furies pjt hunter

accountability builds trust by taking out bad actors?

5/20 we need an app that relays their position 24/7, with updates on funding sources

520 bak html grounded in HORNER

SEE VILLAINS EVIL TAG WHO BROKE AMERICA

MERRI OK

see climate defiance

see better angels, apostates, 180, elder statesman

see Kid Killers, ~ EJ partic holocaust?

hall of shame?

start with hacktivist attacks?

what group/person has gravitas?

bill mck?

RS did climate criminals? LCV?

bak

park fdn? $

Criteria: use systems theory to identify maximum damage/leverage

knowingly did it, not just useful idiot ideologue?

personally profited sellout

robin hood damages/"fines" try to get reparations

smug/ certain their ill gotten wealth will insulated them from personal/political accountability? from climate chaos? pension plan

how many trump admin corrupt are lined up for gigs in 2025 project?

LONGNOW? apes and angels, top and bot 10 ; golden record MUSK? 3d print rushmore

influencer/ manosphere? candace owens?

Thomas Midgley society award , Haber

metaphors: nazi hunter crimes against humanity (nature?)

peace and reconciliation

---

ailes dead mcconnell, phil gramm all gop prez nixon to trump; rupert murdoch

thiel?

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/merrick-garland-2657324103/

gov va md no protest outside justice house (b/c privacy?]

---

an 1 26

White House officials contacted the U.S. Secret Service about then-U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene after Code Pink protestors confronted President Donald Trump at a Washington, D.C. restaurant that the Georgia Republican lawmaker had recommended. The visit had not been announced to the press.

According to Axios, that cinched the downfall of the relationship between Greene and Trump, who was embarrassed by the group and its ability to get so close to him. Officials also were concerned for the president’s safety.

The White House reportedly told the Secret Service that Greene, who is friends with the group’s co-founder, may have tipped them off that the president would be dining at the D.C. restaurant, Joe’s Seafood.

“Trump aides view the Joe’s Seafood debacle as a point of no return in his relationship with Greene,” Axios reported, citing a Trump ally-turned-critic who left office this week.

“Greene told Axios that any suggestion she revealed Trump’s dinner plans was ‘an absolute lie, a dangerous lie. I would never do that.'”

The former Georgia congresswoman also told Axios, “The story you should be writing is why didn’t the Secret Service sweep the restaurant,” and have metal detectors at the door?

Code Pink spokesperson Melissa Garriga told Axios that Greene “absolutely” did not inform the group of Trump’s plans, calling it “comical” to suggest she had.

Meanwhile, Axios also reported that Greene had repeatedly called the White House to confirm Trump would be dining at the restaurant, Joe’s Seafood, but did not show up herself, which some White House officials found odd.

The Trump-Greene relationship had begun to sour earlier, after Trump sent Greene polling results that showed if she ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, she would lose to a Democrat.

---

no lnx

https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/fueling-dissent/

‘A lot like climate’

In June, two peer-reviewed studies trumpeted a conclusion at odds with years of solid science: fine-particle pollution long linked to premature death and chronic illness isn’t as dangerous as health advocates contend. If true, the findings would call into question health benefits claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has set ever-tightening air-quality standards.

There was a catch, however. The articles — which were published within a week of one another — appeared in Critical Reviews in Toxicology and Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, two journals favored by industry consultants alleged to promote pay-for-play science. And both studies were funded by API, a trade group that has spent $40 million since 2013 to lobby Congress on topics ranging from taxes to global warming.[twitter]

“Our study is published...air quality does not kill. $600 million of EPA junk science up in smoke,” climate-change skeptic and Donald Trump acolyte Steve Milloy tweeted in June, linking to the Regulatory Toxicology article. During a congressional luncheon a month later, the former coal executive took credit for conceiving the study before turning it over to friend, S. Stanley Young, and two other statisticians, who authored the final article. No mention of Milloy’s involvement is made in the publication.

Read more about how Big Oil is trying to sow skepticism of science among judges ]

Some of the same data were used in the Critical Reviews article published by Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr., which also disputed the link between fine particles and mortality. Cox, a biostatistician from Colorado, started consulting for API in 1988. Cox disclosed that his paper “benefitted from close proofreading and copy-editing suggestions from API” but denied in an interview that his findings were influenced. In November, he was named the next chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, drawing criticism from groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The science on particle pollution, much like the science on global warming, is exhaustive and widely accepted, with thousands of studies pointing to serious health implications. The World Health Organization notes that particulate matter “affects more people than any other pollutant,” with effects observed at even “very low concentrations.” The particles — found in automotive and industrial exhaust and smaller than one-fifth of the width of a strand of hair — form a toxic mix with ozone that lodges deep in the lungs. Unlike Cox, most researchers are no longer fixated on whether this form of pollution is fundamentally dangerous; they worry instead about whether it can cause — not just exacerbate — chronic illness.

Attacking the science is one way of undermining the Clean Air Act, said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which advocates for more protective air-quality standards. The Clean Air Act is routinely hailed as one of the most cost-effective federal laws, even by business groups. In 2015, the EPA estimated that the law will have saved the U.S. economy $2 trillion by 2020 while costing $65 billion to implement. About 85 percent of the act’s benefits come from reducing fine-particle pollution, which raises the risk of early death. Opponents of the law “deny that air pollution is deadly … or even harmful in order to try to pretend that no benefits are delivered,” Walke said.

Steve Milloy

milloy’s July luncheon at the Rayburn House Office Building — billed as a “congressional staff and media briefing” — was little more than a plug for his latest book, “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA,” which condemns the “echo chamber of deceptive science” on ozone and fine particles. The event was hosted by Myron Ebell, who chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a climate-skeptics’ group that began as an alliance of free-market think tanks. “It’s a lot like climate,” Milloy told the audience. “This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

“It’s a lot like climate... This stuff is pulled out of thin air.”

Reached for comment, Milloy said the study is not an attack on the Clean Air Act but part of his 20-year effort to expose the EPA’s “garbage-in, garbage-out” air pollution research. He denied having any formal ties to API. “I am very, very disappointed in the American Petroleum Institute and all the oil companies for not defending their products, for leaving the science to people like me,” he said.

Young, who authored the study, stood behind its findings and disputed the idea that industry funding presents ethical conflicts. His study data are publicly available, he said, but the EPA isn’t as transparent. Ebell agreed, accusing the agency of using “junk science” to justify air-quality and greenhouse-gas regulation.

Despite their misgivings about the EPA, all three men have become tethered to the agency. Earlier this year, Ebell oversaw the EPA transition for Trump, leading a group that included Milloy. Young was named to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board in October.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, complained that such appointments have become all too common. “These people were fringe fanatics and industry stooges fighting on behalf of the industry a propaganda war against science,” he said.

Milloy and Ebell were listed among the authors of a $2 million plan to amplify uncertainty in climate science — as revealed in a 1998 API memo leaked to The New York Times. Both say the memo grew out of an API brainstorming session that never resulted in concrete action, with Milloy calling it “just a big joke.”

Years before, API had refuted the very concept of global warming under President Charles DiBona, who joined the institute shortly after a stint as energy policy advisor to Richard Nixon in the 1970s. White House communications show that DiBona regularly met with then-API President Frank Ikard, a close friend of Nixon’s, before becoming Ikard’s deputy in 1974....

---

kid killer:

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/19/formaldehyde-leukemia-epa-trump-suppressed/

KOCH

intercept 921

Sharon Lerner

no lnx mANY DOC

a 2017 DRAFT assessment of formaldehyde that was suppressed by the Trump administration found that the chemical causes myeloid leukemia, according to several sources familiar with the document. The draft assessment concludes that 1 microgram of formaldehyde in a cubic meter of air increases the number of myeloid leukemia cases by roughly 3.5 in 100,000 people, more than three times the cancer risk in the assessment now in use. The EPA currently regulates formaldehyde using an outdated set of calculations, finalized in 1991, based on the risk of nasopharyngeal cancer. If the nasopharyngeal cancer and myeloid leukemia risks are combined, the cancer risk could be 4.5 times higher than the current value.

Although the suppressed assessment, produced by a division of the Environmental Protection Agency known as the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, has grave implications for public health, Trump administration officials, including former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, refused to allow the agency to release the assessment, several sources told The Intercept.

If the Biden EPA permits IRIS to finalize the assessment, which is among the most controversial in the agency’s history, other branches of the EPA will likely set regulatory limits based on the new risk value. IRIS values are used to determine safety thresholds for the amounts of the chemical permitted in air and water, emissions caps from industrial facilities, and guidance for cleanups. Such thresholds also alert exposed people to the dangers they face.

“This is a big, big deal. It could trigger significant interest by the personal injury bar,” said Bob Sussman, who served as the senior policy counsel to the EPA administrator during the Obama administration and deputy EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton. “Even without including the leukemia, the risk is a significant one. With the leukemia, it’s certainly a very significant public health concern.”

Even using the much lower, outdated cancer risk number set in 1991, formaldehyde is already the greatest source of nationwide cancer risk from industrial air pollutants,estimated to cause roughly 18 of the 32 cancers in every 1 million people in the U.S. that are caused by toxic pollutants in the air, according to the EPA’s own data. If the risk values are increased by a factor of four or more, the reported cancer risk from formaldehyde will go up accordingly, revealing previously unrecognized cancer hot spots around the country.

Formaldehyde, mainly used to make plywood, particleboard, and glues, is also a hazard for millions of workers who are exposed to the chemical through the production of resins, wood composite and furniture production, plastics manufacturing, paper production, embalming, foundry work, fiberglass production, building construction, agriculture, firefighting, and the teaching of biology, among other occupations. The general public is exposed to formaldehyde through tobacco smoke, cosmetics, food and water, as well as “off-gassing” from consumer goods, construction materials, and furniture. In 2019, 662 facilities reported releasing 47.7 million pounds of formaldehyde.

In addition to looking at the chemical’s relationships to nasopharyngeal cancer and leukemia, the draft assessment also factored in evidence that formaldehyde causes decreased lung function, allergic conditions, reproductive and developmental toxicity, and sensory irritation.

In part because formaldehyde is so pervasive, a wide range of business interests have attempted to prevent the EPA from finalizing the assessment and publicly acknowledging the connection to leukemia. Until now, the EPA has kept the contents of its assessment under tight wraps. The leaked information provides a window into how the science and regulation around the chemical will finally be updated.

“Just knowing that the IRIS assessment acknowledges that formaldehyde causes myeloid leukemia is huge, regardless of what the value is,” Jennifer McPartland, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said after being told about the main findings of the draft assessment. “But the numbers tell you even more. They set the tone for how the agency will proceed with risk management.”

Assessment Was “Ready to Go”

While the EPA has claimed in court that the formaldehyde assessment did not exist in a form that allowed it to be shared — and used that argument to refuse to release it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the environmental whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER — former EPA officials told The Intercept that the completed assessment not only existed but that it had also been prepared for release in early 2018.

“We had the document ready to go for review within the agency, but we were not allowed to proceed,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, former director of the EPA Office of Research and Development, who retired from the agency in July.“Political leadership did not want me to move it forward.”

Wheeler, the former EPA administrator, was among the Trump appointees who were involved in suppressing the calculation of the myeloid leukemia risk, according to one former agency official who worked on the assessment. “The administrator would not allow us to put out that number,” the former official said, going on to explain how members of the administrator’s office, particularly his chief of staff Ryan Jackson, kept an unusually close eye on the formaldehyde assessment.

“Normally when we’re doing an assessment, they [the staff of the administrator’s office] don’t have access to the guts of it, because it’s deliberative. But they would demand that we give them pieces of the assessment, including what literature we were looking at for dose responses,” the former official said, referring to the precise relationship between exposure and cancer risk. “Then they would share it with ACC,” an acronym for the American Chemistry Council. Although the former official provided no direct evidence of the administrator’s office sending out the segments of the assessment, they said the actions of the trade group made it clear that it had reviewed the unpublished material.

“All of a sudden, after we gave the information to Ryan Jackson, there would be all this targeted activity by ACC that would basically dismiss or disprove whatever mathematical methodology that we were going to be using even though it hadn’t been published yet,” said the former official. If the EPA did share the information with the trade group, the report would be subject to release under FOIA and would not be exempt under the “deliberative process privilege,” contrary to the agency’s claim in the PEER lawsuit.

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 26: Environmental Protection Agency Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson (R) listens to Administrator Scott Pruitt testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Environment Subcommittee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 26, 2018 in Washington, DC. The focus of nearly a dozen federal inquiries into his travel expenses, security practices and other issues, Pruitt testified about his agency's FY2019 budget proposal. (]

Orme-Zavaleta confirmed that Jackson, who now works for the National Mining Association, played a key role in preventing the assessment from moving forward. “The ACC was in contact with Ryan a lot,” she said.

Asked about his role in the formaldehyde assessment, Jackson stated, “Following enactment of the Lautenberg Act, EPA placed formaldehyde though the risk evaluation required in that new law so formaldehyde could be directly regulated by EPA,” referring to the Trump administration’s decision to add formaldehyde to the list of chemicals to be evaluated under the Toxic Substances Control Act. That assessment has also yet to be completed or released. Jackson also stated that “I’m not contributing to anonymous rumors.”

Andrew Wheeler declined to comment. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the ACC wrote that the group “has never had access in any manner to unpublished findings from the formaldehyde draft IRIS assessment.”

Orme-Zavaleta also pointed to other Trump appointees who she said were apparently involved in suppression of the document. Among them was thedirector of the Office of Air and Radiation, Bill Wehrum, whose input Orme-Zavaleta needed to move the assessment forward. “A couple times we set up briefings for Bill Wehrum. But they canceled those briefings, and I was not given the OK to further the review within the agency.”

:{:{}:

Dunlap Koch email to EPA

1 page

David Dunlap, who served as deputy assistant administrator in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, also helped suppress the assessment, said Orme-Zavaleta. “When we were in the process of coming up with the priority list for IRIS assessments, a lot of those discussions were held during ‘politicals-only’ meetings, so I wasn’t there. But [Dunlap] was, he was our representative. Formaldehyde was on the list of chemicals being considered. And in November, I got back a short list of the chemicals IRIS would assess, and formaldehyde was not part of it,” she said. Dunlap worked for Koch Industries and defended formaldehyde until shortly before he joined the Trump administration in 2018. Dunlap did eventually recuse himself from work on the assessment, though only after formaldehyde was removed from the list of chemicals IRIS would be allowed to assess, according to Orme-Zavaleta. “I only received a copy of his recusal letter after I got the list of chemicals.”

David Dunlap declined to comment on the matter.

“EPA lied to us. And they lied to the court.”

Presented with information from Orme-Zavaleta and others about the completion of the assessment in 2017,PEER attorney Kevin Bell expressed anger and frustration. Bell oversees 3-year-old litigation against the EPA over the group’s Freedom of Information Act request for the assessment. In that case, the agency has insisted that it didn’t have a completed version of the document that it could publicly release.

“EPA lied to us. And they lied to the court,” said Bell. “They said, ‘We just can’t give you anything like this, because it would be totally full of all sorts of irrelevant things, so that it would totally undermine the deliberative process,’ whereas in reality they had a fully drafted document that was all set to go.”

The EPA declined to comment on Bell’s statement but did provide a broader response, saying that “EPA is committed to ensuring that science is at the backbone of everything the Agency does to deliver on our public health and environmental protection mission, and that we operate in a transparent manner to ensure public trust.” Bill Wehrum did not respond to requests for comment.

Decades of Industry Influence

The suppression of the most recent draft assessment follows many years of interference with government science on formaldehyde. IRIS began updating its original assessment of the chemical in 1997 but almost immediately ran into resistance from industry, particularly around the link to leukemia. A group called the Formaldehyde Council, Inc., which represented companies that used the chemical, began challenging the numbers in the assessment and came up with a cancer risk that was thousands of times lower than the EPA’s. Political appointees in the George W. Bush administration also helped industry postpone the release of the updated document. A 2008 Government Accountability Office report documented those delays and lamented the public health implications of having to rely on an IRIS assessment that was then 18 years old.

:{:{}:

Yet that first assessment, completed three decades ago, is still guiding regulation. In the intervening years, both the International Agency on Cancer Research, or IARC, and National Toxicology Program, whose chemical reviews don’t have the regulatory weight of IRIS assessments, classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen and recognized it as a cause of leukemia. In 2010, the EPA released a draft of the updated assessment, which also found that formaldehyde caused leukemia, but did not finalize it. The ACC was harshly critical of that draft, and the agency sent the report to the National Academy of Sciences for peer review. The external agency confirmed its finding that formaldehyde causes cancer and encouraged the agency to quickly rewrite and reissue its report. But the EPA didn’t complete that work until 2016.

Vincent Cogliano, who directed the IRIS program from 2010 to 2017, said the delays during those years weren’t due to political or industry pressure. “We were really trying to get a very objective assessment released,” said Cogliano, who attributed the slow progress on the assessment in that period to the heavy workload of the small program. While Cogliano characterized some of the science around formaldehyde as complex, he said that no one on the IRIS staff disagreed about the relationship between myeloid leukemia and formaldehyde. “When I left the IRIS program in January 2017, I thought that it was ready to be released,” he said.

And yet more than four years later, the EPA has yet to release the updated IRIS assessment.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Linda Birnbaum, who directed the National Toxicology Program from 2009 to 2019. “Here there is evidence that IARC said that formaldehyde was a known human carcinogen. And we said it was a known human carcinogen and that the data was clear. And more data has come out since then, especially from the National Cancer Institute, yet no word from EPA.”

Formaldehyde was added back on to the list of chemicals being assessed on the IRIS public calendar in March. According to an EPA spokesperson, the IRIS Program anticipates releasing the draft assessment of formaldehyde for public comment and external peer review by September 30, 2022. The agency is widely expected to ask the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on how and whether the agency should combine the cancer risk estimates for myeloid leukemia and nasopharyngeal cancer.

:{:{}:

Orme-Zavaleta said that no one in the Biden EPA expressed hesitation about resuming work on it when she raised the issue in the first weeks of President Joe Biden’s tenure. “I asked them several times. I said, ‘I’m going to unsuspend formaldehyde, are you good with that?’ And every time, everybody said, ‘Fine, do it,’” she said. “It is moving!”

Despite the assurances, those intimately familiar with the history of formaldehyde remain guarded in their optimism that the EPA is finally about to update the assessment of one of the most significant and widespread carcinogens in the U.S.

“For decades, up to now, the industry has pretty much managed to put out all the fires,” said Sussman. “But perhaps something really significant might be about to happen.”

Update: August 19, 2021

This article has been updated with a comment from the American Chemistry Council.

---

NOTE CORP CNP ALEC KOCH BASTARDS USE HYDROXY IN CYNICAL? FURY? MOVE TO RE-OPEN ECONOMY

9/20

https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/

On July 27, a dozen physicians posed in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., dressed in white lab coats with “America’s Frontline Doctors” stitched over the pocket. The group’s chief spokesperson was Dr. Simone Gold, an emergency physician from Los Angeles. They were introduced by Jenny Beth Martin, the founding CEO of Tea Party Patriots, as participants in the “White Coat Summit.” The doctors made spirited arguments for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for Covid-19 and against wearing masks and imposing lockdowns—all running counter to the recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[[1]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn1)

Although the event was billed as a “press conference,” few journalists attended. A video posted by a bystander showed only a handful of attendees, most of them dressed in tourists’ shorts and T-shirts. But the event was livestreamed by Breitbart News and quickly went (so to speak) viral.

There was a rapid backlash. Much of the media attention focused onDr. Stella Immanuel, one of Gold’s cohort. Following the press conference, the Daily Beast posted a video of Immanuel, who is also a Pentecostal preacher, delivering a sermon claiming that various female ailments were caused by sexual visitations from “demons.”

Immanuel has since disappeared from the America’s Frontline Doctors online roster, but the group has continued to get traction. On August 10, Pat Robertson’s show on the Christian Broadcasting Network carried an interview with Simone Gold and an endorsement of her hydroxychloroquine cure.On August 21, Alex Jones’s NewsWars carried an interview with another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, Mark McDonald. McDonald—a child psychiatrist—maintained, “If all Americans had access to hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would essentially end in about 30 days.”

Science has shown otherwise. Despite early hopes last spring, there is mounting evidence that hydroxychloroquine is a problematic—and even dangerous—treatment for Covid-19. One expert with firsthand knowledge is Nick Sawyer, an academic emergency physician in Sacramento, Calif. In July he wrote an article for Lifeline, the publication of the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, describing his harrowing two weeks of service in the Covid wards of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Sawyer was part of a team of California doctors dispatched by Governor Gavin Newsome to offer emergency assistance at the epicenter of the epidemic, at the height of the New York City outbreak.

Sawyer is now dealing with the spike in cases in California, this time with the benefit of four months of additional Covid research. “The science on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 is settled—multiple high-quality studies have shown that it shows no benefit,” he notes. Far more concerning, Sawyer says, is its potential harm: “Hydroxychloroquine can cause unstable cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death.” Over recent months, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and other organizations have issued warnings that the drug should be withdrawn as a Covid-19 treatment. “It’s irresponsible for America’s Frontline Doctors to continue to push this medication on the unwitting American population,” Sawyer states.

Why, then, would Gold’s band of physicians continue its campaign to pitch the treatment to the public? Simone Gold has repeatedly described her group as a “grassroots organization” acting in the service of its patients.[[2]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn2) In fact, it has been a highly orchestrated effort, months in the making, assembled by conservative Washington insiders in direct consultation with the White House, with the goal of reopening the economy in time to benefit Trump’s reelection prospects—regardless of the toll in human lives.

The first public mention of the initiative may have been a Washington Post story on April 13, as the virus raged across New York City and Covid-19 deaths passed the 20,000 mark.[[3]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn3) The Post reported the creation of a new conservative coalition “pushing for the White House and GOP lawmakers to push back against health professionals who have urged more caution.” The leadership was listed as Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council. A fourth individual, Jenny Beth Martin, is the founding director of the Tea Party Patriots. She would play a key role in organizing the events to come, including the doctors’ Washington “summit” in July.

Brandon, Nelson, and Martin are all prominent members of a secretive organization called the Council for National Policy,a shadowy coalition that coordinates initiatives among conservative megadonors, political operatives, and media owners, many of them Christian fundamentalists (see “Holding Democracy Hostage”).

The Post story quoted an interview with Richard Viguerie, a co-founder of the CNP, on the mission of the initiative: “The sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year. . . . Conservatives feel the government has overreacted, and it’s got to end.”[[4]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn4)

The new coalition, called Save Our Country, officially debuted on April 27, as U.S. Covid deaths approached 55,000.[[5]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn5) Headed by economist Art Laffer, its maiden press release featured quotes from Brandon, Nelson, and Martin. “The long-term consequences of a prolonged societal shutdown outweigh the damage done by the virus itself,” Martin stated. “We must immediately reopen the economy.”[[6]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn6) Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the Save Our Country coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns: “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about protests across the country.”[[7]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn7)

But the state-level protests turned out to be of limited utility, and the group began to look for new avenues. In April, CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the CNP, began a series of weekly conference calls to discuss Covid strategy. On May 11—as U.S. Covid deaths reached 74,270[[8]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn8)—one of the calls was intercepted and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Associated Press.

Among the participants were CNP President William Walton, CNP member Nancy Schulze,[[9]](https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/#_ftn9) and Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. Schulze, the wife of former nine-term Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Dick Schulze, opened the call with a warning that two-thirds of the American people were wary of reopening the economy. But, she added, “Doctors are seen by the American people—they have a 92 percent trust rate with the American people according to polling. . . . There is a coalition of doctors, doctors’ coalition, who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care, and these doctors could be activated for this conversation now for reopening. NOTE RWI NICHE SLEEPER CELLS]

“The one thing the left does give credence to, in that they tend to be motivated by a secular worldview, the one thing that they do appreciate and listen to is science, and we have doctors that have the facts, that lived this themselves, that are in the trenches, that are saying it’s time to reopen,” Schulze continued. “I’ve been working with them for three years. There’s a coalition of doctors . . . including the most respected doctors in this country, that are ready to speak if somebody will just call on them.”

Walton told her, “We need to not just make the economic argument,we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us. THIRD PARTY TOBACCO PR BS And so that would be great if you, if we could tee that up.”

Schulze said she’d be happy to put him in touch “with any and all of these doctors, and I have submitted 27 of these doctors’ names to the campaign for the doctors’ coalition that they’re in the process of building.”

Mercedes Schlapp asked Schulze if she had spoken with Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign.“I know they’ve been working on building that coalition. I know they’re going through the vetting process right now. As long as you have the names, that would be helpful. . . . Those are the type of guys we want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the message.”...

proto-furies? // mcconn

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/early-morning-protest-erupts-outside-lindsey-grahams-home-he-told-us-to-use-his-words-against-him/

---

mofo ew 720 also bernhardt

Donald Trump announced the final rollback of the "Magna Carta" of U.S. environmental laws on Wednesday, The New York Times reported.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trumps-epa-moves-jettison-any-regulation-of-a-chemical-linked-to-child-brain-damage-report/

no lnx

trump’s EPA moves jettison any regulation of a chemical linked to child brain damage: report

[ June 3, 2019: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at the National Press Club.

Written by Julia Conley / Common Dreams May 15, 2020

Environmental campaigners vowed to fight President Donald Trump’s EPA Thursday after the agency said it would propose that the rocket-fuel chemical perchlorate does not need to be regulated, despite its links to cognitive damage in fetal and child development.

According to the New York Times, the EPA plans to tell the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that it is “not in the public interest” to regulate the chemical at all, a year after the agency recommended the allowable amount in drinking water be limited to 56 parts per billion (ppb).

The 2019 proposal was already 10 to 50 times higher than what water safety experts recommend, the Times reported.

The new recommendation defies a court order, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said, which was issued in 2018 after the group sued over the Obama administration’s inaction on regulating perchlorate.

“EPA’s cynical decision to defy a court order and the law, and to ignore the science that, as the American Academy of Pediatrics has said, dictates a strong perchlorate standard to protect vulnerable kids, is a deeply disturbing violation of the agency’s mission,” Erik Olson of the NRDC told The Hill.

“We will fight this,” the organization added on Twitter.

NRDC ????

@NRDC

BREAKING: @EPAAWheeler & Trump’s @EPA are choosing NOT to regulate #perchlorate, a dangerous chemical linked to fetal & infant brain damage and found in the tap water of millions of Americans. This decision ignores science and the law. We will fight this. https://on.nrdc.org/2WyYvgV

Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Capitol Hill in March.

E.P.A. Opts Against Limits on Water Contaminant Tied to Fetal Damage

A new E.P.A. policy on perchlorate, which is used in rocket fuel, would revoke a 2011 finding that the chemical should be regulated.

nytimes.com

135

9:56 AM - May 14, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

105 people are talking about this

The Obama administration proposed limiting perchlorate, which can interfere with the thyroid gland and hormone production necessary for development, to 15 ppb in 2011. The EPA revealed that same year that between five million and 16 million people in at least 26 states were exposed to toxic levels of perchlorate. People who live near military facilities where the chemical is used in rocket fuel are especially at risk.

The Department of Defense and military contractors including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin, which have worked closely with the Trump administration, have spent years fighting regulation of the substance.

When former President Barack Obama’s EPA still had not released official regulations on the chemical by 2016, the NRDC filed a lawsuit, resulting in the court order requiring the agency to announce limits by June 2020. The order left the responsibility to regulate perchlorate in the hands of President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

Some states have taken matters into their own hands during the delay, limiting perchlorate in drinking water to as low as 2 ppb. The action by states is being used by Trump’s EPA to argue that the chemical now poses little health risk.

The agency’s new draft policy states that monitoring and limiting perchlorate “does not present a meaningful opportunity for health risk reduction for persons served by public water systems.”

Food and Water Watch called the EPA’s refusal to regulate the chemical “yet another abdication of duty by those that are entrusted with protecting Americans from needless and preventable harm.”

“It’s also yet another example of Trump and his cronies prioritizing corporate profit above all else—even the health and safety of children,” the group’s media relations director, Seth Gladstone, told Common Dreams. “Shameful does not even begin to describe this president and this administration.”

---

sob --> mofo --> evil on hypocrisy [judges say...?] also asbestos --> furies?

WHEELER kid killer on asthma? now neuro-toxin , coal ash

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/05/epa-decides-reject-latest-science-endanger-public-health-and-ignore-law-keeping-outdated-fine-particle-air-pollution

no lnx many

EPA Decides to Reject the Latest Science, Endanger Public Health and Ignore the Law by Keeping an Outdated Fine Particle Air Pollution Standard

By Guest • Tuesday, May 5, 2020

By H. Christopher Frey, North Carolina State University

The COVID-19 pandemic and economic shutdown have temporarily produced clearer skies across the U.S. Meanwhile, however, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been busy finding reasons not to pursue long-lasting air quality gains.

On April 30, 2020, the agency published a proposed new rule that retains current National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter without any revisions. It took this action after a five-year review process, in which scientific evidence showed unequivocally that these standards are not adequate to protect public health.

I have studied air pollution and air quality for over 30 years, and have been directly involved for a decade with EPA’s reviews of scientific findings on air pollution. This includes serving on the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or CASAC, and on 10 specialized panels focused on individual pollutants.

As I have written previously, the Trump administration has watered down the role of science in what is supposed to be a science-based process of setting national air quality standards. This new proposal — which I expect will be challenged in court when finalized — is the result.

Recent studies indicate that reducing PM2.5 standards below current levels could avert thousands of premature deaths.

Fine Particle Air Pollution Is Deadly

Fine particles, known as PM2.5 because they measure 2.5 microns or less in diameter, can penetrate deeply into the lungs and bloodstream. EPA staff scientists have reaffirmed that daily and annual exposure to PM2.5 causes premature death and a variety of illnesses.

Scientists have known this for decades, but since the national standard was last revised in 2012, new studies have strengthened these findings. They include an epidemiologic study with the largest ever number of subjects and several that include PM2.5 concentrations well below the current standard.

EPA’s scientific staff estimates, based on multiple epidemiologic studies, that currently an average of 13,500 to 51,300 people die prematurely each year from breathing fine particles. Although these numbers are uncertain, the likelihood of thousands of deaths per year would typically spur regulators to tighten existing standards. However, EPA’s current political leadership disagrees.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, has asserted that uncertainty around recent studies suggesting that current PM2.5 standards don’t adequately protect public health justifies retaining the current standard. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

What the Law Requires

The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to set air quality standards based on an accurate and thorough review of the latest science. This function is performed by CASAC, which I chaired from 2012 to 2015.

CASAC has seven members, which isn’t enough to provide the breadth, depth and diversity of expertise, experience and perspectives needed for these complex reviews. Recognizing this, for four decades the EPA has augmented the committee by convening expert review panels for each pollutant. They include scientists with extensive knowledge of epidemiology, toxicology, medicine, air quality, exposure, risk, statistics and other fields. I served on the 20-member CASAC PM Review Panel that was appointed in 2015 to help CASAC review the PM2.5 standard.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded that panel in October 2018. Wheeler also continued a makeover of CASAC, started by his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, that removed leading researchers from the committee. Now CASAC has no epidemiologists — a key discipline for assessing PM2.5 health effects.

What Our Expert Panel Recommended

Realizing that EPA would not otherwise get the science advice it needs, the disbanded PM review panel reconvened itself in October 2019. We found that current fine particle standards are not protective of public health.

The studies published since 2012 demonstrating that exposure to fine particles causes premature death at concentrations below current standards were key to our decision. We advised the EPA that the annual standard should be reduced from its current level of 12 micrograms per cubic meter to a range of between 10 and 8 micrograms per cubic meter.

For the 24-hour standard, which regulates short-term air quality spikes, we recommended reducing the limit from the current level of 35 micrograms per cubic meter to between 30 and 25 micrograms per cubic meter. These scientific findings were based on multiple epidemiologic studies, augmented with evidence from controlled experiments with animals and humans.

Failing to Protect the Public

Administrator Wheeler claims that recent studies since the last time the standards were revised “do not provide a basis for revising the standards.” Wheeler acknowledges that studies based on long-term exposures below the current standards show “associations” between air quality and premature death. However, he argues that this research does not show a causal relationship. Yet, based on the overall body of evidence, he acknowledges that “a causal relationship exists between long-term PM2.5 exposure and total mortality.” In my view, his rationale is illogical and is inconsistent with the evidence.

The Clean Air Act requires regulators to set standards that will provide an “adequate margin of safety.” This means that they should be stringent enough to protect sensitive populations, such as older adults, people with preexisting cardiovascular or respiratory diseases and children with asthma.

The EPA proposal acknowledges that these groups exist, but does not specify how it will protect them from PM2.5 in the air. Wheeler is also silent regarding the role of racial and ethnic differences in exposure and risk, even though a federal court called EPA to task in 2009 for not specifically addressing at-risk groups.

Preliminary evidence suggests that exposure to particles worsens the effects of COVID-19. While this finding needs peer review and additional study, existing evidence of risk for sensitive populations shows the need for a more protective standard.

EPA currently faces lawsuits for multiple instances in which it has either sought to weaken, or failed to strengthen, air pollution regulations. They include rolling back motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards, failing to implement stringent rules limiting interstate air pollution and repealing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants. Unless EPA modifies its position on particle air quality to address the law and the science, I expect that this regulation too will end up in court.

H. Christopher Frey is Glenn E. Futrell Distinguished University Professor of Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

---

OMG more evil?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/holy-crap-this-is-insane-citing-coronavirus-pandemic-epa-indefinitely-suspends-environmental-rules/

no lnx

‘Holy crap this is insane’: Citing coronavirus pandemic, EPA indefinitely suspends environmental rules

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1417570841 Washington, DC/USA - June 3, 2019: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at the National Press Club.]

Written by Common Dreams March 28, 2020

---

OMG more evil?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/holy-crap-this-is-insane-citing-coronavirus-pandemic-epa-indefinitely-suspends-environmental-rules/

no lnx

‘Holy crap this is insane’: Citing coronavirus pandemic, EPA indefinitely suspends environmental rules

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1417570841 Washington, DC/USA - June 3, 2019: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at the National Press Club.]

Written by Common Dreams March 28, 2020

“The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment. This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, announced on Thursday a sweeping and indefinite suspension of environmental rules amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, a move green groups warned gives the fossil fuel industry a “green light to pollute with impunity.”

Under the new policy (pdf), which the EPA insisted is temporary while providing no timeframe, big polluters will effectively be trusted to regulate themselves and will not be punished for failing to comply with reporting rules and other requirements. The order—applied retroactively beginning March 13, 2020—requests that companies “act responsibly” to avoid violations.

“Outrageous. Suspending all environmental regulations indefinitely? This has nothing to do with coronavirus. This has everything to do with protecting Big Business.”

—Rep. Mark Pocan

“EPA is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID-19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements,” Wheeler said in a statement. “This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.”

Critics, such as youth climate leader Greta Thunberg, accused the Trump administration of exploiting the coronavirus crisis to advance its longstanding goal of drastically rolling back environmental protections.

“The EPA uses this global pandemic to create loopholes for destroying the environment,” tweeted Thunberg. “This is a schoolbook example for what we need to start looking out for.”

Cynthia Giles, former head of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement under the Obama administration, told The Hill that the new policy is “essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules for the indefinite future.”

“It tells companies across the country that they will not face enforcement even if they emit unlawful air and water pollution in violation of environmental laws, so long as they claim that those failures are in some way ’caused’ by the virus pandemic,”said Giles. “And it allows them an out on monitoring too, so we may never know how bad the violating pollution was.”

Holy crap this is insane: The Trump administration just waived enforcement of the EPA’s environmental rules during the coronavirus pandemic for the indefinite future. Obama’s EPA enforcement chief strongly condemned it as an abdication of duty https://t.co/5JLDjeZb5K pic.twitter.com/mTgoiCDyxP

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) March 27, 2020

The EPA’s order, for which the oil industry aggressively lobbied, represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to use the coronavirus pandemic to advance right-wing policies that would likely not be permitted—or would at least face greater scrutiny—under normal circumstances.

As Common Dreams reported last week, the White House is advancing an assault on public-sector unions, xenophobic border policies, and other objectives amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has officially infected more than 85,000 people in the United States as of Friday morning.

“Outrageous,” tweeted Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in response to the EPA’s new policy. “Suspending all environmental regulations indefinitely? This has nothing to do with coronavirus. This has everything to do with protecting Big Business.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/are-the-rules-of-polite-society-being-rewritten-questions-of-civility-in-the-trump-era/

Eric Trump says he was spit on by an employee at Aviary, a high-end Chicago cocktail bar,on Tuesday night. The employee was briefly taken into Secret Service custody and then released.

In an interview withBreitbart News,Trump said it was “a purely disgusting act by someone who clearly has emotional problems. “For a party that preaches tolerance, this once again demonstrates they have very little civility,” he said.

Eric Trump isn’t an elected politician, but as an executive vice president of the Trump Organization he’s a public face of the family business and by extension, President Donald Trump’s brand. And his complaint about the lack of civility isn’t the first time questions have come up about what kind of boundaries members of the public should preserve when they stumble across politicians or the politically powerful in off-duty scenarios.

In July 2018, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was heckled by a group of protestersas he was leaving a restaurant in his home city of Louisville, KY.

At the time, McConnell was in support of the Trump administration’s policy of detaining families who illegally crossed the border — though not of separating children from their families — and on the day he was confronted while eating, hundreds of people were also protesting outside Louisville’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office just a few miles away.

Video shared online showed a line of people following McConnell out of the restaurant and through the parking lot. Several chanted “Vote him out!” Another called him a “turtle head.”

McConnell didn’t reply; he got into the back of an SUV with a “Team Mitch” sticker on the rear window and left.

A few months later, in October 2018, McConnell and his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, were confronted while eating at another Louisville restaurant. A video showsa man yelling at the couple, “Why don’t you leave the entire country alone?”

Another woman joins in briefly, but while she eventually left quietly, the man snatched McConnell’s to-go box from the table, opened the restaurant door and dumped its contents into the street. ...McConnell’s incidents came on the heels of a string of similar events involving members of the Trump administration. In June 2018, Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a popular Virginia restaurant because the owner said “that many members of her LGBT staff were uncomfortable serving Sanders.”

And days before that, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was protested at a Mexican restaurant in D.C.

“Secretary Nielsen, how dare you spend your evening here eating dinner as you’re complicit in the separation and deportation of over 10,000 children,” shouted a member of the group.

They proceeded to chant “shame, shame, shame” and left after about 15 minutes. ...The Washingtonian’s Jessica Sidman wrote that the culture of D.C. — a city of politicians — is changing.

“Encountering powerful and controversial people shopping for groceries, dining at restaurants, or hitting up SoulCycle has always been a normal facet of DC life,” Sidman wrote. “And for the most part, there’s an unspoken code that we allow them to go about their daily lives uninterrupted.”

The culture change isn’t only evident in the nation’s capital, as the Chicago and Louisville incidents demonstrate. When the daily lives of the politically powerful are interrupted — whether by a lone heckler or a group of protesters — and the inevitable story makes the social media rounds, the question of “What happened to common courtesy?” quickly follows.

It’s a valid question. Does the health of a civilization depend on us maintaining polite manners in order to preserve the social fabric, or does it depend on us shedding and shredding them in order to make undeniable statements? ...Amanda Darrach detailed the night for the Columbia Journalism Review for a story in which many of the attending reporters didn’t want to actually be named.

“A White House correspondent who resembled a young William Shatner (and didn’t want to be named) took a gulp of beer and said that the night felt like ‘the end of a battle, or a decent game of rugby, where at the end of the day you shake hands,’” Darach wrote. “A colleague chimed in, ‘Everybody has their issue with Sarah Sanders, but if you can’t have a drink with somebody, then all of civilization has broken down.’”

(I can’t help but think of the line from the 1996 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma” when the titular character, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, finds out her main social rival is back in town: “I must throw a party for her! Otherwise everyone will feel at once how much I dislike her.” On the other side of the civility spectrum, we have last night’s debacle, in which a restaurant employee reportedly spits on Eric Trump. Eric is one of the lesser players in the Trump political machine when compared to his powerful siblings Donald Jr. and Ivanka, not to mention Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner. Even Eric’s wife Lara, a Trump campaign adviser and host of the,” has a more explicitly political role in the family. Protesting McConnell or Sanders could be seen as a way of getting the attention of someone with actual political power. Spitting on Eric is purely a gesture of contempt directed at the entire Trump family; he’s just the representative.

And while in his interview with Brietbart, Eric Trump interpreted the act as a sign his father is doing something right (“When somebody is sick enough to resort to spitting on someone, it just emphasizes a sickness and desperation and the fact that we’re winning.”) there was no reflection on how or why the general level of contempt could be reaching a boiling point.

Late last week, the deplorable conditions of a detention facility in Clint, Texas, became public after investigators spoke with nearly 50 children about their time in the facility. Investigators found children were often sleeping on cold floors, were underfed, untreated for flu and lice outbreaks, and went without basic essentials like toothbrushes.

Then yesterday, a photo began circulating of a father and his two-year-old daughter who had drowned while crossing the Rio Grande river in an effort to reach Brown, Texas. Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, were being detained in a migrant camp on the Mexican side of the border. As conditions worsened and temperatures peaked, they attempted to cross alone to seek asylum.

So while politicians and those in political power — along with those who work to keep them in power — may want to carry on with their normal daily lives, the results of unconscionable policies under this administration have clearly moved beyond politics as usual. As members of the public grapple with this seismic shift, the rules of civility might be under revision in the process.

---

Graham has argued that smog protects people from too much sunlight, dioxin might reduce cancer in some cases, safe housing codes can kill people and pesticides on foods are a trivial problem that does not constitute a health hazard. In addition, "he claims that our choice of environmental regulations contributes to the death of 60,000 people under a theory he calls 'statistical murder'." [2]

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/are-the-rules-of-polite-society-being-rewritten-questions-of-civility-in-the-trump-era/

https://populardemocracy.org/blog/get-involved-birddog-nation-and-league-heroes

early 2017, a national network of thousands of birddoggers—people who put sustained public pressure on elected officials to take action—came together to help defeat the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Two years and 170+ birddog trainings later, Birddog Nation has won scores of important commitments from their local electeds to support a healthcare system that guarantees high-quality, low-cost health coverage for everyone and brings an end to the terrible HIV pandemic.

If you are interested in participating in this work, Birddog Nation invites you to join their weekly calls on Tuesdays at 8:30pm ET.The call-in number is 1-669-900-6833, with meeting room code 2510128015.

League of Heroes is a community of citizen activists fighting to save our democracy. It began in 2017 when activist Ady Barkan confronted then-U.S. Senator Jeff Flake (AZ), asking him to be a hero and vote to save healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. Instead, Congress chose to put Medicare and other programs at risk so it could cut taxes for corporations and the wealthiest families in America. Now we need you to help continue the fight. Will you be a hero by joining us to defend our democracy and fight for working people?

League of Heroes’ weekly calls take place on Thursdays at 8pm ET. The call-in number is 1-669-900-6833, with meeting room code 2510128015.

---

contract ON Am got rid of office of technol assessment: bktv

but also cut STAFFERS?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-congress-got-dumb-on-tech-and-how-it-can-get-smart/

Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful people in Washington, uses a flip phone. The kind of phone with a tiny screen and real buttons, designed for making actual phone calls, not writing emails. But then, the Senate minority leader rarely emails, telling the New York Timesa few years ago that he sends about one every four months. In case manufacturers stop making his favorite flip phone, Schumer has stockpiled ten of them.

Schumer’s practically a techie compared to Lindsey Graham, though. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2015, “I don’t email . . . I’ve never sent one.” The Luddite tendencies extend to other members of Congress. When Senator Richard Shelby needs to write to his staff, he favors handwritten notes. “I’ve been here a while; I’m a little older than y’all,” he told Politico, by way of justification. When Paul Ryan paid a visit in 2014 to Jim Sensenbrenner, who at the time was a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, he found the congressman tapping out letters on an IBM Selectric II. These old-fashioned habits may be charming coming from your grandparents, but your grandparents aren’t charged with legislating on cryptocurrency, regulating autonomous vehicles, or protecting consumers from data breaches. Members’ technical naïveté goes beyond their choice in phones and onto the floor of Congress. When experts testified before Congress last May about the promise of quantum computing—which could radically accelerate research into everything from pharmaceuticals to machine learning to carbon sequestration—Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger admitted, half-jokingly, to the panel, “I can understand about 50 percent of the things you say.”

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress last December, Texas Representative Ted Poe attempted to grill him on how the company tracks users’ location. “I have an iPhone,” said Poe, who has since retired. “If I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends . . . does Google track my movement?” Increasingly exasperated at what seemed like Pichai’s evasions, Poe repeatedly asked, “Yes or no?” But, of course, Apple, not Google, manufactures iPhones, and whether or not the company was tracking Poe wasn’t a yes-or-no question. It would depend on which apps he had downloaded, whether his GPS was enabled, and so on. Nailing down how Google collects user data has important policy implications, but by bungling some basic facts about the technology Poe let Pichai off the hook.

This lack of tech savvy causes problems well beyond wrangling with the Facebooks and Googles of the world, for the simple reason that tech is baked into all policy areas. Regulators worry that software installed in medical devices could be hacked. Lawyers and activists are concerned about bias in the algorithms used to assess bail. Legislators who want to fight climate change need to know which renewable energy sources are ready for commercialization. But the dearth of expertise hamstrings Congress throughout the entire policy process—from deciding which issues to prioritize, to drafting bills, to exercising oversight.

Of course, nobody expects members of Congress to be experts on everything—that’s why they have staff. The problem is that congressional staffers don’t always know much more than their bosses. They, too, need advice from disinterested experts to walk them through the intricacies of technical issues—and for the most part, they’re not getting it. While a recent survey found that 81 percent of senior staffers thought that access to “high-quality, nonpartisan, policy expertise within the legislative branch” was “very important,” only 24 percent were “very satisfied” with the current situation.

This wasn’t always the case. From the 1970s through the mid-’90s, Congress had its own think tank to help it legislate on technical issues: the Office of Technology Assessment. But the OTA was killed off in 1995 by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich as part of his assault on government expertise. Ever since, Congress has struggled to navigate science and technology issues, with occasionally disastrous results.

The good news is that efforts to resurrect the agency are under way, with the newly Democratic-controlled House pushing to secure funding for it this year. Even some Republicans and conservative think tanks have warmed to the idea. Getting smart on tech is actually something this Congress could do. In the meantime, another government agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is growing its tech team, too.

But the OTA, GAO, or any other three-letter government agency will only fix half the problem of Congress’s tech brain drain. The other half has to do with the overall congressional workforce. The Gingrich revolution not only wiped out the OTA; it also decimated congressional staff ranks, and their numbers have never fully recovered.That’s a major reason why Congress has become so dysfunctional. Staffers shape what information their bosses get, take meetings with interest groups, and participate in important negotiations. But congressional staff these days tend to be young, low-paid, and thinly spread—and those with technology backgrounds are as uncommon as, well, flip phones. To deal with an ever more technologically complex world, Congress needs a critical mass of staffers who bring science and tech experience to the table.

The idea that Congress should have its own dedicated corps of STEM nerds goes back to the 1960s....

---

LONG TERM SYSTEMIC DAMAGE

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/heres-why-mitch-mcconnells-mark-on-the-federal-judiciary-could-last-for-generations/

In either January 2021 or January 2025—depending on whether he serves one or two terms—Donald Trump’s presidency will become a memory. But his mark on the federal judiciary could last for generations. The Republican who is doing the most to help Trump achieve that is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and in an April 10 report for the Daily Beast, journalist Eleanor Clift explains why the Kentucky senator has been so helpful to Trump when it comes to moving the federal judiciary to the far right.

Clift opens her piece by observing, “What Mitch McConnell lacks in charisma, he more than makes up for with steely discipline”—and McConnell, to be sure, has been amazingly disciplined since becoming Senate majority leader in January 2015. Clift outlines how much McConnell has done to advance the Republican agenda, writing, “McConnell’s goal is not fairness. He envisions a federal bench firmly on the right to steer the country for generations to come.His record so far: two Supreme Court judges, 37 Court of Appeals judges, and 57 District Court judges, including two confirmed Tuesday.”

The journalist elaborates, “He took extraordinary means to deny President Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland. And in the last two years, he’s taken numerous actions to override the Senate’s role of advise and consent.”

Clift notes that just last week, McConnell “pushed through a change in Senate rules…. to reduce the time for debate on certain judicial nominees and executive branch appointees from 30 hours to just two hours.” And she points to Patrick Wyrick, a 38-year-old District Court nominee from Oklahoma, as a beneficiary: under the new rules, Wyrick was confirmed by the Senate in a 53-47 vote on Tuesday, April 9. The far-right Wyrick is an ally of Scott Pruitt, Trump’s former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Wyrick, Clift points out, “has only been on the Oklahoma Supreme Court for two years—and now, he’s on his way to a lifetime federal appointment. No wonder McConnell didn’t want anybody talking about Wyrick for 30 hours. Clift goes on to explain, “Republicans are now putting nominees forward in groups of four, which restricts senators in their ability to probe any one nominee. Wyrick was part of such a panel, which meant that each senator had just five minutes for questioning.”

McConnell (who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984) is up for reelection in 2020. And given how much of a red state Kentucky is, his chances of winning another term and staying on as Senate majority leader are quite good.

Clift concludes her report by stressing that McConnell has made it more difficult for Democrats in the Senate to vet GOP judicial nominees.

“Progressives need government to work to enact their agenda—Republicans not so much,” Clift observes. “They’ve kept their eye on the prize: the federal judiciary. And with McConnell in place, it’s paid off.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/06/hit-me.html

sadly guillotine only artists conception

Jamie Dimon is CEO of Jpmorgan Chase, the massive bank that settled a $13 billion mortgage fraud case with the DoJ in 2013 by committing more mortgage frauds to raise the cash; he has since taken the bank into some of the dirtiest business on Earth, from the loans that keep the Keystone XL pipeline viable to funding the private border prisons where Trump's Kids in Cages are being held, terrified and separated from their families.

Dimon is an infamous money-over-people crook: when Elizabeth Warren caught his bank failing to comply with rules put in place after the 2008 crisis, he smirked at her and told her to "hit him" with fines because the bank could easily afford them, having after the massive profit-taking from their massive frauds.

He's even floated the idea of a presidential run in 2020.

Now, Dimon's smirk is turning to rage, as he finds himself dogged by protesters everywhere he goes: speeches, shareholder meetings, when he comes and goes from work. The activists call on him to divest from the bank's unethical business, which will not happen while Dimon is in command. But in the meantime, they are keeping these issues alive, afflicting the comfortable and ensuring that he does not have a moment's peace while he is profiting from others' misery and the destruction of the planet.

Protesters have targeted Wall Street for years, but criticism at the annual conclave has shifted from the traditional corporate complaints about pay and risk-taking. The CEO is annoyed by the activism that now overshadows the event. “The shareholder meeting has become a farce,” Dimon told clients and employees in Washington in October. “I’m not against social groups,” he said, but the meetings “get hijacked.” A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment.

In September, Breech and climate activists disrupted Dimon’s talk at a hotel in Philadelphia with shouts about fossil fuels. JPMorgan lends to TransCanada Corp., whose controversial Keystone XL pipeline got approval from Trump to carry fuel from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf. Before that, eight people were arrested when immigration activists blocked the streets outside his co-op on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At one point, protesters at the gates to his building halted their chants, called for silence, and played the audio of Central American children sobbing in a detention center after being separated from their parents by U.S. authorities at the border. JPMorgan lends to GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc., which run facilities that hold immigrant families in Texas.

Some protesters don’t just want Dimon’s help, they want atonement. At this May’s meeting outside Dallas, Juleon Robinson of the New Economy Project asked Dimon if Chase would provide reparations for giving less banking access and fewer loans to black and Latino customers in New York. “You seem like a bright young man who is highly misinformed,” Dimon said, before ticking through some of the bank’s philanthropic initiatives.

Occupy Jamie Dimon: Activists Are Chasing the Billionaire Across the U.S.[Michelle Davis and Max Abelson/Bloomberg]

(via Naked Capitalism)

So, what should we make of a brand-spankin' new group with the incredible moniker ofCowboys for Liberty? What a positive name! Cowboys are seen as down-to-earth straight-shooters, and America is all about liberty. But wait, is this one of those Koch-funded, far-right-wing bands of angry, anti-government ranchers? Au contraire, as the old cowhands say. In fact, Cowboys for Liberty is an audacious, fun-loving network of hell-raising, climate-change activists who are out to expose, shame and defeat the corporate-serving profiteers behind the unconscionable climate-denier industry, instigated by Jim Marston of the Environmental Defense Fund.

With many of its members from Colorado, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas and other Western states, this new conservation coalition chose the cowboy image both to symbolize the True-West commitment to defending Mother Nature -- and as a spoof on the right-wing's intentional perversion of language and honest policies. One of their first targets? The most selfish of them all: climate-change deniers.

Yes, from time to time, a few individuals pop into the public eye who are so consumed by self-importance, self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement and all things selfish that they have no shame -- even when their narcissism does gross harm to others. These narcissists-doing-disastrous-damage are the climate-change denying clique of prominent polluters, politicos and propagandists are shamefully used their positions of power to enhance their own fame and fortune as glaciers melt, oceans rise, extreme weather expands, species perish and Earth itself spins toward being unlivable.

While these professional deniers acknowledge no shame, the feisty Cowboys have stepped forward to acknowledge it for them.They've established a Climate Deniers Hall of Shame, and it inducted its first class of infamous deniers. Among the honorees are Charles and David Koch, who've dumped more than $100 million into front groups spreading lies about climate change; Sen. Jim Inhofe, the dotty old dean of deniers, who has called global warming a conspiracy spawned by the Weather Channel; and the former CEO of Exxon Mobil,who secretly funded right-wing groups to issue hoked-up reports to discredit the science of climate change.

The Hall of Shame is fun, but it's not a prank. It's a real place to memorialize in perpetuity the names, faces and shameful actions of obtuse, avaricious individuals who've worked to put their petty selves above the very existence of humanity. Publicizing the nefarious efforts of these deniers reveals the importance of an informed and engaged citizenry. Otherwise, we end up ruled by a kakistocracy -- government by the worst people in our society.

DN secret sci SAB rules 20 years ago 1 million death; 200K kia/yr bad air US?!

tucker c bs:

What happened to liberals? Well, a lot of things. One, they lost power, and that drove them off the deep end. They plan to get their power back, no matter what it takes. A new book by Professor David Faris is called It's Time to Fight Dirty, and it explains how the left plans to do it.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua. Prior to her academic life, she worked as an accountant for a variety of nonprofit organizations, including as controller of the Tides Foundation in San Francisco.

orwellian transparency, no press allowed?

secert ssci bs:

:On April 24, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt released a proposed rule that would restrict which scientific studies EPA could use in creating new regulations. The move — already controversial when it was first revealed over a month ago — would prevent EPA from considering studies in which the data is not available to the public, including the private health information of individuals in medical studies, and which is based on one-time events, such as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Prominent climate science deniers were in attendance at the EPA announcement, including Marc Morano, Steve Milloy, and Will Happer.

...

twit:"era of secret science @EPA is coming to an end. The ability to test, authenticate, & reproduce scientific findings is vital for integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess legitimacy of the science underpinning Agency decisions"

March 16, E&E reported that EPA Admin Scott Pruitt is brewing more plans to further hobble how the EPA uses (or in this case, doesn’t use) science to protect the public. According to E&E, the effort will be similar to theOrwellian-esque HONEST Act that Lamar Smith sponsored a year ago but is stalled in the Senate. Pruitt’s idea is to apply a blanket set of new criteria to studies the EPA can cite. The “sound science” recommendations are designed to sound reasonable, but in practice would render lots of high quality, relevant research off-limits.

grounded in HORNER 90's

---