart grid initiatives."

Through Wednesday's decision, the commission has aided FirstEnergy's efforts to sidestep a recent order of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that raised serious questions about FirstEnergy's previous bailout proposal. Under that proposal, customers would have directly assumed all of the financial risk of financially struggling coal and nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy Corp.'s unrelated competition generation business.

In late April, FERC ruled that FirstEnergy's previous bailout proposal—which PUCO had approved a month earlier—may violate federal safeguards concerning transactions between public utilities and their unregulated affiliates. FERC blocked FirstEnergy's bailout scheme pending a federal review. Rather than submit its proposal for FERC review, FirstEnergy concocted a new scheme intended to bypass the FERC order. Although the bailout ultimately approved by PUCO is structured a bit differently and Wednesday's order mentions grid modernization in passing, the fact remains that this bailout poses the same risk to customers that the FERC order sought to prevent.

"In this long-awaited and complicated decision, PUCO missed a critical opportunity to seriously focus FirstEnergy on the more diversified, cleaner energy future that tens of thousands of customers wrote the commission asking for," said Dan Sawmiller, senior representative for Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign in Ohio.

"A few months ago, FirstEnergy took an important step in moving beyond coal when it announced closure of four units at its Sammis coal plant. With PUCO's decision now issued, we hope to be able to work with FirstEnergy to accelerate its path beyond coal and nuclear and toward new investments in clean energy, energy efficiency and other modern grid initiatives like infrastructure for electric vehicles."

Wednesday's order marks the latest development in a more than two-year effort by FirstEnergy to obtain a customer-funded bailout. Throughout that time consumer groups, industrial customers, independent power producers and environmental non-profits have united in challenging FirstEnergy's efforts as contrary to law and bad for customers. Challenges before the Ohio Supreme Court and FERC to the commission's approval of the bailout are expected.

corps fund both sides eg google

A new study from professors at Oklahoma State University has found that Republicans and Democrats have never been so far apart on climate issues.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2016.1208995

img

Fox News' Megyn Kelly interviews The Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman

"What was once a modest tendency for Congressional Republicans to be less pro-environmental than their Democratic counterparts has become a chasm—with Republicans taking near-unanimous anti-environmental stances on relevant legislation in recent years, especially 2015," the study said.

This distance between the parties wasfurther exacerbated by the rise of the Koch-funded Tea Party,which took the hard line of fully dismissing the climate change threat, often making climate change a lightning rod for voters who were outraged at Washington.

As they stoked fears about the U.S. government attempting to pass legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the Tea Party normalized climate denial throughout the Republican Party, according to Ohio State University's Prof. Riley E. Dunlap and Jerrod H. Yarosh, and Michigan State Associate Professor Aaron M. McCright.

Honors & Awards

David Martosko for work in Daily Caller?! with?

SHARED Edward R. Murrow Award (writing)

Radio Television Digital News Association

2012

[Writing

The Daily Caller

Alex Quade's 'The Horse Soldiers of 9-11'

Watch the winning entry - See more at: http://www.rtdna.org/content/2012_national_winners#sthash.kXtIHc8D.dpuf]

http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/14/secret-mission-the-horse-soldiers-of-911/

his name nowhere

SHARED Fourth Estate Award

The American Legion

Agenda 21: many links!

floyd brown, okl tex, sovereignty, common core Craig Shirley, Bossie unholy trinity

renta toms allen west, innis,

up trend gop; brat, joni ernst

Sun. June 23rd:

DepopulatingAn Entire Region of the Country

In the first three parts of this series, it was demonstrated that both the US government and the Chinese government are engaged in an Agenda 21 motivated plot to relocate rural and suburban residents to more densely populated urban centers to live in overcrowded conditions where a person’s every movement and every activity is monitored. The previously described policies are proving effective in moving populations into densely populated urban centers in accordance with Agenda 21 policy. However, the process is not as speedy as the globalists had hoped. The global elite needed a game-changing event in the United States. In order to speed things up, the elite bankers at Goldman Sachs masterminded the Gulf oil spill to this end.

The Gulf Oil Spill Is a Depopulation Event of Epic Proportions

In order to demonstrate the fact that the BP event was indeed a planned event and is part of a bigger scheme to depopulate the Gulf of its 40 million residents, it is necessary to present a review of the money trail in the Gulf which shows forethought, planning and motive as a precursor to more important reasons on why the Gulf had to be destroyed.

Failure at What Cost?

Information at KnowYourCharter.com helps clarify the burden that local public schools must bear to cover the costs of students who chose to attend ECOT. Kids in all 88 Ohio counties are impacted. More than 95% of school districts – 586 of 613 districts – have students and money being transferred to ECOT. As one of the state’s 9 statewide e-schools and one of the country’s largest for-profit K-12 schools, ECOT’s poor performance is exacerbated by its extraordinary financial impact on children throughout the state.

According to state data located at KnowYourCharter.com, more than 90% of the districts that had students and funding transferred to ECOT in the 2012-2013 school year[[1]](http://knowyourcharter.com/2015/01/09/ecot-cost-failure/#_ftn1) had more money go to ECOT than the state would have paid the district[[2]](http://knowyourcharter.com/2015/01/09/ecot-cost-failure/#_ftn2). That forces districts throughout the state to subsidize ECOT with local tax revenues to make up those per pupil state funding differences – differences that in two cases topped more than $10,000 per pupil[[3]](http://knowyourcharter.com/2015/01/09/ecot-cost-failure/#_ftn3).

The average difference between what the state would have paid districts for the kids attending ECOT in the 528 districts was $2,897 per pupil less than what was paid to ECOT. That means local taxpayers had to subsidize the difference to make up for the larger payments to ECOT.

For districts that had at least 1 full-time student transfer to ECOT during the 2012-2013 school year, here are the biggest per pupil funding differences between what ECOT was paid and what the state paid the district in the last school year:

Many of these school districts are among the state’s highest performers, and they are losing significant per pupil funding from the state to a school that graduates students at a 20 percent lower rate than the worst traditional public school district. Consider as well that all this money goes to a school that doesn’t have a building, lunch ladies, buses, a gym, or any one of myriad expenses endured by brick and mortar schools.

Here are some more facts from KnowYourCharter.com:

The $6,440 per student that ECOT received during the 2012-2013 school year is more money per pupil than was received by 91% of Ohio’s traditional public school districts this last school year – nearly $1,000 more than Cincinnati and Columbus together received from the state.

Nearly 3 out of 4 dollars sent to ECOT came from money meant for districts outside the state’s major urban centers.

The all Fs and one D that ECOT received on the state report card data that can be found at KnowYourCharter.com was not matched by any Ohio school district. Only 3 of 613 Ohio school districts received all Fs and one C – and ECOT received between $1,100 and $3,600 more per pupil than those districts.

Since ECOT opened in the 2000-2001 school year, Ohio taxpayers have paid ECOT nearly $690 million. But nearly half that total – $328 million – has come in the last four school years.

ECOT received more than $570,000 from the 25 highest performing school districts on the state’s performance index score. These districts all had scores that were more than 1/3 higher than ECOT’s.

In fact, according to Politico, Trump is trying to build a seawall to protect one of his golf courses from “global warming and its effects” — even as he insists that climate change is a “hoax.” xl, paris

~ MOD:

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Kenneth W. Starr,the former independent counsel who delivered a report that served as the basis for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, was removed as president of Baylor University on Thursday after an investigation found the university mishandled accusations of sexual assault against football players.

The university also fired the football coach, Art Briles, whose ascendant program brought in millions of dollars in revenue but was dogged by accusations of sexual assault committed by its players — an increasingly familiar combination in big-time college sports.

Mr. Starr was stripped of his title as university president but will remain Baylor’s chancellor and a professor at the law school. The chancellor position is “centered around development and religious liberty,” a regent said on a conference call Thursday afternoon, adding that Mr. Starr’s “operational responsibilities have been removed.”

Mr. Starr’s demotion delivered a twist to the biography of a man whose reputation was built on what many considered an overzealous pursuit of allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton. Now he is being punished for leading an administration that, according to a report by an outside law firm commissioned by the university’s governing board, looked the other way when Baylor football players were accused of sex crimes, and sometimes convicted of them.

“We were horrified by the extent of these acts of sexual violence on our campus,” Richard Willis, chairman of Baylor’s Board of Regents, said in a statement. “This investigation revealed the University’s mishandling of reports in what should have been a supportive, responsive and caring environment for students.”

Mr. Starr said in a statement to news organizations: “I join the Board of Regents and the Senior Administration of the University in expressing heartfelt contrition for the tragedy and sadness that has unfolded. To those victims who were not treated with the care, concern, and support they deserve, I am profoundly sorry.”

Violence against women on college campuses has risen as a national conversation in recent years, and one particular thread has been whether athletes in big-time sports like football and basketball are afforded favorable treatment by universities and communities that come together to support and protect successful teams

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NB sombitches list their role in creating regulation as dogwhistle so that they can be paid to beat it

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Roger_R._Martella

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13098/us-chamber-works-behind-scenes-gut-whistleblower-protections

Efforts to gut the federal False Claims Act backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. The federal push builds on previous back-door Chamber efforts through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to discourage states from pursuing fraud claims.

The False Claims Act (FCA) allows the government to recover from businesses that defraud government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and protects whistleblowers who report suspected fraud on government contracts. According to the Department of Justice, cases brought under the FCA resulted in the recovery of $42 billion from 1987-2013, making it an important legal tool for deterring fraud and protecting public funds.

Ensuring that contractors don't defraud the government is clearly in the public interest. Yet for a number of years, the Chamber has been targeting the FCA through its lobbying efforts and its Institute for Legal Reform, which advocates policy changes that would reduce financial penalties on many companies and make it harder for whistleblowers to report alleged misconduct.

Three of the four scheduled speakers at Thursday's hearing on "Oversight of the False Claims Act," held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, called for the FCA to be overhauled; two have clear ties to the U.S. Chamber.

Larry D. Thompson of the University of Georgia School of Law advocated for "greater creativity" in ethics oversight—offering the U.S. Chamber's proposal as an exemplar.

Thompson served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush and was previously a member of the U.S. Chamber's Board of Directors.

Jonathan Diesenhaus, a lawyer with Hogan Lovells US LLP, claimed that the qui tam statute gives too much power to whistleblowers "with less than honorable intentions." Diesenhaus wrote a report on state qui tam statutes and FCAs for the Chamber's ILR, and presented on potential FCA "reforms" at an Institute for Legal Reform summit in 2013.

U.S. Chamber Blocks State Anti-Fraud Efforts through ALEC

This won't be the first time the U.S. Chamber has gotten seemingly independent sources to mouth its talking points.

The Chamber has also worked through ALEC to pressure state lawmakers against strengthening state-level false claims laws, as shown in documents uncovered by Common Cause and reported on by The New York Times.

In 2012, a U.S. Chamber lawyer was the co-chair of ALEC's Civil Justice Task Force, along with Ohio state legislator Bill Seitz. After consulting with the Chamber's representative about a proposed False Claims Act to protect whistleblowers in Ohio, Seitz told The New York Times, "he learned that the bill, as originally written, would have been 'a trial lawyer’s bonanza.'" Seitz then began drafting an ALEC-friendly model and sent a warning to a fellow state legislator about the push to increase false claims litigation.

"While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved," Seitz wrote.

Seitz's efforts on the Chamber's behalf did not go unnoticed. He received the Institute for Legal Reform's "State Legislative Achievement Award" the following year.

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An executive from a top shale drilling firm told attendees of a fossil fuels seminar in Pennsylvania earlier this month that fracking companies deliberately avoid setting up shop near the "big houses" of the wealthy, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettereports.

Two environmental groups, the Sierra Club and the Center for Coalfield Justice, last week sent a letter to the state Office of Environmental Justice to review Range Resources' practices to see if it has indeed avoided rich neighborhoods and targetedlow-income areasfor shale gas development. Attorneys from both organizations were present at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute's Environmental Law Forum on April 7.

The comments were made by Terry Bossert, Range's vice president of legislative and regulatory affairs, and were reportedly made off-the-cuff as he was giving a PowerPoint presentation titled "Environmental Issues Facing the Oil and Gas Industry."...

http://commondreams.org/news/2016/04/22/fracking-executive-says-rich-neighborhoods-safe-drill-sites

vaxxers useful distraction target, like whelan went after tobacco but took $ from everyone else

m specter, movie star (mccarthy husband jim carey)

JBS merck offit, then push for gmo, roundup

BASF fungi bees

4/16

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/this-is-your-brain-on-fungicides/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/the-truth-about-the-republican-war-on-caterpillars/255522/

While Republicans are actively trying to bring back DDT to please big agriculture, concern is growing about other pesticides and fungicides that are already out there. In your food. In your body. In your brain.

poster boy staffer?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/head-of-crossroads-gps-once-a-mcconnell-aide-now-his-political-ally/2012/10/30/9f17ea2a-1329-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html

3. Fox News Turned To Disgraced Former FEMA Director Michael Brown To Deny Climate Change, Baselessly Attack FEMA Policy As “Orwellian”

On the May 6 edition of Fox News’ Your World with Neil Cavuto, Cavuto invited Michael Brown, the disgraced former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to attack FEMA for requiring that states applying for disaster preparedness funds produce plans that consider the impacts of climate change. Brown, whose claim to fame is botching the response to Hurricane Katrina, questioned the need for the policy by disputing that “man has much impact” on climate change, and echoed the misleading “climate is always changing”talking point by asserting: “[W]e’ve always had tornadoes, we’ve always had floods, we’ve always had hurricanes, and we’re always going to.” Brown also described the new FEMA policy is an “Orwellian” ploy meant to force the federal government’s “vision of climate change” on to states. Later, Brown admitted on Twitter that he is a “denier” when it comes to climate change.

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https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2015/04/15/111169/release-cap-analysis-shows-anti-environmental-priorities-dominate-first-100-days-of-new-congress-but-no-results-to-show/

april 2015

D.C. — According to a Center for American Progress analysis of roll call votes, the114th Congress has cast more roll call votes on energy and environmental issues in its first 100 days than on any other legislative issue, with none of the energy and environmental proposals voted on becoming law.

Thirty percent of the votes cast in the 114th Congress were on energy- and environment-related topics, more than any other legislative area. The Senate alone cast more than 44 percent of its votes on fossil-fuel and anti-environmental priorities, including approving the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, blocking action to address climate change, and selling America’s public lands.

“With close to three-quarters of a billion dollars from coal, oil, and gas companies behind them, the new Congress spent its first 100 days pushing divisive and unpopular proposals that have gone nowhere,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, Senior Fellow and the Director of Public Lands at CAP. “Congressional leaders must now choose whether to drive their anti-environment agenda deeper into a ditch or whether to align their priorities with American families who want more renewable energy and better protections for public lands, public health, and clean drinking water.”

CAP’s analysis found that on 74 percent of the energy and environmental votes, a majority of senators supported the anti-environment position. Public opinion research commissioned by CAP shows that the majority of Americans widely oppose many of the proposals that Senate leaders have chosen to prioritize, including efforts to remove key protections for land, water, and wildlife and to block the creation of new national parks.

An earlier CAP analysis found that fossil-fuel interests spent more than $721 million to help elect and influence the agenda of the 114th Congress.

Click here to read the column.

For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Tom Caiazza at tcaiazza@americanprogress.org or 202.481.7141.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/13002/koch-criminal-justice-reform-trojan-horse

Gov't Waste

12/15 node

right sez gov can do no right, justify tax cuts as painless b/c just get rid of waste, fraud and abuse; also rathonale for no new pgn until cut, but never seem to find any, despite military boondoggles, and serves as excuse to cut entitlement/aka safety net; unfort since middle class officially a minority 12/15

also ironic that orgs that claim to cut waste are BS fronts

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https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/afghan

5/15

Scathing reports have once again spotlighted the massive cost and delays surrounding the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a jet designed for multiple branches of the military that has been dubbed the single most expensive weapons program in history.

BAT's secret plant in North Korea

"British American Tobacco, the world's second largest cigarette company, has secretly been operating a factory in North Korea for the past four years," reports the Guardian, though "BAT has never mentioned the factory in its annual accounts."^[5]

When asked about North Korea's human rights record -- Amnesty International has reported on the torture and execution of detainees, and a "basic lack of political freedom" there -- a BAT spokesperson said, "It is not for us to interfere with the way governments run countries." Moreover, she said, BAT could "lead by example" by promoting international business standards and corporate social responsibility. kennth clarke

Kenneth Harry Clarke CH QC (born 2 July 1940), often known as Ken Clarke, is a British Conservative politician who has represented Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire as a Member of Parliament since 1970.

Clarke, one of the UK's best-known politicians, has been described by the press as a "Big Beast". He served in variousBritish Cabinets as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Minister without Portfolio. He has been the President of the Tory Reform Group since 1997.

Clarke contested the Conservative Party leadership three times – in 1997, 2001 and 2005 – being defeated each time.Opinion polls indicated he was more popular with the general public than with his Party, whose generally Euro-scepticstance did not chime with his pro-European views. Notably, he is President of the Conservative Europe Group, Co-President of the pro-EU body British Influence and Vice-President of the European Movement UK.^[1]

Clarke's time as a Cabinet Minister is the fifth-longest in the modern era, having spent over 20 years serving under Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron.^[2]

[hide]

sumner redstone 6 bill owner of cbs (bought from viacom)

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OMG Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) happer, steyn

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/us/politics/libre-backed-by-the-kochs-aims-to-raise-gop-standing-with-hispanics.html

MIAMI — The crowd that lined up around a megachurch here last week — largely Hispanic and mostly poor — came for the Saturday services, but also for the free flu shots that were being offered in the church, and for the Thanksgiving turkeys being given away just outside.

But before they received their turkeys, those in line were asked to answer a few questions: Were they more likely to vote for a Republican or a Democrat in the 2016 presidential election? And did they feel that the government should increase or decrease federal spending in order to improve the economy?

Volunteers, holding clipboards and speaking mainly in Spanish, collected the names, telephone numbers and email addresses of everyone who showed up.

The approach — a free Thanksgiving turkey in exchange for some personal information — captures the mission of Libre, a multimillion-dollar effort financed by the conservative billionaire Kochs and devoted to winning over Hispanics, with the message that economic freedom and smaller-government principles will yield opportunity and prosperity.

A free-market strategy

University funding is part of a multi-pronged approach to social change that Charles Koch and his close ally Richard Fink devised decades ago.

Fink, the Koch brothers' "grand strategist," is currently executive vice president of Koch Industries, president of the Charles Koch Foundation, and chair and CEO of Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, which coordinates Koch Industries' lobbying. Starting in the 1970s, Fink worked with Charles Koch to devise a three-part strategy of influence based on ideas from Austrian economist and free-market proponent Friedrich Hayek to spread their laissez-faire ideology as widely as possible.

The first step in Fink's "Structure of Social Change" involved pouring millions of dollars into universities to produce what he called "intellectual raw materials" to support their political agenda.But these materials had to be packaged in a way that non-academics could understand, and that's where thesecond step in the strategy came in: Think tanks such as the libertarian Cato Institute, co-founded by Charles Koch and heavily funded by the Koch foundations, produce reports, policy proposals, and opinion pieces that turn academic work into political fodder.

Next, what Fink calls "citizen activist" groups put the think tanks' ideas into action by advocating for the recommended policy changes. The Koch network includes a vast array of such groups, including the "social welfare" nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, which David Koch founded with Fink and North Carolina political mega-donor Art Pope, and the closely linked nonprofit Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which bankrolled the beginnings of the Tea Party. AFP spends millions on federal, state and local elections, often buying attack adstargeting opponents of their favored candidates. The Kochs and their companies' political action committees also donate directly to the politicians they hope will usher their policy preferences into law.

While the Kochs are prolific donors to higher education in the South, they are by no means alone. Their close ally Art Pope, for example, has given six- and sometimes seven-figure donations to mainly Southern universities, much of it going towards free-market programs. The foundation of the North Carolina-based bank BB&T has given at least 63 "Moral Foundation"grants to universities that require the schools to offer a course centered on "Atlas Shrugged" by libertarian favorite Ayn Rand.

According to his profile on the National Right to Work website,Raudabaugh "hold's [sic] the Reed LarsonProfessorship of Labor LawatAve Maria School of Law.The Professorship was jointly established by the Foundation and Ave Maria to offer courses on workplace litigation and employee freedom." The NRTWLDF press release issued to announce his hiring states that Raudabaugh splits his time between providing legal assistance to anti-union workers and teaching at the "jointly established" professorship at Ave Marie law school, where law students work with Raudabaugh on research and the writing of briefs on behalf of the NRTWLDF.

Both the Ave Maria University and the the town of Ave Maria are owned by former Domino's pizza owner and extreme right-wing billionaire Thomas Monaghan, who financed the construction as part of his dream to create an insulated conservative Catholic community. According to the Wall Street Journal, Monaghan's medieval vision for this project, which has cost him hundreds of millions of dollars, is to create a town in which he can "control what goes on there" and residents "won't be able to buy a Playboy or Hustler magazine" and businesses are specifically forbidden from selling "the pill or the condoms or contraception." Thanks to a special law passed by the Florida state government at the behest of Monaghan, he and the Barron Collier development corporation not only own a majority of the town's property but arethe ultimate government authority in Ave Maria, and can remain so forever. Empowered by the state government to a dictatorial reign, Monaghan's Catholic corporate dystopia has become a reality and Ave Maria has been described as a "miniature theocratic fiefdom" and compared to"fascist regimes." It's not hard to see why the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation would feel right at home.

American Tea Party Supporters Base Climate Claims on Ideology not Science, Study Confirms [1]

Kyla Mandel [2] | June 22, 2015

By Kyla Mandel [2] • Monday, June 22, 2015 - 00:01

The image of polar ice caps is being used by both sides of the climate debate, but in the United States there’s one political faction whose claims may be more ideologically driven than others.

According to a new study by the University of New Hampshire, American right-wing Tea Party supporters are most likely to base their understanding of climate change on political ideology rather than science.

The survey, published in Polar Geography [3], shows that Tea Partiers – who call for minimal government intervention and are known for their climate scepticism – exhibit a high level of self-assessed understanding of climate science, combined with a low level of knowledge on polar facts.

“These results support the conclusion that Tea Party supporters’ sense of understanding about climate change disproportionately reflects ideology rather than science knowledge,” the report concludes.

Basic Polar Facts

The study examined a series of New Hampshire state surveys, conducted between 2011 and 2015, ranking public knowledge on basic polar facts.

Questions included whether the respondent thought Arctic sea ice area had declined in the past 30 years and whether the melting of Greenland and Antarctic land ice – or Arctic sea ice – could potentially raise sea levels the most. Respondents also had to rank their perceived level of knowledge on the issue.

The study found that climate change understanding, more often than not, has an ideological basis.

Almost half of those surveyed (47 percent) scored low on factual knowledge but high on self-assessed understanding of the issue. This is most prevalent among Tea Party supporters (61 percent) while Democrats, Republicans and Independents appeared roughly similar (between 41–47 per cent).

As the study explains, while a higher self-assessed understanding of climate change among Democrats, Independents and, to some degree, Republicans is more likely to correlate with knowledge that, for example, sea ice has declined, the opposite holds true for Tea Party supporters.

“Our surveys find a paradoxical combination of high self-assessed understanding of climate change with generally low knowledge of basic facts.”

Western States Petroleum Association challenge to City of Berkeley Municipal Code proposed amendment (2014)—After a city council voted to put stickers on gas pumps to warn consumers that burning fhel contributes to global warming an oil industry group threatened to sue based on its corporate free speech rights,

Murray Energy v. Public Citizen (2014)—A corporation sued a public interest group that criticized the corporation because it blocked a health and safety rule for defamation, violation of privacy, and alleged that the corporation suffered mental anguish and emotional distress,

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pol op putz tip pt aus?!

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-4185

Della Curry is now the former kitchen manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado. Last week she was fired for giving out school lunches to elementary school kids who did not have money.

“I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn’t have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her lunch,” Curry said.

In the district, students who fail to qualify for the free lunch or reduced lunch program receive one slice of cheese on a hamburger bun, and a small milk.

energy transfer partners prostitutes

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/05/cia-closing-its-main-climate-research-program

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The Jeb Bush Adviser Who Should Scare You

By David Corn

Last week, Jeb Bush, the all-but-announced GOP presidential candidate, stirred up a fuss when he privately told a group of Manhattan financiers that his top adviser on US-Israeli policy is George W. Bush. Given that Jeb has tried mightily to distance himself from his brother, whose administration used false assertions to launch the still highly unpopular Iraq War, this touting of W.—even at a behind-closed-doors session of Republican donors—seemed odd. But perhaps more noteworthy is that Jeb Bush has embraced much of his brother's White House foreign policy team. In February, his campaign released a list of 21 foreign policy advisers; 17 of them served in the George W. Bush administration. And one name stood out: Paul Wolfowitz,a top policy architect of the Iraq War—for the prospect of Wolfowitz whispering into Jeb's ear ought to scare the bejeezus out of anyone who yearns for a rational national security policy. [READ MORE]

Fossil Fuel Industry Pushes Anti-Solar Agenda on Black Communities

African Americans are disproportionately affected by dirty fuel pollution; energy companies seem to want to keep it that way.

By Joel Francis / Huffington Post April 27, 2015

oo often, African American voices are excluded from discussions about the critical issues facing our country. Energy is no exception. That is why I was pleased to recently attend a conference of the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE). While in attendance, however, I developed concerns that workshops did not address issues facing African American families that are directly attributable to our nation's reliance on fossil fuel energy sources.

The NAACP developed a report that shows how fossil fuels play a significantly harmful role in the health of African Americans and other communities of color. Segregation and economic deprivation has forced generations of African American families to live in some of the least desirable areas. More than two-thirds of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal plant. This puts our community at a much greater risk for the health problems associated with exposure to the toxic chemicals these plants spew. African American children are three times as likely to be admitted to the hospital for, and twice as likely to die from, asthma as compared to white children.

Regrettably, a discussion of the harmful impact of fossil fuel pollution on communities of color was noticeably absent from the conference's proceedings. What is worse is that many speakers denigrated one of the best solutions to the pollution problems plaguing African American communities: renewable energy sources such as solar.

The conference was an opportunity to educate attendees about the costs and benefits of ALL energy sources. Unfortunately, attendees may have left with a skewed perception. Although numerous independent studies have shown that solar energy provides benefits to all electricity consumers on the grid, fossil fuel utilities were pushing a deceptive argument that misrepresents the benefits of solar energy to communities of color. The utility companies' thinly veiled attempts to present clean energy sources as a racial issue was shameful. It became clear that their real motivation was shaping a discourse that protects energy monopolies. http://grist.org/climate-energy/black-lawmakers-can-push-back-against-coal-utilities/

Fortunately, people like Reverend Nelson Johnson of Faith Community Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, see through and are calling out the inaccuracies propagated by utilities. Reverend Johnson recently co-authoredan open letter to the CEO of Duke Energy to "Stop Targeting African Americans with Your Anti-Solar Campaign." He talked about having been visited three times by people pushing propaganda that "solar hurts the poor." The Reverend questioned the motives behind Duke Energy's attacks on solar and called on the utility to stop "this duplicitous corporate behavior."

Apparently, the establishment of a cleaner alternative is a threat to the status quo and a threat to the utility companies' domination of the energy market. While these fossil fuel companies continue to pollute the air above and the land surrounding our communities, they are intent on sustaining our dependence on them through placing misleading campaigns to slow the growth of a viable and pollution-free alternative.

Joel A. Francis is a senior fellow at the Checks and Balances Project, a national watchdog that seeks to hold government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public.

Too often, African American voices are excluded from discussions about the critical issues facing our country. Energy is no exception. That is why I was pleased to recently attend a conference of the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE). While in attendance, however, I developed concerns that workshops did not address issues facing African American families that are directly attributable to our nation's reliance on fossil fuel energy sources.

n Friday, Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for utility company shareholders, met with staff members of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the impact of rooftop solar panels — specifically, the “net metering” policies that encourage people to install them — on communities of color. I responded to an invitation to the meeting, but was denied entrance after being told the meeting was “for staffers only.” I spoke with someone who attended. Here’s the rundown:

There were three presenters: David Owens, an executive veep for Edison; Sheri Givens, a consultant from Texas; and Florida state Rep. Joseph Gibbons (D), who’s the chair of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators’ committee on energy, transportation, and the environment. I wrote about Gibbons and the NBCSL last week.
As expected, Owens and the others made the argument that solar net metering will make low-income African Americans’ household electricity bills go up. Reason: Since households that produce their own solar energy can zero-out their bills, poor people of color who can’t afford solar panels will have to pick up more of the costs of maintaining the grid.
Gibbons co-signed on this argument, and presented as evidence a white paper from NBCSL called “The Need to Develop & Implement Equitable Energy Policies.” I’m told that while the report was brought up, it was not discussed at length. But Gibbons used it as proof that Edison and the utilities would really do what they are saying they are going to do, which is take out their revenue frustrations with solar rooftop producers on low-income households.

he good news is that a good majority of the Congressional Black Caucus staffers — about 75 percent, I’m told — pushed back against these arguments during the question-and-answer period. This is significant, because it means that most of the black lawmakers in Congress are not ready to swallow the utilities’ bait as easily as so many of their colleagues at various levels of government have. (Kate Sheppard reported more on this meeting for Huffington Post on Friday.)

The truth behind all of this is far more complicated. The way electricity rate structures are set up today, expanding solar net metering could indeed place financial burden on those who can least afford it. But that outcome assumes two things:

That the current electricity rate structure, which is based on pollution-heavy fossil fuels of yester-century, isn’t already financially burdening low-income households.
That there’s nothing anyone can do to prevent the shifting of grid costs to poor households.

Regarding the first point, consider that people of color and low-income are far more likely to live on the fenceline or within close proximity to the coal plants generating most of our electricity. We already know that soot and ozone pollution from U.S. coal-fired power plants cause thousands of premature deaths and billions in public health costs, much of that suffered by those with the least resources and worst access to quality healthcare.

In America, that’s mostly African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos. Those communities are further burdened by the climate change-related damage costs created by coal facilities. And then there’s the fact that electricity bills have already been steadily rising....

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Big Energy has tried to turn people of color against solar power since forever

Texas lobbying group busted for phony anti-solar campaign

Clean energy advocates need to speak up if they want black lawmakers to hear them

This ambassador for black politicians argues that solar drags down African Americans

Why are utilities trying to disconnect communities of color from solar? all links

...

Edison Electric Institute has some history with the Congressional Black Caucus and other groups representing black public officials, as Grist reporter Brentin Mock has covered extensively. The National Policy Alliance, which brings together federal, state and local African-American elected officials, recently approved a resolution opposing net metering that Edison had submitted to the group. Mock first reported last week that the CBC briefing with Edison was taking place.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/orange-county-family-paid-72k-keep-son-upgraded-jail-cell-after-he-killed-girl-while

CIVIL LIBERTIES alternet

Orange County Family Paid $72K to Keep Son in Upgraded Jail Cell After he Killed Girl While Drunk Driving

They paid over $72,000 for an upgraded cell.

By Tom Boggioni / Raw Story May 2, 2015

Contrary to the concept of “equal justice for all,” multiple Southern California cities offer upgraded jail cells with phones, DVD players, and full-sized refrigerators to offenders who can afford the daily rate, reports KNBC.

The family of one Seal Beach man paid over $72,000 for an upgraded cell, away from the general population, while he served 2-years for killing a classmate after crashing his car while driving drunk.

Called “pay-to-stay,” the cells can be found in Seal Beach, Anaheim, Arcadia, Burbank, Glendale, Huntington Beach, Pasadena, Santa Ana and Torrance, at nightly rates of $127 to $143. In some cities, the non-violent offender’s cell doors are not locked, and the prisoners are free to come and go to their jobs on a daily basis.

In Anaheim, inmates in the city’s pay-to-stay jail program are able to check out their own DVD players for their cell, and work out in a nice gym for a price.

The city of Fullerton offers one upgraded cell where inmates who can afford the $127 a night gets their own TV, a telephone in the cell, and a personal full-size refrigerator.

“Bottom line — if you don’t have the money, you’re not going to be able to stay,” explained Det. Laura Lomeli, who added that the cells are for “Good people who made a mistake, made a bad choice — and they have to pay the consequences.”

According to Peter Eliasberg, legal director for the ACLU of Southern California, “What a terrible idea. What a slap in the face for the concept of equal justice for all. If it’s a public service — that should be offered to everyone regardless of their ability to pay.”

Michael Keating, of Seal Beach, was intoxicated and at the wheel in 2010 when he crashed, killing Mai Hayakawa instantly.

Mai’s mother, Chiho Hayakawa, was stunned to find out that Keating — who never apologized for his action — got off so easy in jail after killing her daughter.

“I was so shocked,” she said. “I feel his solution comes from money.”

BIZZ OMG2

trump already ‘laid out the roadmap’ to cheat in the upcoming election: analyst

British American Tobacco

Antarctic ice sheet collapse could add 3 meters to sea-level rise

Two perspectives on the biggest risks

Economic or ethical

A philosophical perspective

An uncertain world

Behind President Trump's Twitter theatrics, there's a growing theme to American diplomacy.

March 25, 2019

MOST POPULAR

Law Enforcement for Rent (note series, gov't etc)

Executive Summary

Introduction

Pence and Pompeo push “holy war”

Joining forces to target Jerusalem

Environmentally-Caused Disease Crisis? Pesticide Damage to DNA Found 'Programmed' Into Future Generations

Epigenetic Changes Programmed Into Future Generations

Glyphosate Levels in Mothers Linked to Shorter Pregnancies

Antibiotic-Resistant Genes Are Airborne, Exposing Millions

Trump to Drop Climate Change as National Security Threat

The Trump Administration Word Ban Extends to Other Federal Agencies. Its Ongoing Assault on Science Is Much Worse.

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

guard uk mercer, cambr anal, psy-ops;

Failure at What Cost?

U.S. Chamber Blocks State Anti-Fraud Efforts through ALEC

BAT's secret plant in North Korea

Contents

American Tea Party Supporters Base Climate Claims on Ideology not Science, Study Confirms [1]